It has been asked by both Roman Catholics and Protestants—and not unfairly—whether the interest shown for the last half century by Protestant writers in the hymns of Latin Christendom, is a legitimate one. It is said by the former: “You are poaching on our preserves. All this you admire so much is what your fathers turned their backs upon when they renounced the Roman obedience. You cannot with any consistency attempt to naturalize in your churches and their services, hymns which have been written for a worship which differs in idea and principle, not in details merely, from your own. At best you can pick out a little here and a little there, which seems to suit you. But even then you are in danger of adopting what teaches doctrine which your Protestant confessions and their expositors denounce as idolatry, as when the compilers of the hymnal in use by American Presbyterians adopted Mr. Caswall’s English version of
Quicunque certum quaeritis,
ignoring its express reference to the devotion to the Sacred Heart. This is a gross instance of what you are doing all the time. If it lead you back to the bosom of the Catholic Church we shall be glad of it. But it grates on Catholic nerves to see you employing the phrase which we regard as a serious statement of doctrinal truth, as though it were a mere purple patch of rhetoric.”
This leads us to ask what the Reformation was in the idea of the Reformers themselves. They never took the ground that the religious life of Protestant nations and churches was out of all relation to the life of the nations and churches of Western Europe, as these were before Luther began his work. With all their regard for the Scriptures, they never assumed that out of these could be created a Christian Church upon ground previously held by Antichrist and him alone. Luther declared that the elements of the Church for whose upbuilding he was laboring were just those in which he had been educated. As he expressed it, these were found in the Catechism taught to every child in Germany, and which embraced the creed, the commandments, the sacraments, and the Our Father. What he had learned from study of the New Testament was to give these elements their due prominence, and to disengage them from the additions and corruptions by which they had been obscured. It was not a destructive revolution, but a change of doctrinal perspective for which he was contending. He never lost his relish for the good things he had learned in the Church of his childhood. While he rendered the service into the German speech of the people, he followed in the main the old order of the service in his Deutsche Messe. He also rendered into German sixteen old hymns, twelve from the Latin, from Ambrose down to Huss, and four from the old German of the Middle Ages. In his House-Postil he speaks with great enthusiasm of the hymns and sequences he had learned to sing in church as a boy; and in his Table Talk, while he censures Ambrose as a wordy poet, he praises the Patris Sapientia, but above all the Passion hymn of Pope Gregory the Great, Rex Christe factor omnium, as the best of hymns, whether Latin or German.
Melanchthon’s gentler spirit more than shared in Luther’s reverence for the good in the mediaeval Church. The antithesis to Melanchthon, the representative of the extreme party among Protestants, is Matthias Flacius Illyricus, a man of Slavic stock and uncompromising temper. Yet he also searched the past for witnesses to the truth which Luther had proclaimed. He appeals to a hymn in the Breviary of the Premonstratensian Order, as old, he thinks, as the twelfth century, which testifies against saint worship:
Adjuvent nos eorum merita,
Quos propria impediunt scelera?
Excuset eorum intercessio,
Quos propria accusat actio?
At tu, qui eis tribuisti