This notice of the early printed Church books, which Daniel, Neale, Morell, and Kehrein have brought under requisition, carries us over into the century of the Reformation, which also is that in which the Renaissance began to affect the matter and manner of hymn-writing. Already in the fifteenth century we have hymns of the humanist type by Aeneas Sylvius (Pope Pius II.); by Adam Wernher of Themar, a friend of Johann Trithemius, a jurist by profession, and the instructor of Philip of Hesse in the humanities; and by Sebastian Brandt, the celebrated author of the “Ship of Fools.” All these give careful attention to classic Roman models in the matter of both prosody and vocabulary. If we were to put Brandt’s Sidus ex claro veniens Olympo alongside the Puer natus in Bethlehem, we should see how little of the life and force of simplicity and reality there was in the new poetry.
The sixteenth century begins with the hymns of the humanist Alexander Hegius, a pupil of the school at Deventer and a protégé of the Brethren of the Common Life, who may have known Thomas à Kempis, as he was born in 1433, or at latest in 1445. He died in 1498, but his hymns appeared in 1501 and 1503. He was the friend of Rudolph Agricola and of Erasmus, and introduced the new learning, especially Greek, into Holland. His hymns are pagan in their vocabulary, although in accord with the orthodoxy of the time. Two lines of his,
“Qui te ‘Matrem’ vocat, orbis
Regem vocat ille parentem,”
might have suggested two of Keble’s, which have given no small offence,
“Henceforth, whom thousand worlds adore,
He calls thee ‘Mother’ evermore.”
To Zacharias Ferrari ample reference has been made in the chapter on the Breviaries. Specimens of his work may be found in Wackernagel’s first volume, as also of the hymns of Erasmus (1467-1536), of Jakob Montanus (1485-1588), of Helius Eobanus Hessus (1488-1540), and Marc-Antonius Muretus. To these Roman Catholic humanists—Eobanus Hessus afterward became a Lutheran—might have been added J. Ludovicus Vives (1492-1540), Marc-Antonio Flaminio (1498-1550), and Matthias Collinus (ob. 1566). Wackernagel does add Joste Clichtove (ob. 1543), and Jakob Meyer (1491-1552), who did not attempt original hymns, but recast in classic forms those already in use. Clichtove was a Fleming, and one of the earliest collectors.
The series of Protestant hymn-writers joins hard on to that of the Roman Catholic humanists. In the main they belong to the same school. Their hymns are not, like the Protestant German hymns, the spontaneous and inevitable outpouring of simple and natural emotion—a quality which puts Luther and Johann Herrmann beside Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas of Celano. They are the scholastic exercises of men singing the praise of God in a tongue foreign to their thought. Even the best of them, George Fabricius of Chemnitz, whose edition of the early Christian poets has laid us under permanent obligations, although the most careful to avoid paganisms in his hymns, and the most influenced by the earlier Latin hymns, never impresses us with the freedom and spontaneity of his verse. The series runs: Urbanus Rhegius (ob. 1541), Philip Melanchthon (1497-1572), Wolfgang Musculus (1497-1563), Joachim Camerarius (1500-74), Paul Eber (1511-69), Bishop John Parkhurst of Norwich (1511-74), Johann Stigel (1515-71), George Fabricius (1516-71), George Klee, or Thymus (fl. 1548-50), Nicholas Selneccer (1530-92), Ludwig Helmbold (1532-98), Wolfgang Ammonius (1579), and Theodore Zwinger (1533-88). Recasts of old hymns both as to literary form and theological content we have from Hermann Bonn (1504-48), Urbanus Rhegius, George Klee, and Andreas Ellinger (1526-82). The last-named was a German physician who graduated at Wittemberg in 1549. His Hymnorum Ecclesiasticorum Libri Tres (1578) is described by Daniel as the most copious collection he has seen, but worthless as an authority in its first and second books, as the hymns in these are altered for metrical reasons. Hermann Bonn was a Westphalian, who became the first Lutheran Superintendent in Lubeck, and introduced the Reformation into Osnabruck. He published the first hymn-book in Platt-Deutsch in 1547.
To a later generation belongs Wilhelm Alard (1572-1645), the son of a Flemish Lutheran, who fled to Germany from the Inquisition. Wilhelm studied at Wittemberg, and became pastor at Crempe in Holstein, and published two or perhaps three small volumes of original Latin hymns. Dr. Trench has extracted from one of these two hymns. Of that to his Guardian Angel, Chancellor Benedict, Dr. Washburn, and Mr. Duffield have made translations. This is Mr. Duffield’s: