The Songs of Deborah illumined the period of the Judges. They have been given a place by competent critics among the noblest lyrics of antiquity. One of these, Heinrich Ewald, speaks of them as so artistic, with all their antique simplicity, that they show to what “refined art poetry early aspired, and what a delicate perception of beauty breathed already beneath its stiff and cumbrous soul.”
The Gospel era dawned in the midst of holy songs, hymned by angels, by holy men and women, and by the Mother of our Lord. From that day on the Church of Jesus has been vocal with psalmody. The primitive Church had her spiritual songs. The saintliness of the early Christian ages survives in the Greek and Latin hymns, and the pleasant task of translating and assembling the choicest of these has occupied many gifted minds.
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was borne forward on waves of sacred song. The sweet voice of the student lad that appealed from the snowy street to the heart of Dame Ursula Cotta, and opened her doors to Martin Luther, was a type of the new time. The new songs of the Reformation and the old psalms renewed in the vernacular and in popular musical forms, prepared the way of multitudes for the revived truths of the Gospel.
Luther’s musical taste and talent impressed itself upon Germany, and thence upon Europe. His free spirit found utterance outside of the Biblical forms of praise in metrical renderings of his own and other religious experiences. Calvin saw the value and authority of popular praises, and encouraged and procured their use in the new organisation of reformed worship of which he was the chief agent. But his more conservative spirit in such matters held to the ancient psalms; and this influenced all Europe outside of Germany. The Church of England used the version of Sternhold and Hopkins, and these will be found appended to the early prayer-books. Rous’s version was substantially that best liked and approved by the Church of Scotland.
The historic “Huguenot Psalter” was the joint work of Clement Marot and Theodore Beza, the former having rendered into French metre the first fifty psalms, and the latter the remaining one hundred. These, set to popular music, caught the ear and heart of the people of all ranks. They ran rapidly throughout French-speaking nations, and became as well known as the “Gospel Hymns” in the palmy days of Moody and Sankey.
The Hebrew Psalter embodies the religious experiences of the chosen people, whose faith, more spiritual than that of any other nation of antiquity, was inbreathed and nurtured by the Holy Spirit. It is not to be supposed that the one hundred and fifty psalms included within the canonical psalter were the only ones that the poets of Israel hymned. But these, in the process of an inspired selection and a devotional development, were the ones that filled and satisfied the religious consciousness of that most spiritual people, and became the vehicle of not only a national but of an international praise.
For the Book of Psalms is a book for all nations. The very divinity of its origin insures its catholic humanity. It has proved its high ethnic qualities by ages of world-wide usage. A cloud of witnessing praises, rising from the Church of every age and name throughout centuries of testing, testifies to its fitness. If the taste of this era—much to the regret of some of us—has largely rejected metrical versions in the vernacular, yet their use, after the manner of the ancients, in chants, still holds and even widens in the Church’s service of praise.
It is significant that the hymns which have fastened themselves upon the hearts of the devout in any one branch of the Church are those which are loved and used by all who honor and love the name of Christ. In all ages the truly devout are one in spiritual sympathy, and therefore the forms of praise which utter the devotions of one heart bear alike to God the aspirations of another. The Calvinistic Toplady, Watts, and Bonar; the Methodist Wesleys; the Anglican Heber, Ken, and Keble; the Romanist Faber and Newman, and all the goodly company of the sons and daughters of Asaph, when uttering the devotions of their souls, speak in one tongue.
There is something divine in the flame of sacred poesy that burns out therefrom the dross of sect. The hymns of the most rigid denominations are rarely sectarian. There is not a presbyter or priest in this whole land, who, with due tact and good faith, could not conduct a mission or service of song as chaplain of a congregation of soldiers or sailors made up of Protestants and Roman Catholics, of all phases of ecclesiastical opinions, without one discordant note and with perfect approval and enjoyment of all. This the writer, as a Government chaplain in two wars and for a quarter of a century in the National Guard, has repeatedly done and seen done.
Such great catholic missions as those of Moody and Sankey, Whittle and Bliss, Torrey and Alexander, which have appealed to all classes, conditions, and creeds, and have made their services so largely a service of song, have been and remain impressive witnesses of the substantial unity of the devout when they engage in the worship of praise.