For to my soul ’tis hell to be
But for one moment without[71] Thee.
The special charm of Ken’s hymns lies in their simplicity and suitability. In the plainest words he asks for just what every Christian feels that he needs, morning and evening, his whole life through. They are the first great English hymns, and are worthy to lead the devotions of the Church.
Ken’s influence upon later poets has been great. Charles Wesley, Keble, and Christopher Wordsworth were, to some extent, inspired by his hymns on the Festivals, whilst Newman desired to add Ken to the Calendar of English saints, and actually prepared a service for use on ‘Ken’s day.’[72]
Archbishop Alexander, himself a poet, preaching in Wells Cathedral at the festival commemorative of the bicentenary of Ken’s consecration, said—
Outside the Psalter, no lines have ever been so familiar to English Christians as Ken’s Morning and Evening Hymn. Other hymns have been more mystical, more impassioned, more imaginative—have perhaps contained profounder thoughts in their depth, have certainly exhibited richer colouring upon their surface. But none are so suitable to the homely pathos and majesty of the English Liturgy; none are so adapted to the character which the English Church has aimed at forming, the sweet reserve, the quiet thoroughness, the penitence which is continuous without being unhopeful. They are lines which the child may repeat without the painful sense that they are beyond him, and the man without the contemptuous sense that they are below him. They appeal to the man in the child, and the child in the man. They are at once a form of devotion, a rule of life, a breath of prayer, a sigh of aspiration. They are the utterances of a heart which had no contempt for earth, but which is at home among the angels. When we listen to them, or repeat them with congenial spirit, in whatever climate we may be, the roses of the English dawn and the gold of the English sunset are in our sky.[73]
Montgomery wrote of Ken’s three hymns that, ‘had he endowed three hospitals, he might have been less a benefactor to posterity.’[74] The importance of his hymns as setting a standard of simplicity and directness can hardly be overstated. Yet it is curious how slowly they won general acceptance. They were not printed in the supplement to the Book of Common Prayer till 1801, and though John Wesley included them in his Psalms and Hymns, 1738, he omitted them from his later publications and from his hymn-book. Dean Plumptre, however, says that both the hymns had appeared in some of the earlier collections of hymns for congregational use by English clergymen between 1750 and 1760. The three hymns are given in the Moravian Hymn-book of 1754.
After Ken the seventeenth century had no sweeter hymn-writer than John Austin (1613-69), who left St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1640, on becoming a Romanist. He wrote two volumes of Devotions in the Ancient Way of Offices. These were ‘a family piece among Catholics,’ and were much used by devout Protestants. The nonjuring Bishop Hickes edited them for Protestant use, and John Wesley included seven of the hymns in his Charlestown hymn-book—a larger number than by any other author except Watts. Austin did not complete his work. ‘Death, for which he had fitted his soul by a well-spent life, interrupted his labours.... When he perceived death immediately seizing its prey, he gave up the ghost with these remarkable words: ... “Now, heartily for heaven, through Jesus Christ!”’[75]
Austin’s hymns are used chiefly outside his own communion,[76] though Romanism has no English hymn-writer to compare with him till the time of Faber. In the Arundel Hymns his verses are attributed to W. Austin (a Protestant contemporary). The following hymn illustrates the similarity of Austin and Faber’s writing. Few readers would guess that one of these four verses was written two centuries after the others.