LATIN HYMNOLOGY AND PROTESTANTISM.
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
Coelestis palmam triumphi,
Nobis veniam non deneges peccati.
In the same spirit he and his associates edited the first great
Protestant work on Church history—the _Magdeburg Centuries_ (1559-74, in
thirteen folio volumes). The first Protestants had no more idea of
surrendering the history of the Church to the champions of the Roman
Catholic Church, than of giving up to them the New Testament. They held
that down through all the ages ran a double current of pure Christianity
and scholastic perversion of that, and that the Reformation succeeds to
the former as the Tridentine Church to the latter. This especially as
regards the great central point in controversy, the part of grace and of
merit in the justification of the sinner. And they found the proof of
this continuity especially in the devotions of the early Church. They
found themselves in that great prayer of the Franciscan monk, which the
Roman Missal puts into the mouth of her holiest members as they gather
around the bier of the dead:
Quid sum miser tunc dicturus,
Quem patronum rogaturus,
Quum vix justus sit securus?
Rex tremendae majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salve me, fons pietatis!
“Whenever in the Middle Ages,” says Albrecht Ritschl, “devotion, so far
as it has found articulate expression, rises to the level of the thought
that the value of the Christian life, even where it is fruitful of good
works, is grounded not upon these as human merits, but upon the mercy of
God ... then the same line of thought is entered upon as that in which
the religious consciousness common to Luther and Zwingli was able to
break through the connection which had subsisted between Catholic
doctrine and the Church institutions for the application of
salvation.... Whenever even the Church of Rome places herself in the
attitude of prayer, it is inevitable that in the expression of her
religious discernment, in thanksgiving and petition, all the benefits of
salvation should be referred to God or to Christ; the daily need for new
grace, accordingly, is not expressed in the form of a claim based upon
merits, but in the form of reliance upon God.”[26]
That the Latin hymns of those earlier centuries show a steadily
increasing amount of unscriptural devotion to the mother of our Lord and
to His saints, and of the materializing view of our Lord’s presence with
His Church in the Communion, is undeniable. But even in these matters
the hymns of the primitive and mediaeval Church are a witness that these
and the like misbeliefs and mispractices are a later growth upon
primitive faith and usage.
The first generation of Protestants, to which Luther, Melanchthon, and
Zwingli belong, had been brought up on the hymns of the Breviary and of
the Missal, and they did not abandon their love for these when they
ceased to regard the Latin tongue as the only fit speech for public
worship. They showed their relish for the old hymns, by publishing
collections of them, by translating them into the national languages, by
writing Latin hymns in imitation of them, and even by continuing their
use in public worship to a limited extent.
As collectors and editors of the old Latin hymns, the Protestants of the
sixteenth century surpassed the Roman Catholics of that age. Over
against the names of Hermann Torrentinus (1513 and 1536), Jacob
Wimpheling (1519), Joste Clichtove (1515-19), Jacob van Meyer (1535),
Lorenzo Massorillo (1547), and George Cassander (1556), the Roman
Catholic hymnologists of the half century which followed the
Reformation, we may place the anonymous collector of Basel (1538),
Johann Spangenberg (1545), Lucas Lossius (1552 _et seq._, with Preface
by Melanchthon), Paul Eber (1564), George Fabricius (1564), Christopher
Corner (1568), Hermann Bonn (1569), George Major (1570), Andreas
Ellinger (1573), Adam Siber (1577), Matthew Luidke (1589), and Francis
Algerman (1596). All these, with the possible exception of the first,
were Lutherans, trained in the humanistic school of Latin criticism and
poetry; but only two of them found it needful or desirable to alter the
hymns into conformity with the tastes of the age. The collections of
Hermann Bonn, the first Lutheran superintendent of Lubeck, and that of
George Fabricius, are especially important, as faithfully reproducing
much that else might have been lost to us.
The work of translating the old Latin hymns fell especially to the
Lutherans. Roman Catholic preference was no stronger for the original
Latin than that of the Reformed for the Psalms. Of the great German
hymn-writers from Luther to Paul Gerhardt, nearly all made translations
from the storehouse of Latin hymnody, Bernard of Clairvaux being the
especial favorite with Johann Heermann, John Arndt, and Paul Gerhardt.
And even in hymns which are not translations, the influence of the Latin
hymns is seen in the epic tone, the healthy objectivity of the German
hymns of this age, in contrast to the frequently morbid subjectivity of
those which belong to the age of Pietism.
