The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

II. PERSONAL ADVANTAGES OF SUCH STUDY OF HYMNS

The first line of the study of hymns should be contributory to his own personal development.

Literary Pleasure.

A great delight awaits the minister of cultivated taste and sensibility, for there are not only ten really good hymns, as a famous literary doctor[1] once insisted, but hundreds of them, whose distinction and beauty of phraseology, whose fresh and orderly development of ideas, and whose elevation and glory of thought give unfailing literary pleasure. How can one read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Still, still with Thee,” that best of American morning hymns, without exquisite delight?

“Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh,

When the bird waketh, and the shadows flee:

Fairer than morning, lovelier than daylight,

Dawns the sweet consciousness, I am with Thee.”

Prominent among these literary hymns will be that hymn of majestic praise by Sir Robert Grant:

“Oh, worship the King, all-glorious above,

Oh, gratefully sing his power and his love;

Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of days,

Pavilioned in splendor, and girded with praise.

Oh, tell of his might, oh, sing of his grace,

Whose robe is the light, whose canopy space:

His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,

And dark is his path on the wings of the storm.”

Here are majesty and beauty of thought, flawless phraseology, and musical numbers. No editor has found excuse to alter or amend it.

Even Isaac Watts, who boasted his freedom from literary trammels and who illustrated that freedom all too often and too perversely, proved his latent poetic powers in the noble poetry of

“Our God, our Help in ages past,

Our Hope for years to come,

Our shelter from the stormy blast,

And our eternal home.”

That the literary quality of Adelaide A. Procter’s hymn, “My God, I thank Thee who hast made,” is high no one would deny:

“My God, I thank Thee, who hast made

The earth so bright,

So full of splendor and of joy,

Beauty and light;

So many glorious things are here,

Noble and right.”

The minor chord in the third verse but renders more poignant the high glory of her praise:

“I thank Thee more that all our joy

Is touched with pain;

That shadows fall on brightest hours,

That thorns remain;

So that earth’s bliss may be our guide,

And not our chain.”

There is a mine of inestimable literary wealth awaiting the search of discriminating taste.[2]

Literary Culture.

But many ministers of limited native susceptibility to literary and poetic beauty, and perhaps of none too efficient literary opportunities, will not be able at once to enter into the delight of the literary qualities of hymns. All the more will it be important for them to study their hymnal for the sake of its opportunity for deepening their capacity for enjoying literary values. Their imaginations need to be stimulated. Their response to the charm of musical phrases, to the clearness and lucidity of the thought expressed, to the fitness of the unexpected and pleasing metaphors used, to the nice selection of the words employed to weave a garb of beauty for the message the hymn is intended to convey, can be and must be developed, if not only the proper appreciation of the hymns but also their highest efficiency as preachers are to be secured.

Few preachers realize the importance of this literary culture; yet, apart from his deity, Jesus Christ was the greatest literary man the race has developed. His parables, his similes, his aptness of phrase, his wit, his clearness of style, despite the great topics on which he discoursed, cannot be paralleled in any literature. The literary value of the Gospels is one of the reasons of their agelong and race-wide appeal.

The effort of the preacher to sensitize his mind and spirit, in order to appreciate what his hymnal offers, will give him more of the extraordinary winsomeness of his Master’s style.

While not all hymns are distinctly literary in style and vocabulary, most of them have some poetical and imaginative qualities, and a great many of them have marked literary value. A careful canvass of these values will develop literary discrimination and taste. Hymns like Keble’s “Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear” and Heber’s “Brightest and best of the sons of the morning” must stimulate genuine literary appreciation. To segregate carefully in his mind the genuinely literary hymns—those that are full of imagination, symmetrical in structure, gracious in phraseology—will be a literary exercise of inestimable value.

Development of Emotional Nature.

But the finest literary discrimination and the highest literary delight cannot be secured without an emotional responsiveness that ministers do not always bring to their reading of hymns. But this emotion must not simply be poetic, it must be spiritual, based on an actualization of the profound spiritual truths expressed in the hymns.

The most common fault among ministers is an aridity of mind, a dryness of feeling, a habit of abstract, academic thinking which have no response to the emotional values in the doctrines they preach. It is the secret of many an empty church, of many a barren pastorate.

To some men who lack emotional and poetic insight, the hymnbook may appear dry and uninteresting. It certainly is unappealing to the unspiritual man, no matter how poetical he may be, and this will account for the occasional attack upon the hymns of the Christian Church as being without poetical power or merit. But the Christian minister, who deals with spiritual things, for whom the emotions of the human heart are a great opportunity, ought to find in the study of his hymnbook a great deepening of emotional intuition.

Here he comes in touch with the saints of the Church who have risen to the greatest heights of spiritual insight, and who have sung because the feelings within them were so impelling that they could not do otherwise than sing. His own deficient emotion and his own dull insight into spiritual truth are here inspired and stimulated until he too stands upon the mountaintop. For his own spiritual edification, therefore, there is nothing, outside the Bible, so likely to be of spiritual help as the hymnbook. When he is discouraged, its hymns of inspiration and encouragement cannot but lift the cloud. When his heart is dull, and his vision of his Lord obscured, such hymns as “Jesus, I love Thy charming name,” by Philip Doddridge,

“Jesus, these eyes have never seen

That radiant form of Thine,”

by our own Ray Palmer, or

“Jesus, the very thought of Thee

With sweetness fills my breast,”

by that unknown saintly abbess of the Middle Ages, surely will once more set his spiritual pulses in motion and thrill him with the vitalizing vision of his Lord.

It is with this emotional attitude alone that a minister should study his hymns; otherwise, he will fail in realizing any of their values. To come to them coldly dissecting them with knife and scalpel is to miss their beauty, their spiritual appeal. The minister who prays over his sermon would do well to pray with equal fervency over the hymns he studies and selects. If he vitalizes them for himself, that fresh vision of their meaning will reach the congregation directly and indirectly.