The Lord descended from above,
And bowed the heavens most high,
And underneath his feet he cast
The darkness of the sky.
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On cherub and on cherubim
Full royally he rode;
And on the wings of all the winds
Came flying all abroad.
The graces of style, however, were not greatly prized by the Puritan mind. Sternhold and Hopkins held the suffrages of their co-religionists so long on account of their strict fidelity to the thought of the original, the ruggedness and genuine force of their expression, and their employment of the simple homely phraseology of the common people. The enlightened criticism of the present day sees worth in these qualities, and assigns to the work of Sternhold and Hopkins higher credit than to many smoother and more finished versions.
Sternhold and Hopkins partially yielded to Tate and Brady in 1696, and were still more urgently pushed aside by the version of Watts in 1719. The numerous versions which have since appeared from time to time were written purely for literary purposes, or else in a few cases (as, for example, the psalms of Ainsworth, brought to America by the Pilgrim Fathers) were granted a temporary and local use in the churches. Glass, in his Story of the Psalter, enumerates one hundred and twenty-three complete versions, the last being that of Wrangham in 1885. This long list includes but one author—John Keble—who has attained fame as a poet outside the annals of hymnology. No other version ever approached in popularity that of Sternhold and Hopkins, whose work passed through six hundred and one editions.
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Social hymn singing, unlike liturgic choir music, is entirely independent of contemporary art movements. It flourishes only in periods of popular religious awakening, and declines when religious enthusiasm ebbs, no matter what may be going on in professional musical circles. Psalm singing in the English Reformation period, whatever its aesthetic shortcomings, was a powerful promoter of zeal in moments of triumph, and an unfailing source of consolation in adversity. As in the case of the Lutheran choral, each psalm had its “proper” tune. Many of the melodies were already associated with tender experiences of home life, and they became doubly endeared through religious suggestion. “The metrical psalms,” says Curwen, “were Protestant in their origin, and in their use they exemplified the Protestant principle of allowing every worshiper to understand and participate in the service. As years went on, the rude numbers of Sternhold and Hopkins passed into the language of spiritual experience in a degree only less than the authorized version of the Bible. They were a liturgy to those who rejected liturgies.”[82] It was their one outlet of poetic religious feeling, and dry and prosaic as both words and music seem to us now, we must believe, since human nature is everywhere moved by much the same impulses, that these psalms and tunes were not to those who used them barren and formal things, and that in the singing of them there was an undercurrent of rapture which to our minds it seems almost impossible that they could produce. In every form of popular expression there is always this invisible aura, like the supposed imperceptible fluid around an [378] electrified body. There are what we may call emotionalized reactions, stimulated by social, domestic, or ancestral associations, producing effects for which the unsympathetic critic cannot otherwise account.
Even this inspiration at last seemed to fade away. When the one hundred years’ conflict, of alternate ascendency and persecution, came to an end with the Restoration in 1660, zeal abated with the fires of conflict, and apathy, formalism, and dulness, the counterparts of lukewarmness and Pharisaical routine in the established Church, settled down over the dissenting sects. In the eighteenth century the psalmody of the Presbyterians, Independents, and Separatists, which had also been adopted long before in the parochial services of the established Church, declined into the most contracted and unemotional routine that can be found in the history of religious song. The practice of “lining out” destroyed every vestige of musical charm that might otherwise have remained; the number of tunes in common use grew less and less, in some congregations being reduced to a bare half-dozen. The conception of individualism, which was the source of congregational singing in the first place, was carried to such absurd extremes that the notion extensively prevailed that every person was privileged to sing the melody in any key or tempo and with any grotesque embellishment that might be pleasing to himself. These fantastic abuses especially prevailed in the New England congregations in the last half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, but they were only the ultimate consequences of ideas and practices which prevailed [379] in the mother country. The early Baptists forbade singing altogether. The Brownists tried for a short time to act upon the notion that singing in worship, like prayer, should be extempore. The practical results may easily be imagined. About the year 1700 it seemed as though the fair genius of sacred song had abandoned the English and American non-liturgic sects in despair.
