The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

Not only do the best of the standard hymns alone survive, but those survivors have been rewritten and amended by a half-century of editors and hymn revisers, their revisions being re-revised by succeeding critics, as we have seen in a previous chapter. Every line and phrase has been submitted again and again to the microscope of the literary critic, until we have a body of hymns established in every detail by the consensus of the best literary minds of the last century. This is no derogation of our accepted hymns, but a great advantage to them; but it must not be overlooked in making a fair comparison.

Criteria for Evaluation.

Much of the criticism of the Gospel hymn is due to excessive emphasis on the literary and poetical aspects of the verses to which objection is made. But we have already insisted on the fact that these are not the final criteria of the value of hymns, although they are important factors not to be overlooked.

Speaking of a hymnal containing material of inferior literary quality, Dr. Austin Phelps, of Andover Seminary, who shared with his colleague in the faculty of that institution the honor of being the fathers of American hymnology, wisely remarks: “It is a shallow judgment either to approve or to condemn such a work in the spirit of a connoisseur in aesthetics. The very conditions of excellence in a body of popular psalmody must extend its limits out of the range of a purely Attic taste.”

The approval or rejection of a hymn, or of a body of hymns, is not a question of personal taste or liking, nor even of personal religious reactions, but a question of the needs of the people to be stimulated and helped, and the results of interest and spiritual impression secured among them by the hymns under consideration.

Gospel Hymns and the Unsaved.

There is a distressing lack of understanding both of the real function of the hymn and of the needs of the body of Christians as a whole, and even a greater ignorance of the psychology of reaching the unsaved. If the body of our standard hymns fails to develop needed interest among a large element in our churches, how much less will it appeal to these outside the fold! If these intellectually and culturally less privileged masses in and out of the Church are to follow the Apostolic example and “sing with the understanding,” the songs must lie within the range of their understanding. Professor A. S. Hoyt, D.D., of Auburn Theological Seminary, sums up the situation very wisely: “A few of the modern revival hymns make quick appeal to the modern heart, are easily sung, and may be teachers of religious life. The majority of them are shallow in thought and without musical worth. But in all matters of education we must help men as we find them and patiently lift them to better things.”

Gospel Hymns and the Demands of Worship.

Perhaps the most misleading assumption among those who reject the Gospel hymn is that the chief use of hymns is in worship. They will sing didactic hymns, hortative hymns, inspirational hymns, addressed solely to human ears and hearts in the stated church service and then cast out the Gospel hymn because it is not fitted for solemn worship. That attitude conceives the Divine Being as a literary connoisseur, or as a music critic who applies conventional academic criteria in accepting what his people bring him. Their slogan is that we must bring to God only our best, insisting that anything but our best is an insult to him, forgetting that we do not bring the hymn, but the spiritual results of the hymn in devotion and love and consecration, and that hymn which produces these in the given congregation is the best.

Moreover, the approach to God is not the sole function of effective hymns; it may instead be the approach to men. The best hymn in that department is the one that succeeds most fully in affecting the souls to be influenced. There, not the abstract values of the hymn count, but its psychological adaptation to the actual mental, moral, and spiritual condition of the minds and hearts to be helped, not overlooking even the physical factors essential to religious results.