III.—The Olney Hymns
The contribution of evangelical Churchmen, apart from the Wesleys, to the hymnody of the eighteenth century, is slight, with the important exception of the remarkable collection of hymns issued by William Cowper and John Newton, which takes its title from the little Buckinghamshire town in which Newton was for years curate for an absentee vicar.
Our little England has been the mother of so many famous sons that it often happens that some out-of-the-way village or obscure country town is rich in memories of the great and good, for
Half of her dust has walked the rest
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages.
Such a spot is Olney, the town of Cowper and of Cowper’s Mary, of John Newton, and for a time of Thomas Scott, of whom Newman speaks as ‘the writer who made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul.’[158] Where William Carey, after some hesitation on the ground of his slight abilities, was ‘allowed to go on preaching,’ and finally sent forth to the ministry by the unanimous vote of the Baptist Church, over which John Sutcliff presided. Where also Dr. H. J. Gauntlett, when a boy of ten, was organist at the parish church.[159]
The Olney hymns are at once the ‘monument’ of ‘an intimate and endeared friendship’ and of a memorable literary partnership. ‘The old African blasphemer’ must have felt it even more a matter of thankfulness that he found himself collaborating with William Cowper than that he should become minister of the nearest church to the Mansion House. John Newton’s romantic story is too well known to be repeated here. He is a unique figure in the Christian choir, and the story of our hymn-writers would be vastly poorer if his life were omitted.
Influenced, as he gladly recognized, by the mother who died when he was a boy of seven, his soul lay open to intellectual and spiritual impressions, even in the midst of his wanderings and sins. Euclid, as well as Thomas à Kempis, shared in the saving of his soul and kept him from sinking to the level of his companions and oppressors. His hair-breadth escapes were so many and so remarkable that he might well regard them as interpositions of Providence, indicating that he was ‘a chosen vessel’ whom God had designated to special work when his hour should come.
Among the many interesting men who occupy secondary places in the religious life of the eighteenth century, he is one of the most interesting and attractive. The promise of his childhood blighted by the death of his mother, his restless, roving, adventurous manhood, his pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, his seven years’ faithful love for Mary Catlett, thoughts of whom were never absent from his mind for an hour amidst all his ‘misery and wretchedness,’ the unegotistic frankness of his Authentic Narrative, his profound and thankful modesty,
The genuine meek humility,
The wonder why such love to me,
his genius for friendship, his good-humoured perplexity as to his proper theological and ecclesiastical affinities, his ready wit and manly tenderness, unite to make John Newton’s a name over which one may well linger.
He was a Calvinist for the same reason that the Wesleys were Arminians. They were convinced that only a love divine which included every soul of man could have stooped to them. Newton believed that only God’s determinate counsel could have set such wandering feet as his upon the rock and established his goings. To such elect souls the divers ways of contradictory theologies blend in the one path which leads the sinner to the Saviour. ‘The views,’ he says, ‘I have received of the doctrines of grace, are essential to my peace, and I could not live a day or an hour without them.’ He found them ‘friendly to holiness,’ and it was not in him to be ‘ashamed of them.’ One of his favourite stories was of an old woman near Olney, whose views on predestination suited him exactly. ‘Ah! I have long settled that point; for if God had not chosen me before I was born, I am sure He would have seen nothing in me to have chosen me for afterwards.’ But we can well believe that he was not a satisfactory Calvinist from the ‘highest’ point of view. ‘There were two sorts of Calvinists at Olney,’ he said, ‘and they always reminded me of the two baskets of Jeremiah’s figs.’
His Churchmanship was like his Calvinism, convinced but liberal, almost easy-going. He writes to his friend, William Bull—
I know not how it is. I think my sentiments and experience are as orthodox and Calvinistical as need be; and yet I am a sort of speckled bird among my Calvinist brethren. I am a mighty good Churchman, but pass amongst such as a Dissenter in prunello. On the other hand, the Dissenters (many of them, I mean) think me defective, either in understanding or in conscience, for staying where I am. Well, there is a middle party called Methodists, but neither do my dimensions exactly fit with them.... But there are a few among all parties who bear with me and love me, and with this I must be content at present.... Party walls, though stronger than the walls of Babylon, must come down in the general ruin when the earth and all its works shall be burned up, if not sooner.
