Trinity— [Tu Trinitatis unitas] 117 [O Pater Sancte, mitis atque pie] 118 [Adesto, Sancta Trinitas] 119
All Saints— [Pugnate, Christe milites] 123 [Audi nos, Rex Christe] 125
Communion— [Eja O dulcis anima] 129 [O Esca viatorum] 131 [Jesu, dulcedo cordium] 133 [Verbum supernum prodiens] 135
Death and Judgment— [Gravi me terrore pulsas] 139 [Appropinquat enim dies] 143
Heaven— [Jerusalem luminosa] 149 [Urbs beata Hierusalem (Part I.)] 153 [Urbs beata Hierusalem (Part II.)] 154
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
The Latin poetry of the Christian Church presents a tempting field for the exercise of scholarship and research. The relation in which it stands on the one hand to the classic poetry of Greece and Italy, and on the other to the Liturgies of the Eastern Church, the placing of accent in the room of quantity, and the rise and growth of rhyme—these and such-like matters will always prove attractive to experts and specialists. They are, however, quite beyond the scope of this brief paper. Those who wish to make an exhaustive study of a subject which has many sides and a copious literature, would do well to betake themselves to such standard works as are noted below.[1] The general reader may find something to profit and to interest him in the following general survey.
The title placed on our Saviour’s cross, setting forth His accusation—“Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” was written in three languages—in Hebrew and in Greek and in Latin. That collocation of languages gives the order in which the hymnody of the Church developed.
Hebrew hymnody is contained for the most part in the Hebrew Psalter; for the distinction between psalms and hymns is not one that admits of being applied to all Hebrew poetry. Our Lord and His disciples, as they went out to the Mount of Olives after the institution and first observance of the Supper Sacrament, sang a portion of the Great Hallel, which consists of Psalms cxiii. to cxviii. inclusive. Their doing so is described in the New Testament as singing “an hymn,” just as the singing of Paul and Silas in the Philippian prison is said to be singing hymns unto God.[2]
In the Eastern or Greek Church hymnody was in both private and public use from earliest times. The oft-quoted letter of the younger Pliny, written soon after his arrival as Proconsul in the provinces of Bithynia and Pontus, which took place in A.D. 110, informs the Emperor that it was the practice of the Christians to meet together on a certain day and sing antiphonally (secum invicem) a hymn to Christ as their God; while the “Apostolical Constitutions,” which take us back to the life of the Church in the second or third centuries, enjoin the use of morning and evening hymns of praise for God’s beneficence by Christ. From the ample stores of Oriental hymnology there have come into modern collections many of their gems, thanks to the scholarship and versifying skill of Dr. Neale, Keble, and Canon Bright. To the first named we are indebted for such well-known renderings of Greek sacred pieces as “Fierce was the wild billow,” and, “The day is past and over,” as also for “Art thou weary, art thou languid?” From the author of the “Christian Year” we have a beautiful English rendering of a first or second century Greek hymn, preserved by Basil, “Hail, gladdening Light, of His pure glory poured;” and from Canon Bright we have the vesper or “lamplighting hymn,” with its opening invocation, “Light of gladness, Beam Divine.”