More interesting to us are the early translations into English. The
first are to be found in the _Primer_ of 1545, a book of private
devotions after the model of the Breviary, published in Henry VIII.’s
time both in English in 1545 and again in Latin (_Orarium_) in 1546. In
the next reign a substitute for this in English alone was prepared by
the more Protestant authorities of the Anglican Church, in which,
besides sundry doctrinal changes, the hymns were omitted. But the scale
inclined somewhat the other way after Elizabeth’s accession. The English
_Primer_ of 1559 and the Latin _Orarium_ of 1560 are revised editions of
her father’s, not of her brother’s publications. The parts devoted to
the worship of Mary are omitted, but the prayers for the dead and the
hymns are retained. These old versions are clumsy enough, but not
without interest as the first of their kind. Here is one with the
original text from the _Orarium_, differing from any other authority
known to us:
Rerum Creator omnium,
Te poscimus hoc vesperi
Defende nos per gratiam
Ab hostis nostri fraudibus.
Nullo ludamur, Domine,
Vel somnio vel phasmate:
In Te cor nostrum vigilet,
Nec dormiat in crimine.
Summe Pater, per Filium
Largire quod Te poscimus:
Cui per sanctum Spiritum
Aeterna detur gloria. Amen.
O Lord, the Maker of all thing,
We pray thee now in this evening
Us to defend, through thy mercy,
From all deceit of our enemy.
Let us neither deluded be,
Good Lord, with dream nor phantasy.
Our heart waking in thee thou keep,
That we in sin fall not on sleep.
O Father, through thy blessed Son,
Grant us this our petition;
To whom, with the Holy Ghost, always
In heaven and earth be laud and praise. Amen.
It is not wonderful that when the Anglo-Catholics sought to revive the
_Primer_ as “the authorized book of Family and Private Prayer” on the
same footing as the Prayer book, they took the liberty of substituting
modern versions of the hymns for these “authorized” translations.[27]
But the _Primer_, whatever its authority, never possessed that much more
important requisite to success—vitality. A very few editions sufficed
for the demand, and Bishop Cosin’s attempt to revive it in Charles I.’s
time only provoked a Puritan outcry against both him and it. Rev. Gerard
Moultrie has attempted to revive it in our own time, as “the only book
of private devotion which has received the sanction of the English
Church,” and has not achieved even thus much of success. No Prynne has
assailed him.
In the Book of Common Prayer, besides such “canticles” as the _Gloria in
Excelsis_ and the _Te Deum_, there is but one hymn, an English version
of the _Veni, Creator Spiritus_ in the Ordination Service. It is the
wordiest of all known versions, rendering one hundred and five Latin by
three hundred and fifty-seven English words, but is not without its
old-fashioned felicities. The revisers of 1661 cut it down by omitting
just half of it, and modernized the English in a number of places. Its
very verbosity seems to have suggested Bishop Cosin’s terse version,
containing but four more words than the original, which, however, it
somewhat abridges. This was inserted in 1661 as an alternate version.
The author of the paraphrase in the Prayer-Book is unknown. It is not
Bishop Coverdale, as his, although translated at second-hand from
Luther, as, indeed, all his hymns are from some German source, is far
closer and less wordy.[28] It also was adopted into the old Scottish
Psalter of the Reformation, where it appears in the appendix, along with
a metrical version of the Apostle’s Creed and other “uninspired
compositions.”
From the Reformation until about fifty years ago, there was among
English-speaking people no interest in Latin hymnology worth speaking
of. A few Catholic poets, like Crashaw and Dryden, honored their Church
versions from the hymns of the Breviary. But even John Austin, a
Catholic convert of 1640, when he prepared his _Devotions in the Ancient
Way of Offices_ after the model of the Breviary, wrote for it hymns of
his own instead of translating from the Latin. Some of these (“Blessed
be Thy love, dear Lord,” and “Hark, my soul, how everything”) have
become a part of our general wealth. Of course some versions of a homely
sort had to be made for Catholic books of devotion, and I possess _The
Evening Office of the Church in Latin and English_ (London, 1725), in
which the Vesper hymns of the Roman Breviary are closely and roughly
versified. It is notable that “the old hymns as they are generally sung
in churches”—_i.e._, the hymns as they stood before the revision of
1631, are printed as an appendix to the book, showing how slow English
Catholics were to accept the modernization of the hymns which the papacy
had sanctioned nearly a century before.
Mr. Orby Shipley, in his _Annus Sanctus_ (London, 1884), gives a large
number of these early versions from the Roman Catholic _Primers_ of
1619, 1684, 1685, and 1706; from the _Evening Office_ of 1710, 1725, and
1785; and from the _Divine Office_ of 1763 and 1780. The translations of
1619 have been ascribed to William Drummond, of Hawthornden, and those
of 1706 to Dryden. Drummond was the first Scotchman who adopted English
as the language of literature, and although a Protestant, he belonged to
the Catholicizing party represented by William Forbes, the first
Protestant bishop of Edinburgh. Three hymns are given in Sir Walter
Scott’s edition of Dryden on the authority of English Roman Catholic
tradition, the best known being his version of the _Veni Creator
Spiritus_. These three are found in the _Primer_ of 1706, along with
versions of the other hymns of the Roman Breviary sufficiently like them
to suggest that they are all by the same hand. But this judgment is
disputed.