In truth, he also was one of those whom any Church might gladly have adopted. He would have been thoroughly happy and at home amongst the best of the Dissenters, he would have been an ideal Methodist, and his Narrative would have given an added glory to the Lives of Early Methodist Preachers; but, notwithstanding the difficulties which delayed his taking orders, he was in his right place as a parish clergyman, and had no reason to complain that he was not appreciated in the Establishment. His Apologia shows that when he desired to enter the ministry, Dissenters were quite as much afraid of him as Churchmen, and were as unwilling to ordain him as the archbishop himself.[160]
He entered the Church without any special prejudice in its favour, but his conviction that he had taken the right step grew stronger year by year. His defence of the Prayer-book against the criticism of the Dissenter who availed himself of Watts’s Psalms and Hymns is as effective as it is witty, and is enforced by a characteristic anecdote of a preacher who used to compose hymns line by line as he announced them from the pulpit.
Crito freely will rehearse
Forms of praise and prayer in verse;
Why should Crito then suppose
Forms are sinful when in prose?
Must my form be deemed a crime
Merely for the want of rhyme?
Newton’s charity went a good deal beyond that of the ordinary evangelical of his own and of many a later day. In the Apologia he expresses with vigour his conviction that ‘the Lord has a people’ among the members of the Roman and Greek Churches.
I should hope that they who, having themselves tasted that the Lord is gracious, know the language of a heart under the influence of His Spirit, would, in defiance of Protestant prejudices, be of my mind if they had opportunity of perusing the writings of some Papists.
Newton was not one of the great men of his age, but he is remarkable, if not pre-eminent, for the naturalness with which he speaks the common tongue of the children of God. Father Faber, in the preface to his Hymns, bears a somewhat reluctant witness to this.
Catholics even are said to be sometimes found poring with a devout and unsuspecting delight over the verses of the Olney hymns, which the author (Faber) himself can remember acting like a spell upon him for years, strong enough to be for long a counter influence to very grave convictions, and even now to come back from time to time unbidden into the mind.
If Faber deprecated the ‘spell’ of the Olney hymns, it is fair to remember that Newton concludes his defence of devout Catholics by saying, ‘However, I desire to be thankful that I am not a Papist.’
In 1764 the difficulties which beset his entrance to the ministry ended, and he was ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln to the curacy of Olney, which had been secured for him by the Earl of Dartmouth,[161] a devout and liberal Churchman, commemorated in Cowper’s lines—
We boast some rich ones whom the gospel sways,
And one who wears a coronet and prays.
Newton was nearly forty when he entered upon his first clerical employment. A few months after his coming to Olney, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin stayed with him at the vicarage for about six weeks, and from that time they were bound together by the ties of a deep affection. Newton recognized with his usual shrewdness how much he was inferior to his friend in intellectual capacity, but he was able to give to the sorely tried poet, in his fits of depression, much comfort and a very patient friendship. When in 1773 one of Cowper’s worst attacks came on, he went to the vicarage and remained there for more than twelve months. It was no light trial to Newton, but he said, ‘I think I can hardly do or suffer too much for such a friend,’ and ‘upon the whole’ he was not weary of his ‘cross.’ It has sometimes, most ungenerously, been charged against Newton that his influence tended to produce, or to aggravate, the religious melancholy of the poet, but Cowper’s malady had been very pronounced long before Newton met him. Richard Cecil, and more recently Canon Overton, have defended Newton against this accusation. Cowper’s morbid depression must have been much more trying to Newton than Newton’s humble, cheerful faith could have been to Cowper. Indeed, his playful poems addressed to John Newton and his wife and to their common friend, ‘the smoke-inhaling Bull’—the Independent minister of Newport Pagnell, whom Cowper calls ‘a man of letters and of genius.... but he smokes tobacco—nothing is perfect’—sufficiently show how genial and even jovial was their friendship. The fable that Nonconformist ministers and Evangelical clergymen are either rank hypocrites or intolerable dullards, though it had, and perhaps still has, the support of many great authorities, is only believed in circles profoundly ignorant of them.
