Adoro Te devote, latens Deitas,
assigning it for late (serotinas) services in the octave of Corpus Christi. So Newman; but Daniel declares he finds it in none of the breviaries of modern use, and in the missals only as a part of the priest’s private preparation for saying Mass. Even this rank has not been attained by the sixth hymn ascribed to him, the beautiful
O Esca viatorum,
which Dr. Ray Palmer has made familiar to American worshippers by his exquisite version, first published in the Andover Sabbath Hymn-Book:
O Bread to pilgrims given.
Moll denies that Thomas wrote this, and says it is by a Jesuit poet, which is most probable. March calls it “a happy echo” of the undisputed hymns of Thomas Aquinas. But the echo is softened; the hymn is less masculine. Lympha fons alone would serve as a note to show that Aquinas never wrote it.
It has been said by Dr. Neale that the
Pange, lingua, gloriosi
“contests the second place among those of the Western Church, with the Vexilla Regis, the Stabat Mater, the Jesu dulcis memoria, the Ad Regias Agni Dapes, the Ad Supernam, and one or two others, leaving the Dies Irae in its unapproachable glory.” But this judgment is the prejudiced one of a High Churchman, sufficiently in sympathy with the Roman doctrine of the sacraments to relish keenly Thomas’s concise and vigorous statement of that doctrine, and to mistake the relish for critical appreciation of the poetry. Dr. Neale even praises Thomas’s treatise On the Venerable Sacrament of the Altar as the finest devotional treatise of the Middle Ages, finer therefore than the Imitation itself! A calmer estimate will put the hymn decidedly below Bernard’s exquisite Jesu dulcia memoria, or the Veni, Creator Spiritus of Rabanus Maurus, or the Veni, Sancte Spiritus of Hermann Contractus. It is true that it excels all these in its peculiar qualities, its logical neatness, dogmatic precision, and force of almost argumentative statement; but these qualities are not poetical. In this respect it is not altogether unlike Toplady’s “Rock of Ages,” a hymn in which the intellect has cut a channel for the emotions to flow. That was written as a tail-piece to a controversial article in which Toplady discussed John Wesley’s doctrines in the matter of faith and works, and is a terse statement of theological discriminations on that point.
The Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem, as it is a much longer hymn, gives more scope for the exposition of the Roman doctrine. For this reason Martin Luther abhorred it, probably also because he had no good opinion of Thomas himself. He accuses him of perverting the Scripture in this hymn, “as though he were the worst enemy of God, or else an idiot.” But this harsh judgment did not succeed in expelling the hymn from the use of the Lutheran churches, and since the Oxford revival it has found its way into other Protestant churches. But the sixth, seventh and eighth verses express the doctrine of transubstantiation so distinctly, that one must have gone as far as Dr. Pusey, who avowed that he held “all Roman doctrine,” before using their words in any but a non-natural sense. In the fine version made by Dr. A. R. Thompson, first published in the Sunday-School Times in 1883, and included in Dr. Robinson’s Laudes Domini, only half the hymn is given, those verses being taken which deflect least from the general current of Christian thought about the sacrament. By the author’s kind permission, we give it here with his latest revision: