These hymns have no wings; they are unemotional and without appeal to the imagination. Yet the selectors of hymns who have a purely homiletical point of view demand that a hymnal shall supply appropriate lyrics to fit subjects and occasions that have no lyrical possibilities. If the demands of symmetrical completeness in a hymnal, or of close fitness of theme in a service, must be met, then one must be content with prosaic verses lacking in poetic charm or emotional inspiration.
The Great Hymnic Themes.
There are certain doctrines, certain experiences, that appeal so strongly to Christian hearts that the impulse to write and sing about them far exceeds that growing out of less general, less striking themes. There may be a great difference in the favorite themes of different persons, under different circumstances, in different generations. The Latin medieval hymnists greatly stressed the suffering Christ; Watts sang of the majesty and glory of God and of his reign in the moral and spiritual world, and his hymns are found largely in the purely worshipful rubrics of our hymnals; Charles Wesley wrote in the midst of a great revival, and his hymns emphasize the plan of salvation and voice the personal experiences of the saved. In our own day the ideas of service, of public welfare, of works of philanthropy and mercy, and of social justice find expression.
The supreme theme, of course, is Christ. Whatever phases of Christian doctrine or experience may seem to absorb the mind of any generation, still the songs cluster about the person of Jesus Christ. As Dr. Austin Phelps eloquently insists, “here the rapture of holy song culminates on earth, as it does in heaven. Here every grace of religious character, and every experience of a devout life, has found freedom to express itself in hymns of worship. Where can another such body of sacred poetry be found in any language, as that which comprises the Christology of the songs of the Church?”
This hymnody is all the more appealing in that it sings a living and not a dead Christ, a present personality, near and dear, and not merely a historical character. The singer does not strain his power of thought and elevation of expression to hymn adequately the perfections of an infinite God, but spontaneously rejoices in a Friend who “sticketh closer than a brother”!
Chapter VI
THE GOSPEL HYMN
If this were a purely scholastic and literary treatise on the hymnody of the Church, the subject of this chapter might be ignored; but this discussion purports to be practical, and the Gospel hymn is too large a factor in the life and work of our churches to be thus brushed aside. It is a conservative estimate to say that four out of five churches in our land make use of these hymns to a greater or less extent. They even elbow their way into the most exclusive hymnals issued by ecclesiastical authorities. Collections of them are found not only in rural or village communities, but in urban churches as well. Great denominational publishing houses issue them by the hundred thousand. They are heard in the great ecclesiastical gatherings and conventions of the land. Great evangelistic movements depend on them for inspiration and for aggressive energy.
Yet the Gospel hymn has been treated as a convenient “punching bag” for the literary and musical idealist. One respects the antagonistic attitude of the high liturgist to whom the form is so significant, or of the literary or scholarly man whose susceptibilities are outraged by the acknowledged shortcomings and banalities of many of these popular religious lyrics. Nonetheless, one is astonished that persons of high intelligence, in their devotion to exclusively literary and musical standards, should be blind to the great spiritual value of the better specimens of this indiscriminately condemned class of hymns, and to the extraordinary effectiveness and the immense results in aggressive religious work which this people’s hymnody has demonstrated.
This is really only the recrudescence of an ancient feud between the conception of the hymn as exclusively worshipful and belonging to the liturgical service, and as the free lyrical expression of the religious life of the people adapted to all phases of Christian life—individual, domestic, and social, as well as ecclesiastical. As the church life of the early Christians began to crystallize, the former improvisations were discouraged. In time, the service of song was taken from the laity in the interest of greater dignity and churchliness. The Arian controversy with its hymnic outburst freed the wings of popular religious song, only for them to be restrained again by the rigid formalism organized and enforced by Gregory the Great.
The Waldenses, the Hussites, the Lollards, each group had its own popular hymnody. In the general breaking of bonds in the Reformation, the popular hymns of Huss and Luther and their associates, and the metrical psalms of Marot and Sternhold set to popular secular melodies, were the first manifestations of the new freedom.