INTRODUCTION
The source and inspiration of Christian song is the word of Christ. ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.’ The common phrases of common life cannot satisfy the soul filled with the Spirit and rich with the wealth of Christ’s indwelling word. Religious emotion finds truer and more fitting expression in poetry than in prose. If God had not given to His Church poets, as well as apostles, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, the best that is in us could never have been uttered. Words and phrases that are large enough for intercourse with our fellows become cramped and inexpressive when we speak to God. Praise and penitence alike would often be silent in the congregation of the saints if they could not at once veil and reveal their profoundest feelings in psalms and hymns. Poetry gives to devotion those robes of glory and beauty without which it would, at times, be almost unseemly to join in the public worship of God or to disclose the heart’s secrets in the presence of fellow-worshippers.
Our theme, then, is peculiarly sacred, since it deals with the spiritual songs in which earnest and sincere men have uttered, in the very presence of God, their most secret thoughts, confessions, and aspirations. Every true hymn was first spoken by one man to God alone, was prayed before it was sung, though now it may be heard daily from ten thousand voices. Harsh or flippant criticism is out of place here, an irreverent impertinence, like the interruption of private prayer. In the study of hymns
Put off thy shoes from off thy feet;
The place where man his God shall meet
Be sure is holy ground.[2]
Yet St. Paul himself reminds us that the word of Christ is to dwell wisely as well as richly in our hearts. ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.’ ‘Next to a sound rule of faith, there is nothing of so much consequence as a sober standard of feeling in matters of religion.’[3] Morbid, insincere, fanatical, or exaggerated emotion is as much to be deprecated as doctrinal error, and its evils are at least as disastrous. The diffusion of false or superficial sentiment in the household of the faith is like the spreading of a subtle disease which saps the strength and mars the beauty of devotion, while error bears a charmed life if it comes in the words of a familiar and attractive hymn. Moreover, it is in the hymns of the Church rather than in its formal declarations of faith and doctrine that we find the truest and generally the most favourable revelation of its character. Hymnology is a more important element in the history of religion than most Church historians and theological writers have recognized.[4]
The present time is in many respects peculiarly appropriate for a consideration of the growth and development of the hymns of the modern Church. We are in a state of rest or pause after tumult. The great religious ‘movements’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are matters of history, and we can regard even the most recent of them calmly and without the prejudice which while conflict rages may, not altogether unfairly, be regarded as patriotism. The Methodist Revival, the Evangelical Awakening, the Oxford Movement, the Salvation Army Campaign, the Undenominational Evangelism of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, may all be taken into account in considering the material and character of the hymn-book of the modern Church.
Again, it is interesting to remember that of the hymn-writers of the nineteenth century few survive. For the moment there is neither evangelist nor poet to give us new songs. Our fathers made hymn-books; we re-edit them. Within the last few years the standard Presbyterian, Baptist, Anglican,[5] and Methodist hymn-books have appeared in new and revised editions, whilst in the Arundel Hymns we have the most recent Roman Catholic hymnal. Dr. Barrett’s Congregational Church Hymnal, issued in 1887, is of the modern type, though it preserves many of the features of the older Nonconformist books. Mr. Garrett Horder’s Worship-Song represents the taste of an individual, not of a committee or community; but it is in many respects the best and most complete collection of the hymns of the modern Church. These books enable us to discover current opinion and taste in regard to hymns which are worthy to take their place in the service of the Christian sanctuary, and both in their unity and diversity are of great value as indicating the life and thought of the Churches they represent.
In this lecture I shall attempt—
1. A brief preliminary inquiry into what constitutes a true hymn, suited for use in Christian worship.
2. A very brief review of the relation of the Hebrew Psalter to the Christian Hymnal, and a passing glance at the hymns of the New Testament and of the early Church.
3. A more detailed survey of the rise and development of modern English hymns and their use in the Church since the Reformation.
Such a study, however unskilfully guided, cannot, I hope, be altogether without interest or edification, since it brings the student into fellowship with the sweetest and the saintliest souls, and bids him join in spirit the choir invisible who praise God day and night in His temple.
I regret that the limits assigned to my lecture make it impossible to refer to translations from the Greek, Latin, German, and other languages. These form a most valuable and an increasing portion of all modern hymnals. They furnish abundant material for a separate volume.
I
A True Hymn
When my revered father, more than thirty years ago, delivered the fourth Fernley Lecture, he laid this down as the first scriptural Church principle—‘The Church is not a thing of rigid definition.’ I may adapt that phrase to my own subject, and say, A hymn is not a thing of rigid definition.
Commenting on the note which closes the second book of Psalms, ‘The prayers [LXX. hymns] of David the son of Jesse are ended,’ St. Augustine gives this definition:
Hymns are praises of God with singing, hymns are songs containing praises of God. If there be praise, and not praise of God, it is not a hymn. If there be praise, and praise of God, and it is not sung, it is not a hymn. It is necessary, therefore, if it be a hymn, that it have these three things: both praise, and praise of God, and that it be sung.
In commenting on Ps. cxlviii. he repeats this rule in almost the same words. The definition commends itself at once as excellent, and in regard to a large number of hymns adequate; but even when the widest sense is given to the words it is much too narrow and would exclude many of the truest hymns. Indeed, it is impossible to deny the title to innumerable compositions which do not fulfil these conditions. Many a verse of which it may be said, This is not a hymn, demonstrates its right by the fact that it is hymned by the Church from age to age.
St. Augustine’s third canon may be accepted without hesitation. A poem that cannot be sung may speak in the sublimest accents of devotion, yet it is of necessity unsuited to the service of the Christian choir. Spenser’s ‘Hymn of Heavenly Love’ is a glorious example of this form of praise. Indeed, there are some stanzas which a skilful hand might make available for use in the congregation.
O blessèd Well of Love, O Flower of Grace,
O glorious Morning Star, O Lamp of Light!
Most lively image of Thy Father’s face,
Eternal King of Glory, Lord of Might,
Meek Lamb of God, before all worlds behight,[6]
How can we Thee requite for all this good?
Or what can prize that Thy most precious blood?
Yet nought Thou ask’st in lieu of all this love,
But love of us for guerdon of Thy pain:
Ay me! What can us less than that behove?
Had He requirèd life of us again,
Had it been wrong to ask His own with gain?
He gave us life, He it restorèd lost;
Then life were least, that us so little cost.
But He our life hath left unto us free,
Free that was thrall, and blessèd that was banned;
Nor ought demands but that we loving be,
As He Himself hath loved us afore-hand;
And bound thereto with an eternal band,
Him first to love that us so dearly bought,
And next our brethren to His image wrought.
