“Alas! and did my Saviour bleed?
And did my Sovereign die?
Would he devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I!”
The hymn of personal experience has been rather heatedly objected to by critics like Bishop Wordsworth. In some cases these “I and My” hymns have been rewritten to meet the objection.
These critics who find their own “ego” offended by the apparent emphasis of the hymn writer’s “ego” forget some rather important factors in the situation.
1. It would have been rather presumptuous on the part of the writer to speak for the collective “We” and “Us” who presumably were to sing his verses.
2. As a spontaneous expression of personal experience, the hymn had to be individualistic. Not often, if ever, are particular religious experiences common to a body of believers at a given moment.
3. The high peaks of religious experience which are most valuable as furnishing ideals and stimulus to the members of a singing congregation can be reached only by individuals, not by a mass of people. To restrict the expression of religious experience to that common to all Christians, would be to omit the most inspiring and helpful hymns, and keep our song service at a dead level of inferior value.
4. It must not be forgotten that it is not the congregation that sings; it is its individual units! The congregation is an abstraction, a merely mental conception. The singing of each member is fundamentally as purely individual as if he were absolutely alone! Hence the “I and My” hymn is entirely fitting. Each sings what is, or ought to be, his own individual experience. Indeed, he makes his best contribution to the collective effect if he is intensely individualistic in his singing.