Chapter I
WHAT IS A HYMN?
I. DEFINITION OF THE HYMN
Importance of Accurate Definition.
Before undertaking the study of the hymn in its various aspects and relations, theoretical and practical, it should be very carefully defined. This is all the more necessary because the word “hymn” is used to cover so wide a sweep of religious poetry, and because our discussion is to be largely limited to its practical use in church work.
Dr. Austin Phelps’ test of a genuine hymn, “Genuineness of religious emotion, refinement of poetic taste, and fitness to musical cadence—these are essential to a faultless hymn, as the three chief graces to a faultless character,”[1] is a very clear and charming statement of some essentials of a hymn, which needed emphasis in his rather prosaic day, but does not include all the requisites of a useful hymn.
Inadequate Definition.
The narrow etymological definition of a hymn would confine it to sacred poems that, in at least some part of them, are directly addressed to some person of the Deity. St. Augustine limits the word “hymn” to “songs with praise to God—without praise they are not hymns. If they praise aught but God, they are not hymns.” Even now there are hymnologists who insist upon this limited conception. No less a writer than W. Garrett Horder, in his fresh and illuminating The Hymn Lover, insists that “the cardinal test of a hymn should be that it is in some one, if not the whole of its parts, addressed to God.” This shuts out the use of sacred poetry in instruction, inspiration, exhortation, and special practical applications of hymns. Moreover, if the hymn is to be limited to worship, then the unconverted can never sing sincerely in the public service, and the ancient and medieval churches were justified in withdrawing the privilege of religious song from the general laity.
Definition Must Be Based on Practical Considerations.
The hymn is simply a means to the supreme end of all religious effort. That form of the hymn, that method of its use, and that musical assistance, which realize most fully the immediate and ultimate ends in view under given circumstances can be approved and used. This practical basis of actual spiritual results must govern in formulating the conception of the Christian hymn, as well as in forms of worship and prayer, in preaching, or in church organization.
Since our discussion of the hymn has in view its contributing efficiently to concrete spiritual results, its definition must have a practical basis. Etymological, scholastic, traditional, abstractly idealistic considerations can have only minor weight.