Welcome, O death! thou bringest me
To dwell with God eternally;
Through Christ my soul from sin is free,
O take me now, dear Lord, to Thee!
Another hymn for the dying, “Lord Jesus Christ, true man and God,” breathes the same spirit of hope and trust in Christ. During the years of persecution and suffering that followed the Reformation, the Protestants found much comfort in singing Eber’s “When in the hour of utmost need.”
Justus Jonas, the bosom friend of Luther who spoke the last words of peace and consolation to the dying Reformer and who also preached his funeral sermon, has left us the hymn, “If God were not upon our side,” based on Psalm 124.
From this period we also have the beautiful morning hymn, “My inmost heart now raises,” by Johannes Mathesius, the pupil and biographer of Luther, and an equally beautiful evening hymn, “Sunk is the sun’s last beam of light,” by Nicholas Hermann. Mathesius was pastor of the church at Joachimsthal, in Bohemia, and Hermann was his organist and choirmaster. It is said that whenever Mathesius preached a particularly good sermon, Hermann was forthwith inspired to write a hymn on its theme! He was a poet and musician of no mean ability, and his tunes are among the best from the Reformation period.
The example of the Wittenberg hymnists was quickly followed by evangelicals in other parts of Germany, and hymn-books began to appear everywhere. As early as 1526 a little volume of hymns was published at Rostock in the Platt-Deutsch dialect. In this collection we find one of the most glorious hymns of the Reformation, “All glory be to Thee, Most High,” or, as it has also been rendered, “All glory be to God on high,” a metrical version of the ancient canticle, Gloria in Excelsis. Five years later another edition was published in which appeared a metrical rendering of Agnus Dei:
O Lamb of God, most holy,
On Calvary an offering;