Yet Newton must have been greatly indebted, especially as a hymn-writer, to Cowper. His hymns were all written during his residence at Olney, and he had intended that his share in the volume should have been much less than Cowper’s. Indeed, when his friend’s ‘long and affecting indisposition’ occurred, he laid the project aside for some time. In the end the collection appeared with sixty-eight of Cowper’s and two hundred and eighty of Newton’s. Of Cowper’s hymns, some few had been written before he went to Olney, e.g. ‘The Happy Change’ and ‘Retirement.’
Cowper is the one great hymn-writer who ranks with the greater poets. Montgomery, Heber, Milman, all wrote ‘poems,’ but their enduring poetic monument is in their hymns. Had Cowper never written a hymn, he would have had fame sufficient as a poet; had he never written a ‘poem,’ he would still have lived through the ages as the writer of immortal hymns. Lord Selborne says that Cowper’s contributions to the Olney collection ‘are, almost without exception, worthy of his name’; but, as a fact, many of them are prosaic and feeble, apparently written as task work, perhaps to meet a challenge of Newton’s, or to follow a particular sermon. Cowper’s choicest hymns are too well known for quotation—
O for a closer walk with God. Hark, my soul, it is the Lord. Sometimes a light surprises. God moves in a mysterious way. Jesus, where’er Thy people meet.
Newton’s best are—
Glorious things of thee are spoken. How sweet the name of Jesus sounds. Quiet, Lord, my froward heart. Come, my soul, thy suit prepare.
And the simple Spiritual songs—
Begone, unbelief, my Saviour is near. Though troubles assail and dangers affright.
Like Watts, Doddridge, Beddome, and many others, Newton wrote his hymns for use after preaching or for some special occasion, such as the opening of a room at the Great House for prayer-meetings and children’s services. It was for this event that Cowper wrote
Jesus, where’er Thy people meet,
and Newton a less effective hymn—
Dear Shepherd of Thy people, hear,
Thy presence now display;
As Thou hast given a place for prayer,
So give us hearts to pray.
I do not suppose that the Olney hymns were often selected as a hymn-book for congregational use. The range of subjects is too narrow, and is so largely affected by the circumstances of composition, the sadness of Cowper’s prolonged illness, and the needs of the rustic worshippers, that it is, as a whole, more suited to private devotion than public worship, though from it may be gathered some of the most beautiful of the songs of Zion.
From twelve to twenty of the Olney hymns have won a permanent place in our hymn-books, but what is left is very far from being ‘empty chaff well meant for grain.’ Indeed, there are very few hymn-books of the eighteenth century so interesting as this. When you have picked out of Watts or Doddridge their best hymns, you find it a wearisome and profitless task to plod through the remainder. An outrageous rhyme is a pleasing break in the dull monotony of the sentiment, but the Olney hymns, even at their feeblest, have life and vigour, and are often provokingly easy to remember. Their influence on modern hymnody has been all in favour of the expression of personal, individual experience, in which regard they may not unfairly be compared with many of the sublimest Psalms.
In Cowper’s verses there are often references to his own depressed and anxious state of mind, and pathetic prayers for deliverance or suggestions of comfortable thoughts.
She, too, who touched Thee in the press,
And healing virtue stole,
Was answered, ‘Daughter, go in peace,
Thy faith hath made thee whole.’
Concealed amid the gathering throng,
She would have shunned Thy view;
And if her faith was firm and strong,
Had strong misgivings too.
Like her with hopes and fears we come,
To touch Thee, if we may:
Oh! send us not despairing home,
Send none unhealed away.
THE CONTRITE HEART
The Lord will happiness divine
On contrite hearts bestow;
Then tell me, gracious God, is mine
A contrite heart, or no?
I hear, but seem to hear in vain,
Insensible as steel;
If ought is felt, ’tis only pain,
To find I cannot feel.
I sometimes think myself inclined
To love Thee, if I could;
But often feel another mind,
Averse to all that’s good.
Thy saints are comforted, I know,
And love Thy house of prayer;
I therefore go where others go,
But find no comfort there.