Many of Herbert’s and of Miss Rossetti’s poems are of the same type. We would give much to add them to our hymnals, but they would be out of place there. They belong to the manual of devotion.
That the primary idea of a hymn is praise may also be granted, but even so ‘praise’ must be given an extensive connotation, that it may include whatever directly or indirectly glorifies God. St. Paul’s exhortations show how much more than the offering of adoration is included in the province of Christian song. Our hymn-book, like the Hebrew Psalter, must have not only its songs of high thanksgiving, its sacrifice of praise, but also its prayer of the penitent as he poureth out his soul unto God, its sin-offering as well as its thank-offering, its intercessions and meditations, its instructions and exhortations, its lighter songs and melodies. ‘Every feeling which enters into any act of true worship may fitly find expression in a hymn.’[7]
Dr. Johnson declared that sacred poetry must always be poor because ‘the topics of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but few as they are can be made no more.’ To this criticism Keble replied in his essay on Sacred Poetry—
How can the topics of devotion be few, when we are taught to make every part of life, every scene in nature, an occasion—in other words, a topic—of devotion? It might as well be said that connubial love is an unfit subject for poetry, as being incapable of novelty, because, after all, it is only ringing the changes upon one simple affection, which every one understands. The novelty there consists, not in the original topic, but in continually bringing ordinary things, by happy strokes of natural ingenuity, into new associations with the ruling passion.
There’s not a bonnie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green;
There’s not a bonnie bird that sings
But minds me of my Jean.
Why need we fear to extend this most beautiful and natural sentiment to ‘the intercourse between the human soul and its Maker’?[8]
If, on its subjective side, sacred poetry has a wide range of topics, how manifold and how magnificent are the themes presented by the historic facts upon which faith rests, and by the great truths of the gospel! In Johnson’s day no one understood how large a realm belonged to the Christian singer, but we have no cause to complain of sameness or dullness in the songs of the Christian choir.
St. Augustine’s second canon need not be regarded as implying that every hymn must be formally addressed to God. The very hymns (the psalms) upon which he was commenting abundantly justify our use of hymns which are rather uttered in the divine presence than actually spoken to God. The 103rd Psalm is as truly a hymn of praise, and that of God, as the 104th. After the same self-exhortation, ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul,’ the one continues in the form of a devout meditation, in which the consciousness that God hears is never for a moment absent; while the other at once addresses ‘the Majesty on high.’
O Lord my God, Thou art very great;
Thou art clothed with honour and majesty.
Both might have ended with
Let my meditation[9] be sweet unto Him;
civ. 34.
or, in the words of another psalm—
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation[9] of my heart, be acceptable in Thy sight,
O Lord, my Strength, and my Redeemer.
xix. 14.
Devout meditations which do not actually speak to God are amongst the best and most truly devotional hymns. Watts’s spiritual song,
There is a land of pure delight,
is an example of the hymn which is only indirectly a prayer; whilst
When I survey the wondrous Cross
illustrates the meditation which is partly the communing of the soul with itself, and partly (perhaps in this case only in the second verse) a direct address to God. Yet each is a true hymn. The ideal exercise of the Christian hymn-writer is the practice of the presence of God.
Not only, then, are the subjects of sacred song infinitely varied, but the forms it may assume are many. In the poet, as well as in the prophet, God speaks ‘in divers manners.’ This is seen in St. Paul’s twice repeated classification, ‘psalms, hymns, spiritual songs,’ and by the directions he gives for the use of song in the Church.
In the Epistle to the Ephesians he writes:
And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit; speaking one to another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father.
In the Epistle to the Colossians:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts unto God. And whatsoever ye do, in word or in deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.
Psalms are, no doubt, primarily, if not exclusively, those of the Old Testament, which would naturally form the basis of the hymn-book of the Christian Church. It would have been the worst ingratitude, the most crass stupidity, if such a treasure actually in their hands and in their hearts had not been adopted in the services of the first Christian worshippers, even though it must soon have been felt that some psalms were as little in harmony with the spirit of the new dispensation as the law which Christ Himself enlarged and enlightened.
Hymns ‘would more appropriately designate those hymns of praise which were composed by the Christians themselves.’[10] Of these, as we shall note in the next chapter, some fragments remain, and they are specially characteristic of Christian worship. ‘It was of the essence of the Greek ὕμνος (hymn) that it should be ... addressed to a god or hero, that is, a deified man.’[11] Christianity inherited the Hebrew psalm, it adopted and consecrated the Greek hymn.
Ode, or song, is a more general term, qualified and limited by the epithet ‘spiritual,’ and may be regarded as justifying our use of many modern hymns which a severe or narrow taste would reject. Bishop Beveridge understood it to include ‘all sorts of songs upon any spiritual subject.’
Probably the three terms were not very rigidly distinguished, though they are convenient for describing various classes of devotional poetry. In the title of Ps. lxxv. the LXX. gives the three words: ‘among hymns, a psalm for Asaph, an ode concerning the Assyrian.’[12]
The variety of form which the songs of the Christian temple may assume is seen to be of the utmost value when we consider how large a part the ministry of song has in Christian life and worship. Although Jehovah is ‘exalted above all blessing and praise,’[13] yet does He sit ‘enthroned upon the praises of Israel.’[14] ‘Praise waiteth for God in Zion.’ The ancient summons to worship is—
Enter into His gates with thanksgiving,
And into His courts with praise.
c. 4.
The walls of the city of God are called Salvation, and her gates Praise.[15] The mystic Jerusalem is the true ‘city of praise.’[16] The one offering of the Christian temple is its perpetual eucharist,[17] ‘the sacrifice of praise.’[18] The high praises of God are in the mouth of His saints because His love is shed abroad in their hearts, and they ‘cannot from His praise forbear.’
Jerusalem makes melody
For simple joy of heart,
An organ of full compass she,
One tuned through every part;
While not to day or night belong
Her matins and her evensong,
The one thanksgiving of her song.[19]
Whatever the form of the song, its music is for the ear of God, its melody is that of the heart.
In the Christian Church, as in the Jewish Temple, we may call instrumental music to our aid, and count its offering not unacceptable to God.
Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet:
Praise Him with the psaltery and harp.
Praise Him with the timbrel and dance:
Praise Him with stringed instruments and the pipe.
Praise Him upon the loud cymbals:
Praise Him upon the high-sounding cymbals.
Yet all this pomp and circumstance of worship are but sounding brass and clanging cymbal unless there be the accompaniment of ‘grace in the heart.’
Praise Him every tuneful string;
All the reach of heavenly art,
All the powers of music bring,
The music of the heart.[20]
Praise needs ‘a thousand tongues,’ and even so would find ‘eternity too short’ for its service.
