If we should be faithless,
He is faithful still.”
It does not, of course, absolutely follow that these are really such fragments of hymns as scholars have supposed. The late Dr. Lyman Coleman—a man of great practical good judgment—comments upon these citations thus:
“The argument is not conclusive; and all the learned criticism, the talent, and the taste, that have been employed on this point, leave us little else than uncertain conjecture on which to build an hypothesis.” (Primitive Church, p. 366.) Yet the latest scholarship tends so strongly in this direction, and the internal evidence is so good and fair, that it may be regarded as pretty well affirmed and accepted. No one, for example, would think of comparing such passages as these with the antithetic prose of Romans 3:21-23; or with the magnificent unrhythmic utterance in Romans 8:38, 39; or with the careful particularity of 2 Corinthians 6:4-10. They are seen and felt to be different both in tone and in form.
In the Apocalypse, where the language is naturally exalted and poetic, several such instances have been noted. They are: Revelation 1:4-8; 5:9, 10, 12-14; 11:15, 17, 18; 15:3, 4; 21:10-14, and 22:17. Of one of these—the “Song of Moses and of the Lamb”—we may be reasonably certain:
“Great are Thy works and strange,
Lord God, Thou Ruler of all!
And just are Thy ways, and true,
Thou King of the nations of earth.
For who shall not fear Thee, Lord,