In this mid-century period should also be included the famous war-time hymn by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” written in 1861 to provide worthier words than “John Brown’s body” for the popular tune “Glory, Hallelujah”, which had been composed a few years earlier for a Sunday School in Charleston, South Carolina.
A third period in Unitarian hymnody began with the appearance of hymns by three good friends, Rev. John White Chadwick (1840-1906), Rev. Frederic Lucian Hosmer (1840-1929) and Rev. William Channing Gannett (1840-1923), who carried forward in the last third of the century the broadly theistic interpretation of a universal religion to which Longfellow and Johnson had given utterance. Chadwick’s first hymn was written in 1864 for the graduation of his class from the Harvard Divinity School, a great hymn of brotherhood, widely used in England as well as here. A half-dozen others of fine quality have survived. Hosmer and Gannett worked together in bringing out their book The Thought of God in Hymns and Poems, 1885, 1894, and Unity Hymns and Chorals, 1880, 1911. Neither wrote any hymns while in the Divinity School, but both began to do so soon after. In 1873 Gannett wrote a fine one which is probably the earliest in the language to give a religious interpretation to the then controversial doctrine of evolution, and later a half dozen others to which deep feeling is expressed in beautiful lyrical verse. Hosmer, however, was a much more prolific writer, producing more than 40 hymns which have had some use. He was a meticulous craftsman who studied the technique of hymn-writing, and several of his hymns are among the finest in the language. Canon Dearmer, a leading authority on hymnody in the Church of England, included seven of them in his Songs of Praise and calls one of them “this flawless poem, one of the completest expressions of religious faith,” and says another is “one of the noblest hymns in the language.” For approximately 40 years, c. 1880-1920, Hosmer was the outstanding hymn writer in the English speaking world, and he left no successor who was his equal in the perfection of his finest hymns.
A smaller but important contribution to the Unitarian hymnody of this period was made by Rev. Theodore Chickering Williams (1855-1915) who, while still a student in the Harvard Divinity School wrote one of the best ordination hymns in the language, and, in later years, eight others, still in use, which are religious poetry of a high order.
The latest period in Unitarian hymnody, covering the last half-century, is notable for the productions of two writers, Rev. Marion Franklin Ham (1867-1957) and Rev. John Haynes Holmes, (1879-still living). Although he had published a volume of poems in 1896 Dr. Ham did not begin to write hymns until 1911, but thereafter he produced a succession of beautiful religious lyrics, eight or ten of which have come into use. Some of them are utterances of a profound mystical insight akin to that of Eliza Scudder, but others are expressions of a world-wide theism, and one has been translated into Japanese.
Rev. John Haynes Holmes has been a more prolific writer, author of about 45 hymns, many written for special occasions, but 10 or 15 others have come into general and widespread use. His hymns are in a quite different key from those of Dr. Ham’s quiet mysticism, generally being stirring calls to social justice and the service of mankind, though a few are hymns of gratitude for the simple joys of life. While he has infrequently attained the felicity of phrasing which results in a memorable line his hymns are cast in vigorous and often stirring verse, expressing a noble altruism and a wholesome attitude towards life.
M. F. Ham and J. H. Holmes are the latest notable figures in this era of 150 years since the beginning of American Unitarian hymnody, throughout which scores of lesser writers have also contributed their offerings to the main stream. These writers are far too numerous to name in this outline sketch but their thumbnail biographies and notations as to their hymns will be found in the following catalogue. A survey of this whole era discloses the evolution in liberal religious thought from the period when the emphasis was on the sinfulness of man and the redemptive function of the Christian Church, to the vision of a world wide religion taking in many forms, and manifested in that service of mankind which found expression in the “social gospel” in the first half of this century.
The production of so great a number of fine hymns (and of a long series of hymn books of a superior type) over so long a period, by persons belonging to one of the smallest Protestant denominations, commonly considered coldly intellectual rather than emotional in its approach to religion, is a phenomenon unique in the history of hymnody. When the first edition of the Pilgrim Hymnal was published in 1910 it listed both the nationality and the church membership of the authors included, which led to the disclosure that nearly half the American authors were Unitarians who had contributed considerably more than half the hymns of American authorship. In answer to critics Dr. Washington Gladden replied that this was due to the simple fact that the Unitarians had written a larger number of the best hymns than had the American writers in other denominations.
Canon Dearmer in England observed the same fact and was puzzled to explain it. The explanation, however, is a simple one. With the exception of a relatively small number of writers born in other parts of the country and with different backgrounds, these Unitarian authors were men brought up in the atmosphere of the so-called “New England Renaissance,” that literary revival of which Boston, Cambridge and Concord were the chief centres in the 19th century, and they belonged by blood, by education and by social ties to the New England literary group. The majority were also graduates of Harvard College or Harvard Divinity School, or both, in a period when the spirit of the time was most favorable to the stimulation of poetic gifts, and in a place where the intellectual level was high and there was freedom from any dogmatic control.[5] Thus they had the culture and the warmth of atmosphere needed, and the Divinity School had the admirable custom of encouraging students to write a hymn for the annual graduation exercises or for the School’s Christmas service, and so stimulated their poetic gifts.
Thanks to these favorable circumstances what has been called “the Harvard school of hymnody” has had no equal in the English speaking world, the only comparable institution being Trinity College, Cambridge, England, which, for a much briefer period (1820-1845) was the nursing mother of a notable succession of Anglican hymn writers. It was this fact which led W. Garrett Horder, an English Congregationalist who was also a highly competent hymnologist, to write, “Harvard, like our English Cambridge, has been ‘a nest of singing birds’. I was struck by this when editing The Treasury of American Sacred Songs. Harvard provided the bulk —— of the verse I included.” And other orthodox authorities, notably F. M. Bird and Louis F. Benson, already quoted, have borne witness to the high achievements of both the editors of the long succession of Unitarian hymn books and the authors of the hymns which they included.