The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

THE PLACE AND IMPORTANCE OF THE HYMN

The Church of God has been and is a singing church. This was true in the antediluvian centuries, which was its seminal period, for some of its canticles have survived. In its pupal stage, the Old Testament church life developed both the form and the content of the future hymnody.

To the solo forms of the preceding period, the Mosaic social and religious organization now adds both the choral and the congregational forms of vocal worship. To the fear and awe of previous generations, the Christian development of the Church of God has added the intimate phases of adoration, of gratitude, of love, based on consciousness of communion with the Triune Deity.

Outside of the Israelitish Church and its Christian consummation, there has been little or no song in religious worship. The heathen deities were honored only with rude vocal and instrumental noises made by temple singers and players. It is the Church of God under all dispensations which was a singing church. To this day the voice of sacred song is practically absent from heathen temple.

The Impulse to Sing Is Constitutional in Man.

In the beginning, song was a spontaneous expression of feeling, being based on man’s original constitution as fully as breathing or speaking. Its exercise did not rise high enough in the consciousness of men, nor so conspicuously affect the current of events, that account should be made of it in the sketchy outlines of the early history of the race. None the less do we hear unrelated echoes from Lamech and Jubal,[1] and from Laban’s complaint that Jacob gave him no opportunity to bid farewell “with songs, with tabret, and with harp.”[2] During the great Exodus, these echoes multiply and become more articulate at the Red Sea,[3] at the digging of the well at Beer,[4] about the walls of Jericho,[5] Deborah,[6] Barak,[7] and Hannah,[8] and the school of the prophets,[9] developing a grand crescendo which culminates in the full-voiced chorus and orchestra of the times of David and Solomon.[10] Undoubtedly all these were surviving manifestations of the unbroken tide of social and religious song that flowed on through the ages. The Hebrew church carried on the model constructed by the organizing instinct of Samuel and the musical and literary genius of David, through the succeeding ages, and passed on the devotional impulse to the Christian Church.

Biblical Authority for the Singing of Hymns.

If any authority for the use of hymns were needed beyond the unfailing urge of a sanctified soul to find expression for its spiritual experiences and to persuade other souls to seek a like blessed privilege, there would be ample provision in the development of religious song in the Jewish church, in the participation of Jesus in such a song at so high a peak of religious solemnity as the institution of “The Lord’s Supper,”[11] in the use of song by the Apostles in their private meetings and in unusual personal experiences from the very beginning,[12] in the exhortations of Paul[13] and James,[14] and in the choral scenes of the great Apocalypse.[15]

The Use of Hymns in the Development of the Christian Church.

But the use God has made of song through the succeeding centuries of the development of the Christian Church, is an even more striking indication of the high importance placed upon sacred song by the divine mind.

The results of the thoughtful use of song, both in ancient times and the recent past, abundantly illustrate its value and are genuine laboratory proof of its power in deepening the spirituality of individuals, of communities, and even of nations. The hymns of Huss and of Luther, the psalmody of Calvin and of Knox, the preparatory effect of the hymns of Watts for the great Second Reformation in England and its intensification by the hymns of the Wesleys, the joyous singing of rudely fashioned psalms and the newly introduced hymns in the Great Awakening in New England, the great evangelistic movement in America and in England with its enthusiastic singing of unpretentious Gospel songs—all establish on unquestionably scientific basis the spiritual value of sacred song.

Cultural Value of Hymns.

Compare the number of people in any given city or community who read poetry in any of its forms with the number of church attendants who read, even when they do not sing, from three to eight hymns every Lord’s Day. In literary influence, unconsciously absorbed, this wide use of hymns is vastly more effective upon the public at large than the more intensive and conscious influence of distinctly literary verse.

Millions of homes in Great Britain and America have copies of the Bible and of some hymnbook, while few of them have books of poetry. Phrases from hymns and psalms are a large part of the religious vocabulary of millions. They are quoted not only in sermons, but in essays and general writings and in the public press, perhaps more generally than are poems.

They have been appreciated by the greatest minds, who found them to be of great comfort and even delight, including such men as Benjamin Franklin (who first issued Watts’ hymns in America), George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and William Ewart Gladstone. They deeply interested the man, Matthew Arnold, although the literary critic, Matthew Arnold, had no use for them.

Spiritual Value of Hymns.

Hymns touch and influence the most intimate life of men, the moral and spiritual, and are always influential for good. They concentrate the comforting truths of the Gospel, make them rememberable; what is even more important, they add the emotional vitality to those truths that make them real and actual.

To leave out the hymns from a single service might be an interesting experiment; but omit them permanently, as was the former custom among the Friends, and note how arid and flat the service becomes.

To some, the hymnbook is simply the Bible in another form, bringing its doctrines, its ideals, its hopes, its promises, its comforts, and its spiritual inspirations in a more apprehensible form. Having passed through the crucible of the actual personal experience of the writers of the hymns, they are more concrete, more appealing, more actual.

The Value of Singing Hymns Too Often Overlooked.

Since the hymn has so high a spiritual value, it is all the more distressing that its possibilities of spiritual helpfulness are so generally overlooked and ignored by our ministers and their people. Even where it seems to be distinctly cultivated and emphasized, it is often the merely physiological effects that are sought. In other apparently earnest endeavors to develop its value, there is the aridity of merely artistic and literary emphasis, or the formal liturgical aspect that is stressed!

There is an absence of clear comprehension of what the hymns are intended to accomplish, of their meaning, of the emotions they are supposed to express, and of the methods to be used to vitalize them and to make them effective. They are used mechanically, in deference to tradition and good ecclesiastical form. Most ministers select hymns to fit the themes of their discourses, fitness depending solely on logical relations.

The spiritual life of the churches is not only the poorer and the shallower because of this loss of the quickening influence of the hymn, but this mechanical attitude is carried over to the other exercises of the divine service. The preacher who sings mechanically will pray mechanically, preach mechanically.

The Need of Emphasis on Efficient Use of Hymns.

The actual fact is that in the hymn the preacher has a most valuable factor in making his service spiritually effective. Even as a perfunctory exercise it has at least a social value; but if its emotional and spiritual possibilities are fully developed and exploited, it becomes one of the most impressive and thrilling means of securing genuinely religious results among his people. It is a tragedy that so many clergymen have such dull and unattractive services when through a proper use of hymns they might be made thrillingly interesting. Professor H. M. Poteat, of Wake Forest College, does not use too severe language in his Practical Hymnology when he says, “As a result of inexcusable ignorance, carelessness, and laziness, the singing of hymns, in all too many churches, instead of being an act of worship, has degenerated into a mere incident of the service, holding its place solely because of immemorial custom.”

It is the purpose of this treatise at least to prevent the ignorance Professor Poteat complains of so bitterly. The other difficulties can be removed only “by fasting and prayer.”