The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

CHAPTER V

[1]“But the emotional life, strongest, no doubt, in youth, remains a lifelong element of personality and especially of the religious personality. Feeling is not merely an integral part of religious experience, it is central, vital, its inmost core. William James speaks of it as the deeper source of religion, and says that ‘philosophical and theological formulas come below it in importance. It is the dynamic factor in the religious life. When it is absent, religion degenerates into mere formalism or barren intellectualism.’” (Gillman, in The Evolution of the English Hymn.)

[2]Rev. Louis F. Benson, D.D., in The Hymnody of the Christian Church. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1927.) Used by permission.

CHAPTER VII

[1]Dr. Harris says of his discovery, “The manuscript had been lying with a heap of other stray leaves of manuscript on the shelves of my library without awakening any suspicion that it contained a lost hymnbook of the early Church of the apostolic times, or at the very latest of the sub-apostolic times.”

CHAPTER VIII

[1]There is frequent lament that in the translations of Greek, Latin, and German hymns into English much of the original beauty is lost. But the converse is also true: that such translators as Neale, Brownlie, and Palmer have taken the uncut diamonds of the Greek and Latin Fathers and so transformed them by their lapidarian skill that the world-wide Christian Church is rejoicing in their beauty.

[2]The Te Deum has only slight claims to Greek origin and is postponed to a later chapter.

[3]In like manner the rationalists of the age of Frederick the Great of Prussia sought to prevent the use of the Lutheran hymns; the Arians in the pre-Wesleyan times contended for the psalm versions without doxologies recognizing the Trinity; in our own day, extreme Modernists belittle Christian hymns as dogmatic and unpoetical and urge the use of sociological hymns.

[4]This transfer of the song to clerical singers soon had its inevitable result. Jerome begins to be apprehensive that the form of singing would come to have too exclusive consideration. He complained that those who led the song, like comedians, “smoothed their throats with soft drinks in order to render their melodies more impressive, and that the heart alone can properly make melody to God.“