Though St. Paul associates praise—thanksgiving—with singing in both the passages referred to, it is instructive to note how clearly he asserts the teaching function of the songs of the Church: ‘Speaking one to another,’ ‘teaching and admonishing one another.’ Bishop Christopher Wordsworth said, as I think, truly:
Christian poetry ought to be a medium for the conveyance of Christian doctrine.... A Church which forgoes the use of hymns in her office of teaching neglects one of the most efficacious instruments for correcting error, and for disseminating truth, as well as for ministering comfort and edification.[21]
An entirely opposite view is often taken, especially by Dissenting writers. Mr. Horder even regards the definite assertion of the doctrine of the Trinity in Heber’s greatest hymn as ‘its only fault.’[22] Dr. Martineau argued that to eliminate from a hymn its distinctive doctrinal teaching, and to ‘translate’ it into broader theological language, was ‘simply to remove an obstruction,’ and to introduce the author ‘to the veneration of thousands, to whom otherwise he must appear as a repulsive stranger.’[23] The general question of alterations in the text of hymns may be considered later. At the moment I need only point out that the apostolic ideal of a hymn includes both ethical and doctrinal teaching. John Wesley prided himself upon having given in his hymn-book ‘a little body of experimental and practical divinity.’
The same principle may be applied to hymns of invitation, of which there are so many in the Methodist collection, and of which Faber’s ‘Souls of men, why will ye scatter?’ is the best modern example. An off-hand criticism may condemn hymns addressed to our own souls, to ‘souls of men,’ to ‘neighbours and friends,’ to ‘sinners poor and wretched;’ but they have ample warrant both in precept and precedent.
God sent His singers upon earth
With songs of sadness and of mirth,
That they might touch the hearts of men,
And bring them back to heaven again.[24]
The Christian poet is a teacher and an evangelist.
Passing from the form to the character of the hymn, there are certain great principles concerning which there will, I imagine, be little difference of opinion. The first essential in every hymn is surely that it be not unworthy of use in the service of God, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and is to be worshipped in the beauty of holiness. There must be—
1. Sincerity.—Fitness for divine service depends not upon beauty of form or expression, but upon sincerity of thought.
The fineness which a hymn or psalm affords,
Is when the soul unto the lines accords.[25]
‘The garment of praise’ is the white robe of the pure in heart, and, lacking this, the stately anthem has less of heaven’s music than the discordant voices of the village choir.
So Cowper prays—
Forgive the praise that falls so low
Beneath the gratitude I owe:
It means Thy praise, however poor;
An angel’s song could do no more.
So Keble sings—
Childlike though the voices be,
And untunable the parts,
Thou wilt own the minstrelsy
If it flows from childlike hearts.
Sincerity requires that the thoughts expressed should be real to the singer as well as to the poet. They may not be such as would have occurred to him, and the expression may be altogether beyond his powers of origination, but they must be such as he can think in his best moments or may be helped to enter into at the hour of prayer. Sincerity does not require that all our hymns should be on the lowest level common to a general congregation, but that the sentiment expressed, the emotion presupposed or to be excited, be suited to the heart of man in the presence of his Father in heaven. In the compilation of a hymn-book something must be left to the good sense and judgement of those who are to use it; and there is no part of public worship which calls for more serious and intelligent consideration than the selection of hymns suited to the occasion and to the congregation.
It is perhaps too much to say that sincerity also requires that the writer of a hymn should be not unworthy of a place in the Christian choir. Happily this question rarely arises. The author’s name is often an aid to devotion, and in most hymn-books there is hardly a name—except Dryden’s—that seems wholly unfitted to this sacred service.
2. Reverence.—‘God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few,’ restrained, seemly. The profoundest reverence, the lowliest adoration, shrinks from utterance when it hears and sees unspeakable things. This is sublimely taught in those great lines of Dante:
Here memory mocks the toil of genius. Christ
Beamed on that cross; and pattern fails me now.
But whoso takes his cross, and follows Christ,
Will pardon me for that I leave untold,
When in the fleckered dawning he shall spy
The glitterance of Christ.[26]
Even so profuse a hymn-writer as Watts feels that there are times when it is best to ‘leave untold’ what the heart most desires to tell:
A solemn reverence checks our songs,
And praise sits silent on our tongues.
It is a less sublime, but not less acceptable, form of worship which attempts that which yet it knows to be impossible. Praise must be heard in Zion lest if men hold their peace the very stones should cry out. Nor is it right that awe should silence love. We worship the King, eternal, immortal, invisible, yet even so we praise Him who ‘like as a Father pitieth His children’; and when we sing praise to Christ as God, we remember that He called His disciples not servants, but friends.
Dr. Watts utters the thought of many hearts in one of his finest hymns—
Join all the glorious names
Of wisdom, love, and power,
That ever mortals knew,
That angels ever bore;
All are too mean to speak His worth,
Too mean to set my Saviour forth.
But O what gentle terms,
What condescending ways,
Doth our Redeemer use,
To teach His heavenly grace;
Mine eyes with joy and wonder see
What forms of love He bears for me!
It would be easy to give illustrations of offences against the spirit of reverence, especially in hymns of the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the nineteenth. The Moravian hymns in particular were often disfigured by the most revolting phrases, so had indeed that one does not care to give them even the notoriety of emphatic condemnation.[27] But such gross offences are rare in our time, and are practically unknown to Protestant hymnals. Some of the Romish hymns, and a few in Anglican books, refer to the details of our Lord’s Incarnation and Passion with irreverent and even indecent realism, and those addressed to the Virgin Mary are often as bad as any found in the older Moravian books.
We are, on the other hand, in some danger of carrying our sense of what is reverent too far, and of altering without reason the glowing words of devout Christian affection. John Wesley shrank from including
Jesu, Lover of my soul
in his Collection. The expression is quoted from Wisd. xi. 26: ‘But Thou sparest all; for they are Thine, O Lord, Thou Lover of souls’; and he saw no objection to its general application as in the lines—
Lover of souls, to rescue mine
Reveal the charity divine
That suffered in my stead.
Canon Ellerton hesitated as to the propriety of the inclusion of this great hymn in a Church hymnal, and spoke of it as standing ‘absolutely upon the line’ which separates hymns for public worship from those of private devotion. But the Church in all its borders has decided the question, and our heart tells us that the decision is right. Nor is it, indeed, a hymn solely for the sanctuary and the saint; it is a hymn for the street and for the sinner.[28]
The epithet ‘dear’ is not one to be scattered thoughtlessly through hymns and prayers. Yet there are lines from which it is almost an impiety to remove it. There is a language of reverent affection which has in it nothing of the earth.
