OLD REVIVAL HYMNS.
The sober churches of the “Old Thirteen” states and of their successors far into the nineteenth century, sustained evening prayer-meetings more or less commonly, but necessity made them in most cases “cottage meetings” appointed on Sunday and here and there in the scattered homes of country parishes. Their intent was the same as that of “revival meetings,” since so called, though the method—and the music—were different. The results in winning sinners, so far as they owed anything to the hymns and hymn-tunes, were apt to be a new generation of Christian recruits as sombre as the singing. “Lebanon” set forth the appalling shortness of human life; “Windham” gave its depressing story of the great majority of mankind on the “broad road,” and other minor tunes proclaimed God's sovereignty and eternal decrees; or if a psalm had His love in it, it was likely to be sung in a similar melancholy key. Even in his gladness the good minister, Thomas Baldwin, of the Second Baptist Church, 309 / 263 at Boston, North End, returning from Newport, N.H., where he had happily harmonized a discordant church, could not escape the strait-lace of a C minor for his thankful hymn—
From whence doth this union arise,
That hatred is conquered by love.
“The Puritans took their pleasures seriously,” and this did not cease to be true till at least two hundred years after the Pilgrims landed or Boston was founded.
Time, that covered the ghastly faces on the old grave-stones with moss, gradually stole away the unction of minor-tune singing.
The songs of the great revival of 1740 swept the country with positive rather than negative music. Even Jonathan Edwards admitted the need of better psalm-books and better psalmody.
Edwards, during his life, spent some time among the Indians as a missionary teacher; but probably neither he nor David Brainerd ever saw a Christian hymn composed by an Indian. The following, from the early years of the last century, is apparently the first, certainly the only surviving, effort of a converted but half-educated red man to utter his thoughts in pious metre. Whoever trimmed the original words and measure into printable shape evidently took care to preserve the broken English of the simple convert. It is an interesting relic of the Christian thought and sentiment of a pagan just learning to prattle prayer and praise:
In de dark wood, no Indian nigh,