I. ITS RELATION TO GOD
Thanksgiving.
The first impulse is a recognition of the blessings and privileges that God bestows upon his creatures in general and upon the writer and the singer in particular. There is consciousness of self in this expression of gratitude. The soul still has its feet upon the ground.
There is nothing unworthy in this recognition of self as the recipient of God’s favor, for the soul honors God in its realization of its dependence on him and in its clear vision of the source of its blessedness. Indeed, God asks it as his due.
Prayer for Future Blessing.
The cynic who declares that gratitude is usually tinctured with the hope of favors to come may not properly represent the soul as it gives thanks to God, but there is a kinship between thanksgiving and prayer that makes it easy and logical to pass from the one to the other. The memory of benefits received inevitably suggests needs yet to be supplied.
In its relation to God the hymn may well be a vehicle for the prayer that envisages the spiritual lack that God alone can supply, and vitalizes the recognition with a desirous urgency that must characterize true prayer.
Here again we find not only divine authority, but encouragement and assurance. Whether the hymn is an individual or a collective prayer matters not. The individual need is also a need common to all petitioners, and the prayer by a congregation is still the individual prayer of its units, only intensified objectively toward God and subjectively toward the singers by its mass expression. This intensification is multiplied not arithmetically but geometrically.
Adoration.
The hymn of adoration lifts the soul into a higher plane, into a contemplation of the glory and majesty of the infinite perfections of its God in which self is forgotten and a consciousness of the infinitude of divine beauty, nobility, and spiritual elevation remains to thrill the soul. It rises on wings of selfless delight and rejoicing in God into a very ecstasy that only song can express.
Whether the soul stands on some high peak of earth and surveys the billowing world that stretches far and wide with its beetling cliffs and rocky headlands, its forests and fields, its meadows and orchards, filled with the overwhelming mystery of life and force obeying implicitly the laws formulated only in inherent nature; or gazes into the great vault of the sky, with the silent majesty of circling stars and developing universes, it will find the anonymous hymn of more than a century ago voicing its deepest awe, its noblest joy:
“Praise the Lord! ye heavens adore him,
Praise him, angels in the height;
Sun and moon rejoice before him,
Praise him, all ye stars of light.”
When the soul on some mountaintop of inner experience and vision glimpses something of the sublimity of the divine character, its justice, its truth, its purity, its invincible power and will guided by infinite knowledge and wisdom, its boundless mercy and forgiving grace flowing from the eternal Source of its all-embracing love, again it can adopt as its very own the solemn notes of Tersteegen, echoed in English by John Wesley:
“Lo! God is here; let us adore
And own how dreadful is this place;
Let all within us feel his power,
And humbly bow before his face.”
This is the highest office of the hymn and should be made its largest use; in no other way can the minds and hearts of Christian worshipers be filled and thrilled with a consciousness of an indwelling God as by hymns of praise, fully comprehended and sung with unflawed sincerity.
The Hymn of Communion.
Beyond the hymn of exultant praise is the hymn of communion with God, where the soul expresses its joy, not simply in the objective glories of the divine nature, but in actual communion, companionship, and conscious unity with God in desire, ideals, and purposes. The soul thinks the thoughts of God, delights in what God approves, walks in his ways with spontaneous gladness, and lives in absolute harmony with his will, not mechanically under a stress of duty, but by urge of the deepest depths of the soul. Objective praise may pull out all the stops of the soul’s enthusiasm and the high imaginings of the spirit, but the hymn of communion may express itself in tenderness and sweetness, in upwelling love and quiet affection. It often is a personal rather than a collective hymn.