To some, the hymnbook is simply the Bible in another form, bringing its doctrines, its ideals, its hopes, its promises, its comforts, and its spiritual inspirations in a more apprehensible form. Having passed through the crucible of the actual personal experience of the writers of the hymns, they are more concrete, more appealing, more actual.
The Value of Singing Hymns Too Often Overlooked.
Since the hymn has so high a spiritual value, it is all the more distressing that its possibilities of spiritual helpfulness are so generally overlooked and ignored by our ministers and their people. Even where it seems to be distinctly cultivated and emphasized, it is often the merely physiological effects that are sought. In other apparently earnest endeavors to develop its value, there is the aridity of merely artistic and literary emphasis, or the formal liturgical aspect that is stressed!
There is an absence of clear comprehension of what the hymns are intended to accomplish, of their meaning, of the emotions they are supposed to express, and of the methods to be used to vitalize them and to make them effective. They are used mechanically, in deference to tradition and good ecclesiastical form. Most ministers select hymns to fit the themes of their discourses, fitness depending solely on logical relations.
The spiritual life of the churches is not only the poorer and the shallower because of this loss of the quickening influence of the hymn, but this mechanical attitude is carried over to the other exercises of the divine service. The preacher who sings mechanically will pray mechanically, preach mechanically.
The Need of Emphasis on Efficient Use of Hymns.
The actual fact is that in the hymn the preacher has a most valuable factor in making his service spiritually effective. Even as a perfunctory exercise it has at least a social value; but if its emotional and spiritual possibilities are fully developed and exploited, it becomes one of the most impressive and thrilling means of securing genuinely religious results among his people. It is a tragedy that so many clergymen have such dull and unattractive services when through a proper use of hymns they might be made thrillingly interesting. Professor H. M. Poteat, of Wake Forest College, does not use too severe language in his Practical Hymnology when he says, “As a result of inexcusable ignorance, carelessness, and laziness, the singing of hymns, in all too many churches, instead of being an act of worship, has degenerated into a mere incident of the service, holding its place solely because of immemorial custom.”
It is the purpose of this treatise at least to prevent the ignorance Professor Poteat complains of so bitterly. The other difficulties can be removed only “by fasting and prayer.”