“The Lord in the day of His anger did lay
Our sins on the Lamb, and he bore them away,”
the Earl looked up and said, “Stop! don’t you think, Mrs. Brass, that ought to be, ‘The Lord in the day of his mercy did lay’?”
The old lady did not admit the validity of his lordship’s theology; but it very abundantly showed that his experience had passed through the verse, and reached to the true meaning of the hymn. An old blind woman was hearing Peter McOwan preach. He quoted these lines:
“The Lord pours eyesight on the blind;
The Lord supports the fainting mind.”
The poor old woman was not happy until she met the preacher, and she said, “But are there really such sweet verses? Are you sure the book contains such a hymn?” and he read the whole to her. It is one by Watts:
“I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath.”
Innumerable are the anecdotes of these hymns; they inaugurated really the rise of English hymnology; and it is not too much to say that, as compared with them, many more recent hymns are as tinsel compared with gold. A writer truly says: “They sob, they swell, they meet the spirit in its most hushed and plaintive mood. They roll and bear it aloft, in its most inspired and prophetic moods, as on the surge of more than a mighty organ swell; among the mines and quarries, and wild moors of Cornwall, among the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, in chambers of death, in the most joyous assemblages of the household, they have relieved the hard lot, and sweetened the pleasant one; and even in other lands soldiers and sailors, slaves and prisoners, have recited with what joy these words have entered into their life.”
Thus the great hymns of this period grew and became a religious power in the land, strangely contradicting a verdict which Cardinal Wiseman pronounced some years since, that “all Protestant devotion is dead.” While we give all honour to the fine hymns of Denmark and Germany, many of the best of which were translated with the movement, it may, with no exaggeration, be said that the hymnology of England in the eighteenth century is the finest and most complete which the history of the Church has known.