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CHAPTER VII.
PRAISE.
III. Hymns in the Daily Services.
We are about to explain how Hymns are attached to Lessons for purposes of worship. It will be well therefore to consider what a Hymn is, and how we arrived at the present arrangement. We will defer to the chapter on Anthems the consideration of those Hymns that may be described as Prayers set to music. Many Psalms may be described in this way, and in the Commination the 51st Psalm is used as a Prayer (see the Rubric there). But if our intention be Praise, most of those Prayer-psalms lend themselves to Praise, and are so used in this Service before the Lessons, as we have just seen. In like manner metrical Hymns are to be found in our Hymn-books which are in their plain sense prayers rather than praises.
In the Day Hour Services we find metrical Hymns—at Lauds, Vespers and Compline after the Bible "Chapter," and, at the other Services, before the Psalms. They were in Latin, and some of them have been translated and are known to us in our Hymn-books.
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Of the Office Hymns well known in modern Hymn-books, Now that the daylight fills the sky is a good example.
We have, moreover, in the Prayer Book itself, two translations of the Hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus formerly sung at Lauds throughout Whitsun week.
The longer form of it, more a paraphrase than a translation, appeared in the Ordination Services in 1550; the shorter translation, which is so well known, in a Book of Devotions made by John Cosin in 1627, where are found also translations of other Day Hour Hymns, the book being designed from the Breviary.