It is at once necessary and almost superfluous to say that I know how much has been left unsaid, how many names there are deserving mention, how many hymns that might be referred to, but in such a fruitful land the gleanings are richer than the vintage of former years.
V
Nineteenth-century Hymns
II.—Free Church Hymns
The composing of hymns is one of the surest signs of spiritual life, and the use of hymns is a wonderful witness of Christian unity; and the Church of England has been fertile during the last half-century in the production of hymns which are used by all English Christians, whilst the confederate Churches of the same period can hardly point to any additions made by them to the hymns of the Christian world.[190]
As we have seen, the honours of hymn-writing during the period referred to are undoubtedly with the Anglicans, though Heber and Keble belong to an earlier time. But this sweeping assertion of Mr. Llewellyn Davis ought to have been impossible if he had remembered Horatius Bonar, certainly one of the greatest English hymn-writers. There are also George Rawson, T. T. Lynch, T. H. Gill, George Matheson, and, every Methodist would add, William M. Bunting.
It must be remembered also that the Free Churches were already rich in hymns when the nineteenth century dawned, whilst the Tractarians had to make, translate, or borrow from the Nonconformists, hymns for their special needs. Methodism had an ample supply of hymns for such Church festivals as it desired, and the observance of festivals and other ecclesiastical occasions was only gradually adopted in the older Nonconforming Churches. When at length they felt the need for such hymns as form the characteristic portions of Anglican hymnody they were already to hand; and after the first natural prejudice against everything that savoured of the ritualistic movement had passed away, they found hymns intended to be the exclusive property of the Anglicans admirably suited to their own newly awakened Church consciousness. There is something delightful and even amusing in the readiness with which such hymns as ‘The Church’s one Foundation’ and ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’ have been adopted by all the denominations. The Baptist and the Bible Christian sing with as simple confidence as the highest of Anglicans:
Like a mighty army
Moves the Church of God;
Brothers, we are treading
Where the saints have trod;