Chief of all the auxiliary circumstances which aided the Great Revival, beyond a question, was this: that it taught the people of England, for the first time, the real power of sacred song. That man in the north of England who, when taken, by a companion who had been converted, to a great Methodist preaching, and being asked at the close of the service how he had enjoyed it, replied, “Weel, I didna care sae mich aboot the preaching, but, eh, man! yon ballants were grand,” was no doubt a representative character. And the great and subduing power of large bodies of people, moved as with one heart and one voice, must have greatly aided to produce those effects which we are attempting to realise. All great national movements have acknowledged and used the power of song. For man is a born singer, and if he cannot sing himself he likes to feel the power of those who can. It has been so in political movements: there were the songs of the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. And the greatest religious movements through all the Christian ages have acknowledged the power of sacred song, even from the days of the apostles, and from the time of St. Ambrose in Milan. Luther soon found that he must teach the people to sing. That is a pleasant little story, how once, as he was sitting at his window, he heard a blind beggar sing. It was something about the grace of God, and Luther says the strain brought tears into his eyes. Then, he says, the thought suddenly flashed into his mind, “If I could only make gospel songs which people could sing, and which would spread themselves up and down the cities!” He directly set to work upon this inspiration, and let fly song after song, each like a lark mounting towards heaven’s gate, full of New Testament music. “He took care,” says one writer, in mentioning the incident, “that each song should have some rememberable word or refrain; such as ‘Jesus,’ ‘Believe and be saved,’ ‘Come unto Me,’ ‘Gospel,’ ‘Grace,’ ‘Worthy is the Lamb,’ and so on.”
Until Watts and Doddridge appeared, England had no popular sacred melodies. Amongst the works of the poets, such as Sir Philip Sidney, Milton, Sandys, George Herbert, and others, a few were scattered up and down; but they mostly lacked the subtle element which constitutes a hymn. For, just as a man may be a great poet, and utterly fail in the power to write a good song, so a man may be a great sacred poet, and yet miss the faculty which makes the hymn-writer. It is singular, it is almost indefinable. The subtle something which catches the essential elements of a great human experience, and gives it lyrical expression, takes that which other men put into creeds, sermons, theological essays, and sets it flying, as we just now said, like “the lark to heaven’s gate.” It ought never to be forgotten that Watts was, in fact, the creator of the English hymn. He wrote many lines which good taste can in no case approve; but here again the old proverb holds true, “The house that is building does not look like the house that is built.” And the great number of following writers, while they have felt the inspiration he gave to the Church, have moulded their lines by a more fastidious taste, which, if it has sometimes improved the metre or the sentiment, has possibly diminished in the strength. We will venture to say that even now there is a greater average of majesty of thought and expression in Watts’s hymns than in any other of our great hymn-writers; although, in some cases, we find here and there a piece which may equal, and some one or two which are said to surpass, the flights of the sweet singer of Stoke Newington. But the hymns of Watts, as a whole, were not so well fitted to a great and popular revival, to the expression of a tumultuous and passionate experience, as some we shall notice. They were, as a whole, especially wanting in the social element, and the finest of them sound like notes from the harp of some solitary angel. One cannot give to them the designation which the Wesleys gave to large sections of their hymns, “suitable for experience meetings.” Praise rather than experience is the characteristic of Watts, although there are noble exceptions. Our readers will perhaps remember a well-known and pleasing instance in a letter from Doddridge to his aged friend. Doddridge had been preaching on a summer evening in some plain old village chapel in Northamptonshire, when at the close of the service was “given out,” as we say, that hymn commencing:
“Give me the wings of faith to rise.”
We can suppose the melody to which it was sung to have been very rude; but it was, perhaps, new to the people, and the preacher was affected as he saw how, over the congregation, the people were singing earnestly, and melted to tears while they sang; and at the close of the service many old people gathered round Doddridge, their hearts all alive with the hymn, and they wished it were possible, only for once, to look upon the face of the dear old Dr. Watts. Doddridge was so pleased that he thought his old friend would be pleased also, and so he wrote the account of the little incident in a letter to him. In many other parts of the country, no doubt, the people were waiting and wishful for popular sacred harmonies. And when the Great Revival came, and congregations met by thousands, and multitudes who had been accustomed to song, thoughtless, foolish, very often sinful and licentious, still needed to sing (for song and human nature are inseparable, apparently, so far as we know anything about it, in the next world as well as in this), it was necessary that, as they had been “brought up out of the horrible pit and miry clay,” “a new song of praise” should be put in the mouth. John Wesley had heard much of Moravian singing. He took Count Zinzendorf’s hymns, translated them, and immensely improved them; he was the first who introduced into our psalmody the noble words of Paul Gerhardt. Some of the finest of all the hymns in the Wesleyan collection are these translations. Watts was unsparingly used. Wesley’s first effort to meet this necessity of the Revival was the publication of his collection in 1739.[[9]] And thus, most likely without knowing the anecdote of Luther we have quoted above, Wesley and his coadjutors did exactly what the Reformer had done. They gave effect to the Revival by the ordinance of song, and preached the Gospel in sweet words, and often recurring Gospel refrains.
