Take Doddridge’s hymn, “Ye servants of the Lord”: the first stanza makes the general appeal for service; the second emphasizes the need of readiness for that service; the third, attention to the Lord’s commands; the fourth exclaims over the joy and the reward of service; the fifth, the honors that Christ shall heap on his servant. That makes a fine outline for a sermon!
The homiletical hymn was often dry because the sermon was dry. They were both too frequently “proses” in a sense different from the medieval use of the word.
The Hymn of Propaganda.
The hymn of propaganda calls for consideration. It is a didactic hymn, of course, but its purpose is not to express the fundamental doctrines of the faith, but to urge some subordinate article of it out of all proportion to its intrinsic importance, or to win adherents for some new religious ideas. There are hymns of Perfectionism, of Holiness, of Unity, of Premillenialism, of Second Adventism, of Christian Science, of phases of Theosophy, that fall within this category.
The spiritual value of some of these is not to be underrated, but each hymn must be judged on its own merits. The danger of exaggeration is the chief point calling for circumspection. Hymns of propaganda criticizing or antagonizing the Christian Church must be rejected.
Hymns of the Social Gospel.
A few years ago, when the sociological aspect of Christianity won wide attention, it was seriously proposed to rewrite the whole hymnbook and inject the “Social Gospel.” A few desirable hymns on Brotherhood were written which fill out a previously somewhat neglected rubric. Brotherhood is not a discovery of the twentieth century, but has been an integral part of Christianity from the beginning and was never so fully exemplified as at that period.
In so far as the “Social Gospel” is simply the application of the gospel of Christ to old wrongs that yet need to be righted, like slavery, and war, and alcoholism, or to new social complexes in our modern economic life where there is injustice, or where there is need of help for body, mind, or soul, hymns may prove desirable helps. They will, however, be written spontaneously, not as propaganda, and will be used freely in so far as there is practical and emotional justification for them. The onward progress of the Kingdom in these unfinished tasks will most likely depend on the stimulation of the great motives that have given victory in the past. It is the appeal to these motives that gives vitality to such a hymn as “Where cross the crowded ways of life,” by Frank Mason North.
Special Hymns.
It is a little difficult to supply hymns for subordinate topics which do not stir the spiritual pulses, and hence the poorest hymns in our hymnbooks are found in these divisions. The doctrines of Human Depravity, Regeneration, Sanctification, the State of the Impenitent Dead, do not lend themselves to attractive hymnic expression.