In one noble department of religious literature, the liturgical, the record of the American church is meager. The reaction among the early colonists and many of the later settlers against forms of worship imposed by political authority was violent. Seeking for a logical basis, it planted itself on the assumption that no form (unless an improvised form) is permitted in public worship, except such as are sanctioned by express word of Scripture. In their sturdy resolution to throw off and break up the yoke, which neither they nor their fathers had been able to bear, of ordinances and traditions complicated with not a little of debilitating superstition, the extreme Puritans of England and Scotland rejected the whole system of holy days in the Christian year, including the authentic anniversaries of Passover and Pentecost, and discontinued the use of religious ceremonies at marriages and funerals.[386:2] The only liturgical compositions that have come down to us from the first generations are the various attempts, in various degrees of harshness and rudeness, at the versification of psalms and other Scriptures for singing. The emancipation of the church from its bondage to an artificial dogma came, as we have already seen, with the Great Awakening and the introduction of Watts's "Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament."[387:1] After the Revolution, at the request of the General Association of Connecticut and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, Timothy Dwight completed the work of Watts by versifying a few omitted psalms,[387:2] and added a brief selection of hymns, chiefly in the grave and solemn Scriptural style of Watts and Doddridge. Then followed, in successive tides, from England, the copious hymnody of the Methodist revival, both Calvinist and Wesleyan, of the Evangelical revival, and now at last of the Oxford revival, with its affluence of translations from the ancient hymnists, as well as of original hymns. It is doubtless owing to this abundant intermittent inflow from England that the production of American hymns has been so scanty. Only a few writers, among them Thomas Hastings and Ray Palmer, have written each a considerable number of hymns that have taken root in the common use of the church. Not a few names besides are associated each with some one or two or three lyrics that have won an enduring place in the affections of Christian worshipers. The "gospel hymns" which have flowed from many pens in increasing volume since the revival of 1857 have proved their great usefulness, especially in connection with the ministry of Messrs. Moody and Sankey; but they are, even the best of them, short-lived. After their season the church seems not unwilling to let them die.
Soon after the mid-point of the nineteenth century, began a serious study of the subject of the conduct of public worship, which continues to this day, with good promise of sometime reaching useful and stable results. In 1855 was published "Eutaxia, or the Presbyterian Liturgies: Historical Sketches. By a Minister of the Presbyterian Church." The author, Charles W. Baird, was a man peculiarly fitted to render the church important service, such as indeed he did render in this volume, and in the field of Huguenot history which he divided with his brother, Henry M. Baird. How great the loss to historical theology through his protracted feebleness of body and his death may be conjectured, not measured. This brief volume awakened an interest in the subject of it in America, and in Scotland, and among the nonconformists of England. To American Presbyterians in general it was something like a surprise to be reminded that the sisterhood of the "Reformed" sects were committed by their earliest and best traditions in favor of liturgic uses in public worship. At about the same time the fruitful discussions of the Mercersburg controversy were in progress in the German Reformed Church. "Mercersburg found fault with the common style of extemporaneous public prayer, and advocated a revival of the liturgical church service of the Reformation period, but so modified and reproduced as to be adapted to the existing wants of Protestant congregations."[388:1] Each of these discussions was followed by a proposed book of worship. In 1857 was published by Mr. Baird "A Book of Public Prayer, Compiled from the Authorized Formularies of Worship of the Presbyterian Church, as Prepared by the Reformers, Calvin, Knox, Bucer, and others"; and in 1858 was set forth by a committee of the German Reformed Church "A Liturgy, or Order of Christian Worship." In 1855 St. Peter's Presbyterian Church of Rochester published its "Church-book," prepared by Mr. L. W. Bacon, then acting as pastor, which was principally notable for introducing the use of the Psalms in parallelisms for responsive reading—a use which at once found acceptance in many churches, and has become general in all parts of the country. Sporadic experiments followed in various individual congregations, looking toward greater variety or greater dignity or greater musical attractiveness in the services of public worship, or toward more active participation therein on the part of the people. But these experiments, conducted without concert or mutual counsel, often without serious study of the subject, and with a feebly esthetic purpose, were representative of individual notions, and had in them no promise of stability or of fruit after their kind. Only, by the increasing number of them, they have given proof of an unrest on this subject which at last is beginning to embody itself in organization and concerted study and enterprise. A fifty years of mere tentative groping is likely to be followed by another fifty years of substantial progress.
The influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church upon this growing tendency has been sometimes favorable, sometimes unfavorable, but always important. To begin with, it has held up before the whole church an example of prescribed forms for divine worship, on the whole, the best in all history. On the other hand, it has drawn to itself those in other sects whose tastes and tendencies would make them leaders in the study of liturgics, and thus while reinforcing itself has hindered the general advance of improvement in the methods of worship. Withal, its influence has tended to narrow the discussion to the consideration of a single provincial and sectarian tradition, as if the usage of a part of the Christians of the southern end of one of the islands of the British archipelago had a sort of binding authority over the whole western continent. But again, on the other hand, the broadening of its own views to the extent of developing distinctly diverse ways of thinking among its clergy and people has enlarged the field of study once more, and tended to interest the church generally in the practical, historical, and theological aspects of the subject. The somewhat timid ventures of "Broad" and "Evangelical" men in one direction, and the fearless breaking of bounds in the other direction by those of "Ritualist" sympathies, have done much to liberate this important communion from slavish uniformity and indolent traditionalism; and within a few years that has been accomplished which only a few years earlier would have been deemed impossible—the considerable alteration and improvement of the Book of Common Prayer.
It is safe to prognosticate, from the course of the history up to this point, that the subject of the conduct of worship will become more and more seriously a subject of study in the American church in all its divisions; that the discussions thereon arising will be attended with strong antagonisms of sentiment; that mutual antagonisms within the several sects will be compensated by affiliations of men like-minded across sectarian lines; and that thus, as many times before, particular controversies will tend to general union and fellowship.
One topic under this title of Liturgics requires special mention—the use of music in the church. It was not till the early part of the eighteenth century that music began to be cultivated as an art in America.[391:1] Up to that time "the service of song in the house of the Lord" had consisted, in most worshiping assemblies on this continent, in the singing of rude literal versifications of the Psalms and other Scriptures to some eight or ten old tunes handed down by tradition, and variously sung in various congregations, as modified by local practice. The coming in of "singing by rule" was nearly coincident with the introduction of Watts's psalms and hymns, and was attended with like agitations. The singing-school for winter evenings became an almost universal social institution; and there actually grew up an American school of composition, quaint, rude, and ungrammatical, which had great vogue toward the end of the last century, and is even now remembered by some with admiration and regret. It was devoted mainly to psalmody tunes of an elaborate sort, in which the first half-stanza would be sung in plain counterpoint, after which the voices would chase each other about in a lively imitative movement, coming out together triumphantly at the close. They abounded in forbidden progressions and empty chords, but were often characterized by fervor of feeling and by strong melodies. A few of them, as "Lenox" and "Northfield," still linger in use; and the productions of this school in general, which amount to a considerable volume, are entitled to respectful remembrance as the first untutored utterance of music in America. The use of them became a passionate delight to our grandparents; and the traditions are fresh and vivid of the great choirs filling the church galleries on three sides, and tossing the theme about from part to part.
The use of these rudely artificial tunes involved a gravely important change in the course of public worship. In congregations that accepted them the singing necessarily became an exclusive privilege of the choir. To a lamentable extent, where there was neither the irregular and spontaneous ejaculation of the Methodist nor the rubrical response of the Episcopalian, the people came to be shut out from audible participation in the acts of public worship.
A movement of musical reform in the direction of greater simplicity and dignity began early in this century, when Lowell Mason in Boston and Thomas Hastings in New York began their multitudinous publications of psalmody. Between them not less than seventy volumes of music were published in a period of half as many years. Their immense and successful fecundity was imitated with less success by others, until the land was swamped with an annual flood of church-music books. A thin diluvial stratum remains to us from that time in tunes, chiefly from the pen of Dr. Mason, that have taken permanent place as American chorals. Such pieces as "Boylston," "Hebron," "Rockingham," "Missionary Hymn," and the adaptations of Gregorian melodies, "Olmutz" and "Hamburg," are not likely to be displaced from their hold on the American church by more skilled and exquisite compositions of later schools. But the fertile labors of the church musicians of this period were affected by the market demand for new material for the singing-school, the large church choir, and the musical convention. The music thus introduced into the churches consisted not so much of hymn-tunes and anthems as of "sacred glees."[392:1]