Like a sun-burst, opening a brighter era, came the Wesleyan movement, and in the same period the hymns of Dr. Isaac Watts. Whatever the effect of the exuberant singing of the Methodist assemblies may have had upon a cultivated ear, it is certain that the enthusiastic welcome accorded by the Wesleys to popular music as a proselyting agent, and the latitude permitted to free invention and adoption of hymns and tunes, gave an impulse to a purer and nobler style of congregational song which has never been lost. The sweet and fervent lyrics of Charles and John Wesley struck a staggering blow at the prestige of the “inspired” psalmody. Historians of this movement remind us that hymns, heartily sung by a whole congregation, were unknown as an element in public worship at the time when the work of the Wesleys and Whitefield began. Watts’s hymns were already written, but had as yet taken no hold upon either dissenters or churchmen. The example of the Methodists was a revelation of the power that lies in popular song when inspired by conviction, and as was said of the early Lutheran choral, so it might be said of the Methodist hymns, that they won more souls than even the preaching of the evangelists. John Wesley, in [380] his published directions concerning congregational singing, enjoined accuracy in notes and time, heartiness, moderation, unanimity, and spirituality as with the aim of pleasing God rather than one’s self. He strove to bring the new hymns and tunes within the means of the poor, and yet took pains that the music should be of high quality, and that nothing vulgar or sensational should obtain currency.
The truly beneficent achievement of the Wesleys in summoning the aid of the unconfined spirit of poesy in the revival of spiritual life found a worthy reinforcement in the songs of Isaac Watts (1674-1748). Although his deficiencies in the matter of poetical technic and his frequent dry, scholastic, and dogmatic treatment have rendered much the greater part of his work obsolete, yet a true spiritual and poetic fire burns in many of his lyrics, and with all necessary abatement his fame seems secure. Such poems as “High in the Heavens, eternal God,” “Before Jehovah’s awful throne,” and “When I survey the wondrous cross” are pearls which can never lose their place in the chaplet of English evangelical hymnody. The relaxing prejudice against “uninspired” hymns in church worship yielded to the fervent zeal, the loving faith, the forceful natural utterance of the lyrics of Watts. In his psalms also, uniting as they did the characteristic modes of feeling of both the Hebrew and the Christian conceptions, he made the transition easy, and in both he showed the true path along which the reviving poetic inspiration of the time must proceed.
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What has come of the impulse imparted by Watts and the Wesleys every student of Christian literature knows. To give any adequate account of the movement which has enriched the multitude of modern hymn-books and sacred anthologies would require a large volume.[83] No more profitable task could be suggested to one who deems it his highest duty to expand and deepen his spiritual nature, than to possess his mind of the jewels of devotional insight and chastened expression which are scattered through the writings of such poets as Charles Wesley, Cowper, Newton, Faber, Newman, Lyte, Heber, Bonar, Milman, Keble, Ellerton, Montgomery, Ray Palmer, Coxe, Whittier, Holmes, the Cary sisters, and others equal or hardly inferior to these, who have performed immortal service to the divine cause which they revered by disclosing to the world the infinite beauty and consolation of the Christian faith. No other nation, not even the German, can show any parallel to the treasure embedded in English and American popular religious poetry. This fact is certainly not known to the majority of church members. The average church-goer never looks into a hymn-book except when he stands up to sing in the congregation, and this performance, whatever else it may do for the worshiper, gives him very little information in regard to the artistic, or even the spiritual value of the book which he holds in his hand. Let him read his hymn-book in private, as he reads his Tennyson; and although he will not be inclined to compare it in point of literary quality with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury or Stedman’s [382] Victorian Anthology, yet he will probably be surprised at the number of lyrics whose delicacy, fervor, and pathos will be to him a revelation of the gracious elements that pervade the minor religious poetry of the English tongue.