[9]. See [Appendix].
The remark is true that there was no art, no splendid form of worship or ritual; early Methodism and the entire evangelic movement were as free from all this as Clairvaux in the Valley of Wormwood, when Bernard ministered there with all his monks around him, or as Cluny when Bernard de Morlaix chanted his “Jerusalem the Golden.” Like all great religious movements which have shaken men’s souls, this was purely spiritual, or if it had a secular expression it was not artificial. Loud amens resounded as the preacher spoke or prayed, and then the hearty gushes of, perhaps, not melodious song united all hearts in some litany or Te Deum in new-born verse from some of the singers of the last revival. Amongst infuriated mobs, we read how Wesley found a retreat in song, and overpowered the multitude with what we, perhaps, should not regard melody. Thus, when at Bengeworth in 1740, where Wesley was set upon by a crowd, and it was proposed by one that they should take him away and duck him, he broke out into singing with his redoubted friend, Thomas Maxfield. He allowed them to carry him whither they would; at the bridge end of the street the mob retreated and left him; but he took his stand on the bridge, and striking up—
“Angel of God, whate’er betide,
Thy summons I obey,”
preached a useful and effective sermon to hundreds who remained to listen, from the text, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”
But the contributions of Watts and Wesley are so well known that it is more important to notice here that as the Revival moved on, very soon other remarkable lyrists appeared to contribute, if few, yet really effective words. Of these none is more remarkable than the mighty cobbler, Thomas Olivers, a “sturdy Welshman,” as Southey calls him. He is not to be confounded with John Oliver, also one of the notabilities of the Revival. Thomas was really an astonishing trophy of the movement; before his conversion he was a thoroughly bad fellow, a kind of wandering reprobate, an idle, dissipated man. He fell beneath the power of Whitefield, whom he heard preach from the text, “Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” He had made comic songs about Whitefield, and sung them with applause in tap-rooms. As Whitefield came in his way, he went with the purpose of obtaining fresh fuel for his ridicule. The heart of the man was completely broken, and he felt so much compunction for what he had done against the man for whom he now felt so deep a reverence and awe, that he used to follow him in the streets, and though he did not speak to him, he says he could scarcely refrain from kissing the prints of his footsteps. And now, he says, at the beginning of his new life, what we can well believe of an imagination so intense and strong, “I saw God in everything: the heavens, the earth and all therein showed me something of Him; yea, even from a drop of water, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand, I received instruction.” He was about seriously to enter into a settled and respectable way of business when John Wesley heard of him; and although he was converted under Whitefield, Wesley persuaded him to yield himself to his direction for the work of preaching as one of his itinerant band, and sent him into Cornwall—just the man we should think for Cornwall, fiery and imaginative: off he went, in 1753. He was born in 1725. He testifies that he was “unable to buy a horse, so, with my boots on my legs, my great-coat on my back, and my bag with my books and linen across my shoulders, I set out for Cornwall on foot.” Henceforth there were forty-six years on earth before him, during which he witnessed a magnificent confession before many witnesses. He became one of the foremost controversialists when dissensions arose among the men of the Revival. He acquired a knowledge of the languages, especially of Hebrew, and was a great reader. Wesley appointed him as his editor and general proofreader; but he could never be taught to punctuate properly, and the punctilious Wesley could not tolerate his inaccuracies as they slipped through the proof, so he did not retain this post long. But Wesley loved him, and in 1799 he descended into Wesley’s own tomb, and his remains lie there, in the cemetery of the City Road Chapel. He wrote more prose than poetry; but, like St. Ambrose, he is made immortal by a single hymn. He is the author of one of the most majestic hymns in all hymnology. Byron and Scott wrote Hebrew melodies, but they will not bear comparison with this one. While in London upon one occasion, he went into the Jewish synagogue, and he heard sung there by a rabbi, Dr. Leoni, an old air, a melody which so enchanted him and fixed itself in his memory, that he went home, and instantly produced what he called “a hymn to the God of Abraham,” arranged to the air he had heard. And thus we possess that which we so frequently sing,