The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

Hymns Create a Religious Atmosphere.

The use of hymns creates an atmosphere of religious interest and feeling that is realized not only by the believers in the congregation, but by the unregenerate as well. They may not enter fully into the spirit of the exercises, but an intellectual interest is awakened by the singing that may rise into spiritual interest and into an approach to the spiritual life. Rev. George F. Pentecost, famous in his day as a preacher and as a very successful evangelist, recognized the aggressive and practical value of hymn-singing: “I am profoundly sure that among the divinely ordained instrumentalities for the conversion and sanctification of the soul, God has not given a greater, besides the preaching of the Gospel, than the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. I have known a hymn to do God’s work in a soul when every other instrumentality has failed—I have seen vast audiences melted and swayed by a simple hymn when they have been unmoved by a powerful presentation of the Gospel from the pulpit.”

Hymns in the Home.

No small practical value in Christian hymns is found in their use in family life where young and old sing them together and so sanctify and spiritualize the household atmosphere. The storing of the memories of the children with the leading hymns of the church is no small factor in their Christian nurture. The older members of the family also will be stimulated spiritually, finding in the memorized hymns strength and solace while they bear the heat and burden of the day. We have lost the spiritual atmosphere in many of our Christian homes, not only by the neglect of the family altar, but also by the neglect of the singing and memorizing of the hymns and tunes of the church.

One of the chief influences in the preparation of Ira D. Sankey for his great life-work was the singing of hymns as the family gathered around the great log-fire in the homestead. He not only familiarized himself with the old hymns and tunes and popular sacred songs, but he was impressed by their spirit and by their adaptation to the needs of the human soul.

Hymns in Personal Work.

The use of hymns in personal work, in the visitation of the sick, in improvised religious gatherings in private homes, has been largely abandoned, much to the loss of the churches. When D. L. Moody was trying out Ira D. Sankey during the latter’s pregnant first visit to Chicago, his singing to the sick and to the spiritually needy ones they called upon was a notable item in the practical test.

Prof. Waldo S. Pratt, of the Hartford Theological Seminary, whose most valuable book has been quoted in these pages again and again, sums up the results of an intelligent and devout use of hymns most admirably: “Hymn-singing may surely be called successful when it affords an avenue for true approach to God in earnest and noble worship; when it exerts a wholesome and uplifting reflex influence on those who engage in it, establishing them in the truth and quickening their spirituality; and when it creates a diffused atmosphere of high religious sympathy and vigorous consecration, so that even unbelievers are affected and constrained by it.”[5]

But if these purposes of the singing of hymns are to be realized and their values exploited, they must be properly employed. They must be made vital and their messages brought home to the hearts of the people. There should be no listless, merely formal singing of noble Christian hymns. There is unwitting sacrilege in doing that. The truth of God, the high experiences of his saints, are rendered unreal and lose their appeal—they become stale.

There are multiplied millions of true believers who duplicate the unhappy experience of a prominent London preacher who declared that he did not exactly disbelieve the cardinal doctrines of Christianity, but that they had become unreal to him. They were only abstractions, playthings of his logical faculties, husks from which the living kernel had fallen, which left his soul hungry. How could a minister by the discussion of what seemed to him unrealities inspire and spiritualize his hearers? How can any minister to whom the hymns in his hymnal are dry and abstract rhymes about vague and uninteresting platitudes at best, be able to make his song service a vital contribution to the spiritual progress of his people? If the hymns stir him, he can easily make them stir the people.