Come then, and to my soul reveal
The heights and depths of grace,
The wounds which all my sorrows heal,
That dear disfigured face.
Personally I should not touch even Faber’s
Sweet Saviour, bless us e’er we go,
though I wish he had used another epithet; and I certainly could not draw a rough pen through Cowper’s tender line
Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood
Shall never lose its power.
There is something due to the men who wrote thus. If they loved much, we should let them speak their love to all the ages in terms of strong affection, and our colder hearts may learn to burn within us as we draw near with them to Him who ‘sought us Himself with such longing and love.’
Bad taste is an error of judgement, not irreverence, but it has very much the same effect upon the worshipper, and it is to be regretted that some very great hymns, consecrated by ten thousand sacred memories, are marred by phrases which will not bear comment or meditation. If the hymn were new, not many modern books would include Cowper’s lines
There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
but nothing could long preserve in common use Watts’s verse—
His dying crimson like a robe
Spreads o’er His body on the tree;
Then am I dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me.
3. Closely allied to reverence is Dignity, the elevation and refinement of thought and language which beseem the worship of God. Nor is it any disadvantage to the less enlightened or less educated in the Christian assembly that they should learn to speak the language of the family of God. Dignity is not necessarily obscure or pompous. It represents what is worthy of man’s thought when it is engaged on the highest of all themes. The intrusion into the most sacred moments of what is mean or vulgar in sound or association is a grievous offence. Hymns belong to the belles lettres of the literature of devotion; to be familiar with them should be in itself a liberal education.
4. Beauty.—‘Intercourse between God and the human soul,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘cannot be poetical’—a characteristically dogmatic assertion for which there might be some excuse in his day, but which succeeding years have overwhelmingly disproved. A hundred years ago it was necessary to include in a hymn-book compositions that compensated for their lack of poetry by their undoubted piety, but we have such a wealth of song at our disposal that there need be nothing poor, prosaic, commonplace in our hymnals. Watts’s greatest error was his excessive tenderness for ‘vulgar capacities.’
5. Simplicity.—We may say of great hymns what Tennyson said of great men—they are
In their simplicity sublime.
Heavy words are rightly to be regarded as fatal to a good hymn. Charles Wesley was peculiarly prone to use words which make hymns impossible in public worship. Who desires in prayer or praise to use such words as ‘consentaneous,’ ‘implunged,’ ‘choral symphonies’?
The best hymns are made up of short words, and have a large preponderance of monosyllables. The words, too, should be such as men use in the more serious intercourse of daily life. It goes without saying that colloquialisms and words with mean associations are not fit for the sanctuary, but the finest hymns are often those which the plain man recognizes as written in his own tongue.
Bishop Ken’s great hymns are models of simple directness of thought and expression, and so are some verses of Pope’s Universal Prayer.
What conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do;
This, teach me more than hell to shun,
That, more than heaven pursue.
If I am right, Thy grace impart,
Still in the right to stay;
If I am wrong, oh teach my heart
To find that better way!
Teach me to feel another’s woe,
To hide the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.
6. Fervour.—If there is no fire or glow in a hymn, it might as well be prose as poetry. Indeed, many hymns are so prosaic, so wooden, that it is difficult to see how they can ever
Teach our faint desires to rise
above the dullest levels of devotion. There should be in a hymn a restrained fervour, a reverent rapture of poetic inspiration free from all admixture of the sensuous and morbidly emotional. ‘Be not drunken with wine ... but be filled with the Spirit.’
Quench then the altar-fires of your old gods,
Quench not the fire within.[29]
Nay, rather, if we find no ‘minstrel rapture’ for the praise of the Most High, may we not ask with Charles Wesley—
Why breaks not out the fire within,
In flames of joy, and praise, and love?
As might be expected, it is among the Anglican and the rationalistic communities that there is the greatest dread of the emotional in worship. Yet Dr. Martineau is the ablest apologist for fervour in religious poetry.
The editor of a hymn-book will not think it necessary to graduate the fervour, the imaginativeness, the grandeur of the compositions admitted into his volume, by the cold, level, and prosaic condition of mind which may possibly prevail among some who use it. Thus, to damp the fire down to the temperature of the fuel, seems to offer but a small prospect of kindling anything. We must not thus forgo the glorious power which art exercises in worship. Its peculiar function in connexion with religion is to substitute for the poor and low thoughts of ordinary men, the solemn and vivid images of things invisible that have revealed themselves to loftier souls, and to present the objects of faith before the general mind in something of that aspect under which they rise up before the great artists of poetry and of sound. These gifted men are to lift us; we are not to depress them. In sacred music we acknowledge this principle at once; we confess that it is a noble thing, when we think of the origin of things, and call God the Creator, to have within us the mighty transitions of Haydn’s genius instead of our own puny dreams; to have the incidents of sacred story glow and live before us at the touch of a power like that of Handel or of Spohr; to find ourselves, at such bidding, with the ‘Shepherds abiding in the field,’ not far from the holy chant falling on the midnight air; or to hear in a voice, melting as Christ’s, ‘Come unto Me, ye weary’; or, as we pass from bereavement to bereavement of this world, to be haunted, as with a sudden peace, by the echo of that unearthly strain, ‘Blest are the departed.’ Not less elevating is the poetry than the melody of faith, when it is equally left alone with its first fresh power, and not reduced halfway to prose as a condition of its entrance into worship.[30]
We should, perhaps, hesitate to say that a Christian hymn may have the ‘fine, careless rapture’ which is the glory of Browning’s thrush, but we must not deny to it the ‘inward glee’ as well as the ‘serious faith’ of Wordsworth’s stock-dove. The fervour of Christian song is the bright expression of our glorying in the Lord.
Sing we merrily unto God our Strength.[31]
7. Truth of doctrine.—If it be allowed that hymns play an important part in the teaching of the Church, it is hardly necessary to press this point. Indeed, there is often more to be feared from theological pedantry than from doctrinal sensitiveness. The essential unity of the faith of Christendom is nowhere better illustrated than in the number of hymns which belong to the common treasure of the Church. There is already a union of hearts in the language of devotion which is the surest promise of the reunion of Christendom. At the same time, there are not a few hymns which must either be excluded from denominational hymn-books, or be revised into accord with the faith of the congregations that are to use them.
I well remember the distress of a distinguished Independent minister when I quoted to him Wesley’s verse—
Ah! Lord, with trembling I confess,
A gracious soul may fall from grace;
The salt may lose its seasoning power,
And never, never find it more—
and the pained incredulity with which he deprecated my assurance that the hymn was still in use in our congregations. I remember, too, how abruptly an eminent Methodist minister closed his hymn-book and directed the congregation to cease singing when he found them approaching the last verse of one of Toplady’s hymns—
Yes, I to the end shall endure,
As sure as the earnest is given,
More happy but not more secure
The glorified spirits in heaven.
