The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

Its Character as a Transcript of Life.

In so far as a hymn is a transcript of a genuine conviction, intensified by emotion, or of a profound experience, it is literature. There have gone into it vision, feeling, imagination, sincerity, intimate experience—an appropriation of the influences life offers a soul that gazes upon it with wide-open eyes. It is not the measure or the rhyme that makes literature of a hymn. A bald formulation in metrical form of doctrines dissected by metaphysical processes may be called a hymn by courtesy, but it is not literature any more than would be a textbook on mathematics.

But a hymn in which the hurried pulse and the throbbing heartbeat of deep human feeling can be felt is genuine literature, a revelation of human personality and of the collective life of which it is representative. It is the story of the experience of an exploring soul seeking knowledge of the deeper spiritual relations with God and his Kingdom.[1]

Its Wide Distribution.

The importance of the hymn as literature is further attested by the response to it of the many generations which have made it the vehicle of their religious life. Dr. Reeves calls attention to the wide distribution of hymnbooks; they have come from the printing press by the multiplied millions during the last four hundred years. Three millions of the Methodist Hymnal have been broadcast over the United States, sixty million Hymns Ancient and Modern over the British Empire. Hundreds of other contemporary hymnals, both official and unofficial, aggregate even more millions. If we add collections of Gospel Songs, we get many millions more. No other form of literature has had so wide a distribution. A single hymnal has had more active readers than all the poetry in the world, ancient and modern.[2] To dispose of an edition of one hundred thousand volumes of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the standard collection of the poems of the ages approved by critics, would take a score of years. Moreover, they would go largely into libraries, private and public, for occasional reference.

Its Acceptance Through Many Generations.

But wideness of distribution is no final criterion of literary quality, else our newspapers might lay an earnest claim to literary standing. But these hymnals do not severally represent individual writers, as do most of the books of poetry; they contain a common body of hymns representing the major portion of all of them. That selection of hymns, fundamental to all of them, has been culled out from the great mass of sacred lyrics written through many centuries, by the consensus of different generations, of different backgrounds, of different grades of social and literary culture, of different peoples and even races, and accepted as the most complete expression of the fundamental Christian life of them all. If that unanimity of responsiveness and practical endorsement by continued use does not confer the accolade of literature upon that body of hymns, the accepted definition of literature is faulty and inadequate.

Its Profound Influence.

No other verses have been read so often. They have not only shaped the religious thought and experience of vast peoples and developed their character, but have affected their general modes of thought and forms of expression and influenced their secular literature. Without their rugged, ax-hewn version of the Psalms, would the Scotch have become the stern, dour, conscience-driven people the world has learned to know and value? Without the vigorous “spirituals” and the lively rhythms of its gospel songs, would the American church life have developed the freedom from ecclesiastical tradition and formalism, and the fearless aggressiveness that has lighted the beacons of salvation in every land? The hymn has been the expression of life, and in turn has become the wellspring of life.

Whatever of culture and refinement other forms of literature have brought has directly touched only a small minority, and but indirectly the great mass of civilized peoples; but the hymn has had a direct influence on the life and character of the mass of the people, and has appealed to their instincts and imaginations and shaped their ideals in the most immediate and striking way. Where one person has been refined and enriched in mind by the poetry of Milton, or Wordsworth, or Tennyson, a thousand have been comforted, inspired, and transformed by Sternhold and Hopkins, Watts, or Wesley.