Oh, make this heart rejoice or ache,
Decide this doubt for me;
And if it be not broken, break—
And heal it, if it be!
THE WAITING SOUL
Breathe from the gentle south, O Lord,
And cheer me from the north;
Blow on the treasures of Thy word,
And call the spices forth!
Help me to reach the distant goal;
Confirm my feeble knee;
Pity the sickness of a soul
That faints for love of Thee!
I seem forsaken and alone,
I hear the lion roar;
And every door is shut but one,
And that is Mercy’s door.
There, till the dear Deliverer come,
I’ll wait with humble prayer;
And when He calls His exile home,
The Lord shall find him there.
PRAYER FOR PATIENCE
Lord, who hast suffered all for me,
My peace and pardon to procure,
The lighter cross I bear for Thee,
Help me with patience to endure.
The storm of loud repining hush,
I would in humble silence mourn;
Why should the unburnt, though burning bush,
Be angry as the crackling thorn?
Ah! were I buffeted all day,
Mocked, crowned with thorns, and spit upon,
I yet should have no right to say,
My great distress is mine alone.
Let me not angrily declare
No pain was ever sharp like mine,
Nor murmur at the cross I bear,
But rather weep, remembering Thine.
Cowper’s hymns are not all the voice of the penitent or of the anxious believer. He shared Newton’s opinion as to the classification of Calvinists, and two of his compositions evidently refer to the second basket of figs. They illustrate Hazlitt’s criticism, ‘His satire is excellent. It is pointed and forcible, with the polished manners of the gentleman and the honest indignation of the virtuous man.’[162] The following verses are a good example of his satire.
A LIVING AND A DEAD FAITH
With golden bells, the priestly vest,
And rich pomegranates bordered round,
The need of holiness expressed,
And called for fruit as well as sound.
Easy indeed it were to reach
A mansion in the courts above,
If swelling words and fluent speech
Might serve instead of faith and love.
But none shall gain the blissful place,
Or God’s unclouded glory see,
Who talks of free and sovereign grace,
Unless that grace has made him free!
This is not a favourite strain of Cowper’s. His hymns are nearly always the expression of personal emotion or experience. We may close our quotations from his Olney hymns with one which expresses, in his own way, the common yearning of all who love our Lord Jesus Christ.
LONGING TO BE WITH CHRIST
My Saviour, whom absent I love,
Whom, not having seen, I adore;
Whose name is exalted above
All glory, dominion, and power;
Dissolve Thou these bonds that detain
My soul from her portion in Thee,
Ah! strike off this adamant chain,
And make me eternally free.
Oh then shall the veil be removed,
And round me Thy brightness be poured,
I shall meet Him whom absent I loved,
I shall see Him whom unseen I adored.
Newton’s contribution to the Olney hymns is considerable both in quality and quantity. His preface disarms criticism.
Dr. Watts might, as a poet, have a right to say, ‘That it cost him some labour to restrain his fire, and to accommodate himself to the capacities of common readers.’ But it would not become me to make such a declaration. It behoved me to do my best.... If the Lord, whom I serve, has been pleased to favour me with that mediocrity of talent, which may qualify me for usefulness to the weak and the poor of His flock, without quite disgusting persons of superior discernment, I have reason to be satisfied.
It is quite refreshing to find a hymn-writer who describes himself thus. They have often been modest men and women, but have had a fairly good idea of the value of their own compositions.
Newton’s hymns are, even more than those of Watts or Doddridge, pastoral hymns. Other men wrote for the congregation, he wrote for his own particular congregation, and very often with a special reference to one member of it. We know that his sermons were suggested in this way. If ‘Sir Cowper’ had a bad fit, or the Vicarage maid, Molly, was ‘perplexed and tempted on the point of election,’ the kind-hearted pastor had a sermon and a hymn, suited to their ‘state,’ ready on Sunday.
Many of Newton’s pieces express much more of Cowper’s experience than of his own. In such lines as the following is not his eye upon the sad figure in ‘the poet’s corner’ in the Great House?
Sure the Lord thus far has brought me
By His watchful tender care,
Sure ’tis He Himself has taught me
How to seek His face by prayer:
After so much mercy past,
Will He give me up at last?
