The Rise of Sacred Song in Apostolic Times.
But when the baptism of the Holy Spirit vitalized and organized the Christian Church, the tide of sacred song began to swell. It had a great heritage from the dying Jewish church: its fundamental ideas, its laws, its prophets, its hope of the Messiah now transformed into a reality; but not the least of its inheritances were the habit of praise and worship, and the lyrics that gave them form.
We read that the Church was filled with joy and praised God. Incidentally, we learn that, despite sufferings from cruel scourging, Paul and Silas sang hymns in the Philippian prison, showing that with the new wine of Christian joy there were created new bottles to contain it. We may be sure this was not an isolated instance, but the occurrence of an established practice.
Apostolic Emphasis of Sacred Song.
James says, “Is any merry, let him sing psalms.” Whether he meant David’s or “private” psalms is left open to conjecture. The American Revised Version translates it “praise.” Paul is most definite in recognizing “hymns and spiritual songs” as distinguished from “psalms.” Some commentators have interpreted the latter as David’s psalms, the “hymns” as the already accepted canticles, and the “spiritual songs” as the new songs, more or less improvised, that were sung by individuals, “teaching and admonishing one another,” “singing with grace in the heart.”
Paul’s conception of the hymn, therefore, was not a collective hymn, sung by all, but a hymn of edification sung by individual singers. The practice of solo singing assumed in Paul’s exhortations in Ephesians and Colossians, due to the perennial danger of governmental raids and persecutions, still continued in the time of Tertullian (circa 198). He writes that after their common meal “each man, according as he is able, is called on, out of the Holy Scriptures, or of his own mind, to sing publicly to God. Hence it is proved in what degree he hath drunken”—a refutation of the common charge of gluttony and drunkenness.
Traces of Hymns in the Epistles.
In the eagerness to unearth traces of the supposed hymnody of the Apostolic church, the wish has been father to the thought, and passages have been pointed out as probable quotations from hymns current in the churches. Some of them are quite plausible, but others are examples of the periodic structure so manifest in the style of both Christ and Paul and in the Oriental proverbial form, but lacking the parallelism of the Psalms.
In Ephesians 5:14, Paul has the formula of quotation from the Old Testament, but no such passage, or anything approaching it, can be found in either the canonical or uncanonical books of the Old Testament. If we should substitute “it” for “he,” the second word of the passage “it” might refer to a hymn in common use. Westcott and Hort put it in metrical form, but the Revised Versions do not. It is very plausible, however; even in the English translation the structure is distinctly metrical:
“Awake, thou that sleepest,