The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

Demands my soul, my life, my all”?

Medley’s hymn, “Oh, could I speak the matchless worth,” in not a single phrase directly addresses the Deity. It is a purely subjective expression of delight in the Lord Jesus Christ; and yet how impressive, how delightful, how eminently worthy of the feelings of any great congregation, is this hymn of Christian joy.

The hymn of emotion, therefore, supplies the soul’s demand, for it satisfies the instinct for expression. It clarifies the intellectual basis of the emotion and in so doing intensifies it. The collective singing and mass expression of a common emotion intensify it still further and fit it more fully to affect the will and the character, and so give permanence to the influence of the truth underlying the feeling. Where at the beginning the truth is but dimly perceived and passively accepted, the resulting shallow feeling will be deepened. In this way the hymn becomes a very generator of desirable religious emotion.

The Hymn of Inspiration.

It follows that the hymn may be a means of stimulating interest and enthusiasm in connection with a topic or proposed course of action, and may become the hymn of inspiration. Any line of thought or method of presentation appealing to any emotion or impulse that creates courage, hopefulness, confidence, assurance of success, will be pertinent and desirable. The intenser element of direct exhortation may be added, making a hortative hymn of one of mere inspiration.

The Hymn of Personal Experience.

The hymn of personal experience differs from that of emotional expression in being more subjective, more analytical of the effect produced on the mind by the apprehension of the religious truth. The latter is based on the realization of some objective truth or doctrine, while the hymn of personal experience emphasizes the inner experience in prayer, in specific exercise of faith, in a reaction of the soul to some accomplished task, or to a season of communion with God. The hymn of the blind poet, George Matheson, which has been so widely used,

“O Love that wilt not let me go,

I rest my weary soul on Thee,”

is distinctly a hymn of Christian experience; while Isaac Watts gives poignant expression to the emotions of the Christian, as he contemplates the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, borne to atone for his sins,