In my Saviour’s intercession
Therefore I will still confide!
Lord, accept my free confession,
I have sinned, but Thou hast died:
This is all I have to plead,
This is all the plea I need.
That is what he has to say of ‘Confidence’ from Cowper’s point of view. When he speaks for himself he adopts a different tone.
Oh! I tremble still to think
How secure I lived in sin;
Sporting on destruction’s brink,
Yet preserved from falling in.
Come, my fellow-sinners, try,
Jesu’s heart is full of love!
Oh that you, as well as I,
May His wondrous mercy prove.
He has sent me to declare,
All is ready, all is free:
Why should any soul despair
When He saved a wretch like me?
Perhaps it was with Cowper in his mind he wrote that beautiful and touching hymn for private devotion, which has been often most unjustly censured—‘’Tis a point I long to know.’ Newton, like Bunyan, knew how sincere a pilgrim Mr. Little Faith was, and each in his own way sought to comfort him. There is good robust common sense in the prayer of the last two verses. In strength and beauty it does not compare with Cowper’s hymn on the same text, ‘Lovest thou Me?’ which Mr. Gladstone reckoned one of the three greatest English hymns; but it belongs to the Christian treasury, and has brought help to many.
Lord, decide the doubtful case,
Thou who art Thy people’s sun,
Shine upon the work of grace,
If it be indeed begun.
Let me love Thee more and more,
If I love at all, I pray;
If I have not loved before,
Help me to begin to-day.
The tenderness of ‘the old African blasphemer’s’ heart is nowhere more touchingly illustrated than in his version of Isa. liv. 5-11, which must surely have been written for Cowper, since it quotes and emphasizes the words of his own great hymn. It has five eight-line verses, and is headed ‘To the Afflicted, Tossed with Tempest, and not Comforted.’
Pensive, doubting, fearful heart,
Hear what Christ the Saviour says;
Every word should joy impart,
Change thy mourning into praise.
Yes, He speaks, and speaks to thee.
May He help thee to believe!
Then thou presently wilt see
Thou hast little cause to grieve.
Though afflicted, tempest-tossed,
Comfortless awhile thou art,
Do not think thou canst be lost,
Thou art graven on My heart.
All thy wastes I will repair,
Thou shalt be rebuilt anew;
And in thee it shall appear
What a God of love can do.
It is the pastor’s heart which takes up the very words of his friend—
Yes, He speaks and speaks to thee,
May He help thee to believe!
Richard Cecil says that Herbert was a ‘favourite’ of Newton’s, and there are not wanting reminiscences of Herbert in the Olney hymns, though Newton had little of Herbert’s ingenuity or power, and he says in a few plain words what Herbert weaves into a quaint poem, bright and ever-memorable with some ‘conceit’ such as he only conceived. If we set Newton and Herbert side by side, the comparison is, of course, all in favour of Herbert. Herbert speaks to himself and to God in what is an unknown tongue to many a good plain Christian. Newton wrote for his simple labouring folk at Olney; he is the poet of the rustic prayer-meeting. Bemerton and Olney were both villages in the land of Beulah, but there is a difference in the dialect, which is easily accounted for when we remember the contrast between the life of Herbert and of Newton. When they passed through a similar spiritual experience they described it in very different fashion, but, though there are diversities of gifts, there is the same Spirit; there is the same self-distrust, self-abhorrence; and there is the same calm acceptance of the great salvation and its joys. George Herbert tells his deepest, sweetest experience in the final poem of The Temple.[163] Newton tells his story in simple, homely verse that is not poetry, but is prayer and praise expressed in natural rhythm.
Dost Thou ask me who I am?
Ah, my Lord, Thou know’st my name:
Yet the question gives a plea
To support my suit with Thee.
Thou didst once a wretch behold,
In rebellion blindly bold,
Scorn Thy grace, Thy power defy:
That poor rebel, Lord, was I.
Once a sinner near despair,
Sought Thy mercy-seat by prayer;
Mercy heard and set him free:
Lord, that mercy came to me.
Many years have passed since then,
Many changes I have seen,
Yet have been upheld till now;
Who could hold me up but Thou?