Of old, in the temple, there was kept—said the rabbins—a flute of reed, plain and straight and simple, but of marvellous sweetness. It came down from Moses’ day. But the king commanded his goldsmiths to cover and adorn it with gold and gems. And, lo, the sweetness of the reed flute was forever gone! Thus, perchance, in our later art and our foolish wisdom, it may be we have often spoiled the ancient hymns!
CHAPTER II.
THE STUDY OF THE LATIN HYMNS.
The genealogy of the song of praise in the mediaeval and modern Christian Church is both simple and beautiful. It begins far back, as we have seen, in the chants and psalms of the Hebrew. Then it changes to the Syriac and the Greek. Then it emerges into the Latin. Next it is caught up in the old High-German poetry, and at length it becomes the modern English hymn. The line of direct descent is like that of some high and puissant family whose inheritance is transferred now to one branch and now to another, but whose noble lineage is never lost.
When the reader or the worshipper is attracted to-day by some ancient hymn-writer’s name, he naturally asks for information. He is aware that hymnology is called a branch of study, like any other scholastic pursuit. He is also aware that the more usual English and German hymns have their historians, and, to a limited degree, that they have been analyzed, classified, compared, and their text settled. Even their impelling causes and surroundings are known, as in the case of the touching lyrics of George Neumark and Paul Gerhardt, or the pathetic strains of Cowper, or the stirring notes of Charles Wesley.
But occasionally a bird of strange plumage flies across this peaceful sky or perches and sings in these religious groves. The name of some Greek father—an Anatolius or a John of Damascus—appears as the original author. The hymn-horizon widens out to an earlier age. When one sings the Te Deum Laudamus, he discovers that it has its antecedent in the Greek liturgy. And when he employs that fine version of Bishop Patrick,
“O God, we praise Thee and confess,”
he is put upon a track of inquiry by which he discerns an even earlier rendering in the oldest prayer-books, beginning—
“We praise Thee, God, we knowledge Thee
The only Lord to be.”
These little hints and stray gleams of outlook through the mists of uninformation are intensely alluring. And when by some happy chance it is learned that this old Latin sequence is traditionally ascribed to Ambrose, Bishop of Milan; when it is accredited to the spontaneous utterance of Augustine and his great preceptor at the time of Augustine’s baptism; when it is noted as a derivative from that Greek psalmody whence the holy Ambrose obtained so many of his hymns; and when it opens thus a door into the heaven of the earlier worship of the Church, then indeed the reader is proportionately stimulated to further question.