The verses set forth accurately and appropriately the teaching of the Churches to which the hymns respectively belong, but they are impossible in other theological regions. A very wide range should be allowed to religious thought as expressed in hymns, but those which contradict the things most surely believed in a Church are rightly excluded from its hymnal.
8. We should add, I think, if not to the essentials, yet certainly to the virtues of a good hymn, Scriptural language. Our greatest prose writers have found in the English Bible the most effective, forceful, impressive words; and the hymn-writer has the advantage not only of its pure, strong diction, but also of the hallowed associations which the words of Holy Scripture preserve for all Englishmen.
II
Hymns of the Bible and the Early Church
The hymn-book of the modern Church is the direct descendant of the Hebrew Psalter. Had David and Asaph never sung, the hymns of Watts and Wesley, of Keble and Montgomery, could hardly have been written. If the praises of Israel had not rung through the courts of the Temple, the choir of the Christian Church would have been silent. Primitive Christianity struggled hard to free itself from the swathing-bands of Jewish ritual; but it recognized from the first the riches of its inheritance in the Book of Psalms. There, more than in any other Scripture, the first Christians heard ‘the voice of Christ and His Church.’[32] Our Lord Himself joined in singing these ancient hymns, and bade His disciples understand that all things must needs be fulfilled which ‘were written in the ... psalms’ concerning Him. St. Paul and St. James alike commend the singing of psalms, and thus, without controversy, the Psalter was claimed by the Church as her own. The determination to hear the voice of Christ everywhere, led to extravagances of exposition which a more critical age cannot tolerate, but it gave the psalms a firm hold upon the heart of Christendom. The ancient Scriptures would have passed away with the ‘worldly sanctuary’ had it not been for the witness of the priest, the prophet, and the psalmist to Christ.
Religious poetry and song must long have preceded any collection of psalms or hymns. One would like to know who first, in the far-off days, said to his brother, ‘O come, let us sing unto the Lord’; but that unknown poet or musician had been famous and forgotten before history was born. The first Hebrew psalm is the Song of Moses at the Red Sea, the earliest of the triumph songs of the people of God, the hymns which celebrate Jehovah, who ever showeth Himself ‘a God of deliverances.’[33] Sung first to ‘the loud timbrel by Egypt’s dark sea,’ it becomes in the Apocalypse the Song of Moses and of the Lamb, chanted to the harps of God by the glassy sea mingled with fire. At the first the singers are the congregation, not yet a people, whom Moses brought out of Egypt in haste; at the last they are the white-robed army of them that have gotten the victory through the blood of the Lamb.
I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously:
The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and song,
And He is become my salvation:
This is my God, and I will praise Him;
My father’s God, and I will exalt Him.
Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like Thee, glorious in holiness,
Fearful in praises, doing wonders?
Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of Thine inheritance,
The place, O Lord, which Thou hast made for Thee to dwell in,
The sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have established.
The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.[34]
Moses, then, is the first singer in the Christian choir; and if to this song of triumph we can add the 90th Psalm, we may well place Moses amongst the sweetest and the sublimest of hymn-writers.
Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead’s most benignant grace.[35]
But Moses is not the founder of Hebrew psalmody. The fact that he and others may have written psalms does not detract from the fame of David, ‘the sweet psalmist of Israel.’ It was he who won for the psalm a permanent place in the worship of God. It is not for me to discuss here critical questions in regard to the Davidic authorship of particular psalms; but I venture to deprecate a too ready or complete acceptance of Wellhausen’s phrase that the Psalter was ‘the hymn-book of the second temple,’ as though it settled the question of the existence of previous Psalters used in the days before the Exile. Unless we are prepared to reject history and tradition alike, David must still hold his place amongst the singers of the Church of God.
There David stands, with harp in hand,
As master of the choir.
The builders of the great vanished cities of the olden time, of its palaces and pyramids; the founders of its monarchies, empires, and republics, pass into oblivion or preserve at best the dull memorial of a name in history; but ‘he who sang the Holy Spirit’s song’ has an audience that never wearies, though the individual listeners pass in solemn and ceaseless order to the silent land. For man is one everywhere and in all ages. The accidents of life vary, but its essence abides. ‘The universal Church of Christ hath given its witness that these psalms are not made for one age, but for all ages; not for one place, but for all places; not for one soul, but for all souls.’[36]
The contention that David’s history is not consistent with the high religious tone of the poems ascribed to him need not disturb us. The man who wrote the Lament for Saul and Jonathan was no mere brigand chief, but one who wore ‘the graces that adorn a king,’ and as a poet and a friend deserves to rank with Milton and with Tennyson.
How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!
Jonathan is slain upon thy high places.
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan:
Very pleasant hast thou been unto me:
Thy love to me was wonderful,
Passing the love of women.
How are the mighty fallen,
And the weapons of war perished!
2 Sam. i. 25-27.
Is there not the same note in David as in Milton, the same lingering on the loved name, the same reiteration of the words of sorrow?
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas?
But, O the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!
Jonathan is shrined as richly and as unfadingly as Edward King or Arthur Hallam, and we may well believe that the man whom Jonathan loved as his own soul loved God from his inmost heart—that the author of the Lament was the singer of the 18th Psalm. And if it be allowed that David wrote that song—‘the Psalm of Clovis and John Wesley’[37]—it is difficult, merely on the ground of personal character, to deny him any psalm in the whole book.
I love Thee, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer;
My God, my strong rock, in Him will I trust;
My shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower.
I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised:
So shall I be saved from mine enemies.
In my distress I called upon the Lord,
And cried unto my God:
He heard my voice out of His temple,
And my cry before Him came into His ears.
Then the earth shook and trembled,
The foundations also of the mountains moved
And were shaken, because He was wroth.
He bowed the heavens also, and came down;
And thick darkness was under His feet.
And He rode upon a cherub, and did fly:
Yea, He flew swiftly upon the wings of the wind.
He sent from on high, He took me;
He drew me out of many waters.
He delivered me from my strong enemy,
And from them that hated me, for they were too mighty for me.
They came upon me in the day of my calamity:
But the Lord was my stay.
He brought me forth also into a large place;
He delivered me, because He delighted in me.
