Verses to be read by the congregation, or to be sung by the choir or by a soloist, before being sung by the people may be starred. Changes of force, or speed, may be marked p. for soft singing, or f. for loud singing. A passage marked rit. will be retarded, or hurried if marked accel. A repeat sign, bis, after a verse will suggest that a verse may be profitably repeated. Scripture references will suggest passages that can be used to emphasize the sentiment of the hymn, such as Genesis 28:10-13, for the hymn, “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” M before a verse may mark it as a memory verse to be sung with closed hymnal. P may indicate that it is a prayer, to be sung before the long prayer. Dates connected with a hymn will show when it has been sung, and so prevent its unduly frequent repetition from mere force of habit. Every alert-minded minister will have methods and devices of his own that should be recorded in connection with the hymns so treated.
Such a hymnal, individual, practical, wealthy in resources, will be of incalculable value to the wide-awake, aggressive minister, rendering him independent of moods, of dull spirits, of disturbing environments. He needs but open his hymnal, a treasure house of practical suggestions, and his resources, immediately accessible and fully prepared, await his use.
A personal hymnal like this will not be made in a day or a month. Week by week, as hymns are selected, they are fully investigated and studied and their points recorded in the preacher’s copy. His skimming of newspapers and magazines, his daily experiences, his hearing of addresses and sermons; his reading of history and literature, no less than his study of hymnological literature, will pay heavy tribute to such a royal treasury.
The books of hymnic material, pretty largely historical, are fairly numerous, and their help should not be despised, for they offer very useful illustrative matter. Robinson’s Annotations upon Popular Hymns is not as up-to-date nor as scholarly exact as the later Duffield’s English Hymns, or as Nutter and Tillett’s Hymns and Hymn Writers of the Church, but is richer anecdotally and more suggestive of expository comment. Dr. Benson’s still later Studies of Familiar Hymns, Series I and II, will be found very rich in practical material. The present writer’s Practical Hymn Studies[6] offers help most ministers need. The matter found in these and other like collections should be carefully sifted and recorded. A condensation of the selected items, particularly of the longer anecdotes, may be ample for all practical purposes.
Is it necessary to suggest again that all this varied material should be well organized in a loose-leaf blank book small enough to be carried about or, better yet, in a rebound, interleaved hymnal?
In making such a thorough study of as many hymns as he has leisure to analyze, the minister is really editing a hymnal of his own, none the less his own that it is embedded in the larger collection. There are very few preachers who do not have such an inner hymnal made up of the hymns they are in the habit of using; the pity is that it is frequently so small, so poorly selected, so unsymmetrical, so dependent on an unresponsive memory, and so lacking in the materials that would help to make the hymns effective.
Memorizing Hymns.
A large number of hymns should be committed to memory for his own mental enrichment and comfort. It will enlarge his devotional vocabulary, his power of expression of spiritual things—nay more, increase the spontaneity and spirituality of his thinking and feeling, for memory lies nearer the springs of subconscious intuition and impulses than the printed word. A wealth of spiritual thought, of sanctified imagination, of vibrant religious feeling, of apt and expressive phrase and vocabulary, is provided by such a well-stocked memory.
The subconscious mind will furnish the fitting quotation, whether he writes his sermon or speaks ex tempore. In unexpected emergencies, when there is no time to leaf over the hymnal for a verse to be sung, the mind automatically supplies it. In personal work, in cheering the sick, in comforting those who mourn, in inspiring the lagging and discouraged ones, the apt quotation will be exceedingly effective. There are moments in a service, unexpected episodes of an emotional character, climaxes of feeling in a discourse, when a verse of a hymn sung by the congregation will exceed in impressiveness any oratorical outburst; if the minister can trust his memory, he can carry the faltering memories of his people and realize an effect otherwise impossible, not only not losing any momentum, as he would if it were necessary to refer to the hymnal, but indefinitely increasing it. The great hymns of the Church should be made a part of his mental furniture, become a large share of his clerical working capital. He should not be satisfied to have less than a hundred hymns at his mental fingers’ ends for efficient use at a moment’s notice.