Edmund Hamilton Sears was born on April 6, 1810, and educated at Union College in Schenectady, New York, 1831-34, and Harvard Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1837. He became a missionary for the American Unitarian Association, a minister for congregations in Wayland and Lancaster, Massachusetts, and editor, from 1859 to 1871, of The Monthly Religious Magazine. Married to Ellen Bacon, with four children, he died on January 16, 1876, of injuries sustained from a fall from a tree two years previously. He remains very well known for his hymns, especially "It came upon the midnight clear."