It may be true that the value of the psalms to the Church does not depend upon the settlement, one way or another, of the rival claims of singers before and after the Exile, yet the question is of vastly more than mere literary or historic interest. We lose much if we lose David and the psalmists of the kingdom from ‘the glorious choir’ which sings for ever the praises of Israel’s God and David’s Son. And we are all the poorer if the sources of Christian song are to be sought, not by
Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracles of God,
but by the dull canals of Babylon, where the exiled people wept when they remembered Zion. Even the most extreme of modern English critics tells us that, ‘As mere academical exercises, by not merely unnamed but unknown individuals, the psalms will neither edify the Church nor charm the literary student.’[38] But, after all, we have not yet lost our fellowship with the men of David’s time. The psalms are to us a memorial of the golden days of Israel’s history. They are still to us, as to Francis Davison,
Hymns which in the Hebrew tongue
First were sung
By Israel’s sweet and royal singer.
Or, to put the case in prose:
Both poetry and music existed before David’s time, and poetry had been carried to a high development in such compositions as Exod. xv. and Judges v. But with David a new era of religious poetry commenced. The personal element entered into it. It became the instrument of the soul’s communion with God.[39]
It is this ‘personal element’ which makes the Psalter a living book in every age.
The earlier Hebrew psalmists, even when they wrote in view of the imposing ritual of the temple service with its crowded choir, its thousand white-robed priests sounding their silver trumpets, were never bound by a narrow conventional opinion as to what beseemed the order of public worship. Fettered by rule and rubric as the later Jewish Church was, the psalmist as well as the prophet stands for the right of the individual soul to enter alone into the presence of God.
Speak to Him, thou, for He hears,
And spirit with Spirit can meet.
The personal element is, in some respects, the most precious gift of the Psalter to Christianity. Had the hymns of the mediaeval Church, instead of the Hebrew Psalter, been the pattern for modern hymn-writers, we should have lost the best, the grandest, the most abiding of modern hymns. But the revival of hymn-writing, alike in Germany and in England, was a result of the Protestant Reformation, which set aside ecclesiastical in favour of Biblical precedents; so our hymn-books are inspired by the Psalter, not the Breviary. And this vindication of the rights of the individual soul we owe in the first instance to David, or to the men who wrote the psalms ascribed to him. As Edward Irving has said, with his majestic and unrestrained eloquence:
The force of his character was vast, and the scope of his life was immense. His harp was full-stringed, and every angel of joy and of sorrow swept over the chords as he passed. Such oceans of affection lay within his breast as could not always slumber in their calmness. For the hearts of a hundred men strove and struggled together within the narrow continent of his single heart.[40]
Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, in the elaborate preface to his Holy Year, says:
The pronouns I and my are rarely found in any ancient Church hymn. But in modern hymns the individual often detaches and isolates himself from the body of the faithful, and in a spirit of sentimental selfishness obtrudes his own feelings concerning himself.[41]
This is an entirely superficial criticism, though, in greater or less degree, it has been accepted in many modern hymn-books. It is unsound in principle, and contrary to the highest precedents, ancient and modern. It is the personal element that makes a hymn dear to the congregation of Christ’s flock. It is the fit expression of profound individual experience that gives a hymn its charm for the multitude, who can think poetry, but cannot write it. Perhaps no hymn of the last century has touched more hearts than Newman’s ‘Lead, kindly Light’; yet it was written as a personal prayer, giving expression to a special and temporary experience. Few hymns better illustrate the appropriateness to others of the experience of one. In his later years, Newman declined, almost querulously, to be ‘examined’ as to what he meant exactly by the closing lines of his famous hymn, written in a ‘transient’ state of mind, ‘when home-sick or sea-sick’; but to Mrs. Tait, who inscribed the lines
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile
beneath the portrait of the children taken so suddenly from the desolated Deanery at Carlisle, no lapse of years could ever dull their meaning. The poet often speaks ‘not of himself,’ and his words may be truer as well as richer to the man who repeats than to the man who wrote them. A formal service, performed by professionals or by the technically ‘religious,’ may find suitable expression in general terms; but the Christian congregation
Learns the use of I and me.
The grandest of all hymns, ancient and modern, throb with individual life, whether they soar to heaven on the wings of ecstasy, or bow to earth beneath an overwhelming sense of sinfulness.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And all that is within me bless His holy name.
Have mercy upon me, O God ...
Blot out my transgression.
Create in me a clean heart, O God;
And renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from Thy presence,
And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
The Lord is my Shepherd,
I shall not want.
O happy day that fixed my choice
On Thee, my Saviour and my God!
Abide with me! fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.
Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear,
It is not night if Thou be near.
Thou, O Christ, art all I want,
More than all in Thee I find.
Some of the most sublime passages in ancient chant and modern hymn are those in which the singer turns from the confession of a common sin or the expression of a common gratitude to claim a personal share in it. Even that greatest hymn of the Church’s public worship, the ‘Te Deum Laudamus,’ voices at last the cry of the individual believer—
In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped; let me not be ashamed for ever.
So Charles Wesley, celebrating the first anniversary of his conversion, sings—
He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean,
His blood availed for me.
So Thomas Olivers at the end of his great anthem to the God of Abraham adds his own voice to the voices of the celestial choir—
The whole triumphant host
Give thanks to God most high:
‘Hail, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,’
They ever cry:
Hail, Abraham’s God and mine!
I join the heavenly lays.
The contrast between the liturgical hymn written for others to sing and the hymn of personal experience, the pouring out of the soul before God, is well illustrated in the Psalter; e.g. compare Ps. cxv.—
Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory,
For Thy mercy, and for Thy truth’s sake.
with Ps. cxvi.—
I love the Lord, because He hath heard
My voice and my supplications.
It is in the earlier psalms, though not in them exclusively, that we find the personal element conspicuous, and it is those psalms which have inspired the highest forms of Christian song.
Even in psalms written for the congregation and with direct liturgical intent there is often the introduction of the personal element, as in Ps. cvi.
In the Book of Psalms we have not only the cry of the seeker after God, but the voice of the Church in its common prayer and praise. We find here, too, hymns for the Sabbath day and other festivals, hymns in commemoration of the older saints, national prayers and anthems, which confess the sin of the people or record the mighty works of God, setting the nation’s history to music. Indeed, it is difficult to discover in modern hymn-books any hymn which has not its prototype in the Psalter, though the Incarnation and its manifold revelation brought into Christian life and thought a light that far outshines the brightest stars of the earlier dispensation.
Like other great hymn-books, the Hebrew Psalter grew by stages and gathered into its treasury things new and old. In its final form it is a collection of hymns ancient and modern—a fusion of various hymn-books, in which, as in other collections, there is occasional repetition, free quotation of one writer from another, reminiscences of familiar psalms of earlier psalmists, and evidences of the exercise of a wide editorial discretion in revision and emendation.
