He does as he said,
Our holy Lord Jesus
Alive from the dead.
The later additions to the stock of Latin hymns are important only to the student of Roman Catholic liturgies, as connected with the new devotions sanctioned from time to time by the Congregation of Sacred Rites. Thus the devotion to the Sacred Heart led to the writing of the hymn Quicunque certum quaeritis, which the Roman Breviary has copied from the Franciscan, and whose translation by Mr. Caswall has found its way even into Protestant hymn-books. And the crowning sanction of the extravagant reverence for our Lord’s mother, the declaration that she was conceived without sin, and the institution of the feast of the Immaculate Conception, caused Archbishop John von Geissel of Koeln to write, in 1855, a new sequence for the Missal service, Virgo virginum praeclara.
Last in the series of the Latin hymn-writers stands the present pope, Leo XIII., who is the third pope in the long series to whom any hymn can be ascribed with any degree of certainty, the other two being Damasus and Urban VIII. In his Latin poems, published in 1881, there are three hymns in honor of two bishops of Perugia who suffered martyrdom in the early age of the Church. They are not remarkable for poetical inspiration, although they show that his Jesuit masters imbued him with the rules of classic verse and expression. All his poems have been reprinted in this country (Baltimore, 1886), with an English version by the Jesuits of Woodstock College.
In any other field of Christian hymnology we should close our account of the past by the expression of confidence in the fertility of the future. But as regards Latin hymnology, we feel that the period of greatest value has passed by, and the record is sealed. While it is true that
“Generations yet unborn
Shall bless and magnify the Lord,”
as Rouse sings, we feel that it will not be in the medium of a dead language, but in the tongues “understanded of the people.” The attempt to maintain Latin as the language—as the exclusive speech of Christian worship in Western Europe, is one of those parts of the Roman Catholic system which are already condemned by results. The comparative barrenness of Latin hymnology for the past hundred years is evidence enough that this is not the channel in which Christian inspiration now flows; and the attention paid even by Roman Catholic poets to hymn-writing in the national languages is fresh evidence of the readiness of that communion to adapt itself to new conditions as soon as this is seen to be inevitable.