We should like to know something of the man who edited the final Collection of Hymns for the use of the people called Jews. If he had written a preface, or even a title-page, he would have solved for us many interesting literary questions—though he would have added little to the spiritual or liturgical value of the Psalter. It is enough for us to know that the psalms as we sing them to-day are the Psalms of which our Lord spoke, when He appealed to them as witnesses with Moses and the prophets to His mission. It was a hymn-book ready for use in the Church of Pentecost, and was adopted in its worship from the beginning.
The influence of the Psalter upon Christian hymnody extends far beyond the use of the rhythmic psalms. The metrical versions, which long supplied the place of hymn-books, gave to the Psalms a double share in Christian worship. Even to-day, when the metrical Psalter has lost its hold upon the Christian congregation, many of our greatest hymns are versions of Hebrew psalms. Nor is the rhythmic version outworn. No complete order of Christian worship is possible which does not include at least some portion of the Psalter in one or other of our three grand English renderings.[42]
The birth of the Lord Jesus was marked, as so many critical periods have been, by a ‘sudden blaze of song.’ The choir of heaven itself sang the ‘Gloria in Excelsis’; Mary chanted the ‘Magnificat’; Zacharias, the ‘Benedictus’; whilst Simeon’s swan-song, the ‘Nunc Dimittis,’ closed the rich though scanty hymnody of that great transition time.
The apostolic Church had no David. The Epistles preserve for us some few lines of early Christian hymns; but it was left to later times to give its sublimest songs to the Christian choir. Yet, if for a moment we think of what might have been, surely St. Paul could have written battle-songs grand as Luther’s; St. Luke, an earlier Christian Year; and St. Peter might have sung with the simple pathos of John Newton. But though other gifts were theirs in abundance, the gift of song was not bestowed upon them; and since the apostolic Church had no poet, the New Testament has no Psalter. Nor, indeed, does it need one; for God’s great poem, His sublimest work, is the Man Christ Jesus.
And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds
More strong than all poetic thought.
But though the primitive Church had no great hymn-book, it had its ephemeral ‘songs and solos,’ its minor poets who helped many an earnest worshipper to draw nigh to God with the voice of a psalm. Indeed, there is some reason to think that the Corinthian Church suffered from too great a number of would-be poets, for there ‘every one’ had ‘a psalm,’ and St. Paul would obviously have liked to issue, as John Wesley actually did, a rule against the giving out of hymns of the preacher’s own composing.
The fragments that remain of the hymns of the apostolic age are few and uncertain. The most distinctly rhythmic is the short creed, which may have been said or sung, found in 1 Tim. iii. 16—
Ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί,
ἐδικαιώθη ἐν πνεύματι,
ὤφθη ἀγγέλοις,
ἐκηρυχθη ἐν ἔθνεσιν,
ἐπιστεύθη ἐν κόσμῳ,
ἀνελήμφθη ἐν δόξῃ.
Manifested in the flesh,
Justified in the spirit,
Seen of angels,
Preached among the nations,
Believed on in the world,
Received up in glory.
In Eph. v. 14 there are three lines which may have been taken from an ancient baptismal hymn.
Ἔγειρε, ὁ καθεύδων,
καὶ ἀνάστα ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν
καὶ ἐπιφαύσει σοι ὁ Χριστός.
Up! O sleeper,
And arise from the dead,
And Christ shall shine on thee!
Westcott and Hort print in metrical form not only these passages, but St. Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, which thus takes its place among the earliest Christian hymns.
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς·
Ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου,
ἐλθάτω ἡ βασιλεία σου,
γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου,
ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς·
Τὸν ἄρτὸν ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον
δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν,
ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφήκαμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν,
ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.[43]
Our Father which art in heaven;
Hallowed Thy name,
Come Thy kingdom,
Be done Thy will
Alike in heaven and on earth;
The bread we need
Give us to-day;
And forgive us our debts,
As we forgive our debtors;
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
It is very possible that the metrical structure of St. Matthew’s version may to some extent explain its variations from St. Luke.
‘The hymns of the Apocalypse show, strange to say, no metrical arrangement of diction,’[44] but their influence upon Christian song has been great. Thus the New Testament makes a most important, though chiefly indirect, contribution to the hymnal of the Church.
St. Paul’s division of religious poetry into ‘psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs’ indicates the character and variety of the songs of the apostolic Church, but gives little information concerning its hymnals. We may assume, however, that whilst the Hebrew Psalter formed the first and greatest section of the songs of the Church, there were also a number of recognized ‘hymns’ and ‘odes,’ to which additions might at any time be made. By the law of spiritual selection these ancient hymns have passed out of the literature of the Church; they perished in the using, and having served their own generation according to the will of God fell on sleep.
The Church universal is indebted to the liturgical Churches for the inclusion in their Books of Common Prayer of the psalms which heralded the dawn of the day of the Son of Man. It is surely a narrow and superficial notion of divine worship which would exclude such canticles from our services as archaic or artificial.
How beautiful, for example, is the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ whether sung daily at eventide, or when the day of life is ended and the Lord now letteth His servant depart in peace! It is in Christian usage what the sounding of ‘The Last Post’ is to the British soldier, marking the close of the common day or sounding the last farewell to a comrade whose warfare is accomplished. A petty and prosaic criticism may regard as unreal such adaptations of ancient hymns, though consecrated by many centuries’ use, but there is as legitimate a poet’s licence in devotion as in literature.
The Old and New Testament alike, though the former more directly than the latter, gave to hymns a place in the worship of God. But the new wine of the gospel, which burst the wine-skins of out-worn ritual, could not be contained even in the golden chalice of the Psalter or the canticles written on its models.
Distinctively Christian hymns which, as we have seen, are occasionally quoted in the Epistles, and are referred to as a recognized part of public and social worship, date from the earliest times. The famous letter of the younger Pliny to Trajan tells how those who were terrified into the denial of their Lord, confessed no worse crime than that of meeting on an appointed day before the dawn to sing antiphonal hymns to Christ as to a god.[45] Judaism had its Messianic psalms, but the hymns which give praise to Christ as
God made Man for man to die
are the glory of the new dispensation. The early defenders of catholic doctrine appealed without hesitation to the fact that ‘whatever psalms and hymns were written by the brethren from the beginning, celebrate Christ the Word of God by asserting His divinity.’[46]
Orthodox and heretic alike—perhaps the heretic especially—sought to win acceptance for his teaching, to fix it in the memory of the congregation by setting it to music. The famous heretic Arius (d. 336) disseminated his doctrine in hymns which are said to have been written in metres associated with the most licentious songs. They were answered by the orthodox hymns of Ambrose. Later heretics, like Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea (d. 390), followed his example; whilst St. Augustine himself wrote an acrostic hymn or psalm against Donatist error. But it was in the beginning as it is in our own day, a man’s doctrinal aberrations were forgotten, at least for the moment, if he could write good hymns. So Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, writing against Nepos, ‘a bishop in Egypt,’ protests that he ‘greatly loves’ Nepos for his skill in psalmody, ‘by which many are still delighted.’[47]
In an often quoted passage in the Confessions, St. Augustine tells how he was affected to tears by the singing of ‘hymns and canticles,’ and records the introduction at Milan of antiphonal singing ‘according to the custom of the Eastern regions,’[48] whilst the people watched in the church ready, if need were, to die with their beloved bishop, St. Ambrose.
Ambrose of Milan and Hilary of Poictiers divide the glory of introducing the singing of hymns into the Church of the West. Hilary compiled a hymn-book—Liber Hymnorum—which is only known to us by a few hymns more or less doubtfully ascribed to him. Ambrose is the first great Latin hymn-writer who still lives in the songs of the sanctuary. His hymns are unrhymed, and, as Trench says, of ‘almost austere simplicity.’
It is as though, building an altar to the living God, he would observe the Levitical precept, and rear it of unhewn stones, upon which no tool had been lifted. The great objects of faith in their simplest expression are felt by him so sufficient to stir all the deepest affections of the heart, that any attempt to dress them up, to array them in moving language, were merely superfluous. The passion is there, but it is latent and represt, a fire burning inwardly, the glow of an austere enthusiasm, which reveals itself indeed, but not to every careless beholder. Nor do we presently fail to observe how truly these poems belonged to their time and to the circumstances under which they were produced—how suitably the faith which was in actual conflict with and was just triumphing over, the powers of this world, found its utterance in hymns such as these, wherein is no softness, perhaps little tenderness; but a rock-like firmness, the old Roman stoicism transmuted and glorified into that nobler Christian courage, which encountered and at length overcame the world.[49]
To St. Ambrose many of the earlier Latin hymns are attributed, and the ‘Te Deum’ is known in the Breviaries as ‘The Song of St. Ambrose and St. Austin,’ according to the tradition that it was composed and sung by them in alternate verses when the latter was baptized at Milan.
The familiar English translation is by an unknown hand. Grand as it is, there are some verses in which a more literal rendering would have been still grander. As the Latin text may not be known by some readers, I give what may be called the received text—
Te Deum laudamus Te Dominum confitemur
Te aeternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur
Tibi omnes Angeli Tibi coeli et universae potestates
Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim incessabili voce proclamant
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth
Pleni sunt coeli et terra majestatis gloriae Tuae
Te gloriosus Apostolorum chorus
Te Prophetarum laudabilis numerus
Te Martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus
Te per orbem terrarum sancta confitetur Ecclesia
Patrem immensae majestatis
Venerandum Tuum verum et unicum Filium
Sanctum quoque Paracletum Spiritum
Tu Rex gloriae Christe
Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius
Tu ad liberandum suscepisti hominem non horruisti Virginis uterum
Tu devicto mortis aculeo aperuisti credentibus regna coelorum
Tu ad dexteram Dei sedes in gloria Patris
Judex crederis esse venturus
Te ergo quaesumus Tuis famulis subveni quos pretioso sanguine redemisti
Aeterna fac cum Sanctis Tuis gloria numerari[50]
Salvum fac populum Tuum Domine et benedic haereditati Tuae
Et rege eos et extolle illos usque in aeternum
Per singulos dies benedicimus Te
Et laudamus nomen Tuum in saeculum et in saeculum saeculi
Dignare Domine die isto sine peccato nos custodire
Miserere nostri Domine miserere nostri
Fiat misericordia Tua Domine super nos quemadmodum speravimus in Te
In Te Domine speravi non confundar in aeternum.
In the Prayer-book version we miss the apostles’ ‘glorious choir,’ the martyrs’ ‘white-robed’ army; and the close would, I think, have been even more impressive as well as more literal had the last lines read—
O Lord, let Thy mercy be showed upon us, even as we have hoped in Thee.
O Lord, in Thee have I hoped; let me not be ashamed for ever.[51]
In the primitive days, before the rise of the mediæval Papacy, before the time of Breviary and Mass-book, the singing of hymns was well established alike in the East and West. In almost every language in which the gospel was preached, hymns were written, and were used not only to aid the devotion of the devout worshipper in the services of the Church, but to arrest and teach the careless wayfarer. Thus Bishop Aldhelm of Sherborne ‘would sit on the bridge, as the people came out from Mass to loiter gossiping on their way home, and sing them sacred lays, teaching them their faith, as it were, in chance verses, and enlisting in God’s service the national love of music and song. It was Alfred, himself a singer, who preserved this tale.’[52]
In later days, when the Romish worship had become more elaborate and formal, it is chiefly in the Breviaries that we find the hymns of the Church, in Latin, of course, and as little understanded of the people as the rest of the service. A large number of these hymns are in existence, and whilst many are disfigured by the idolatrous and often coarse adoration offered to the Virgin Mary and the saints, and others dwell with dreadful particularity upon the details of the Passion, many give worthy and sincere expression to the profoundest experiences of the devout soul. Some of the best and sweetest of these songs, which are often reckoned amongst ‘ancient’ hymns, belong to the degenerate days of the Papacy. They are not only intrinsically precious, but are gracious evidence that the genuine spirit of devotion was found, and the voice of praise and prayer and penitence heard, in quiet places and pure hearts, even in a time of general apostasy. Any detailed reference to pre-Reformation hymns would be outside the limits of this lecture, but the translations of Greek and Latin hymns which are to be found in our modern hymnals will naturally claim attention at a later stage.
In concluding this brief and necessarily superficial preliminary sketch, I may refer to a few of the ancient hymns which are probably little known to the ordinary worshipper.
1. Syriac.—These are chiefly known to us through the great teacher and writer, Ephraem Syrus, who died at Edessa in 373. His hymns were written to counteract the influence of the popular songs of the heretic Bardesanes, and his son Harmonius. Dr. Bonar, Mrs. Charles, Mr. Moorsom, and others have translated several of these Syriac hymns; but they are not likely ever to win such wide acceptance as the Latin or the Greek hymns, though a few are to be found in modern collections. Several of the most touching of St. Ephraem’s hymns are on the death of children, whilst others celebrate the hosannas of the children at the Triumphal Entry. I give a translation, or ‘imitation,’ by Dr. Bonar of a hymn for the Lord’s Day.