Among Protestants the neglect was as great. So profuse a writer of hymns
for the Christian year as George Wither translated only the _Te Deum_
and the _Veni, Creator Spiritus_ into English verse.[29] Tate and Brady,
in their _Supplement_ (1703) to their _New Version of the Psalms_
(1696), published a translation of the _Veni, Creator Spiritus_. But
Bishop Symon Patrick was the only hymn-writer of that age who may be
said to have given any special attention to Latin hymns. His hymns were
chiefly translations from that source, especially Prudentius, and Lord
Selborne mentions that of _Alleluia, dulce carmen_, as the best.
The Methodist revival, which did so much to enrich our store of hymns,
and which called attention anew to those of Germany, accomplished
nothing for us as regards Latin hymns. The Earl of Roscommon’s
translation of the _Dies Irae_ (1717), and Dr. Johnson’s affecting
reference to the stanza,
_Quaerens me sedisti lassus, ..._
stand almost alone in that age. It was not until the Romantic movement
in Germany and then in England broke the bonds of a merely classic
culture, taught the world the beauty of Gothic art, and obliged men to
revise their estimate of the Middle Ages, that the singers of the
praises which sounded through those earlier centuries had a fair chance
to be judged at their real worth. The forerunner of that movement was
Johann Gottfried von Herder, who indeed may be said to have anticipated
the whole intellectual movement of the past century, Darwinism not
excepted. From his friend and master Hamann, “the Magus of the North,”
he had learned “the necessity for a complete and harmonious expression
of all the varied faculties of man,” and that “whatever is isolated or
the product of a single faculty is to be condemned.” This made him as
much discontented with the eighteenth century and its literature and
philosophy of the enlightened understanding, as Hamann himself was. It
was the foundation for that Catholic taste which enabled him to
appreciate the excellence of all those popular literatures which are the
outflow of the life of whole peoples. His _Voices of the Peoples_ did
for the Continent what Bishop Percy’s _Reliques_ did for England, and
did it much better. He saw that “the people and a common sentiment are
the foundations of a true poetry,” and the literature of the schools and
that of polite society are equally condemned to sterility. For this
reason he had small respect for that classic Latin literature at whose
bar every modern production was impleaded. He found far more genuine
life and power in the Latin poems of the Jesuit father, Jacob Balde, and
still more in the hymns of the Latin Church. His _Letters for the
Promotion of Humanity_ (1794-96) contain a passage of classic
importance:
“The hymns which Christianity introduced had for their basis those old
Hebrew Psalms which very soon found their way into the Church, if not
as songs or anthems, at any rate as prayers.... The songs of Mary and
of Zacharias, the Angelic Salutation, the _Nunc Dimittis_ of Simeon,
which open the New Testament, gave character more immediately to the
Christian hymns. Their gentler voice was more suitable to the spirit
of Christianity than even the loud trumpet note of that old jubilant
Hallelujah, although that note was found capable of many applications,
and was now strengthened with the words of prophet or psalmist, now
adapted to gentler strains. Over the graves of the dead, whose
resurrection was already present to the spirit’s vision, in caves and
catacombs, first were heard these psalms of repentance and prayer, of
sorrow and hope, until after the public establishment of Christianity,
they stepped out of the dark into the light, out of solitude into
splendid churches, before consecrated altars, and now assumed a like
splendor in their expression. There is hardly any one who can listen
to the _Jam moesta quiesce querula_ of Prudentius without feeling his
heart touched by its moving strains, or who can hear the funeral
sequence _Dies irae, dies illa_, without a shudder, or whom so many
other hymns, each with its own character—_e.g._, _Veni, Redemptor
gentium_; _Vexilla Regis prodeunt_; _Salvete flores Martyrum_; _Pange,
lingua, gloriosi_, etc., will fail to be carried into that frame of
feeling which each seeks to awaken, and with all its humility of form
and its churchly peculiarities, never fails to command. In one there
sounds the voice of prayer; another could find its accompaniment only
in the harp; in yet another the trumpet rings, or there sounds the
thousand-voiced organ, and so on.
“If we seek after the reason of this remarkable effect, which we feel
in hearing these old Christian hymns, we find it somewhat peculiar. It
is anything but the novelty of the _thoughts_ which here touches and
there shakes us. Thoughts in these hymns are found but sparingly. Many
are merely solemn recitations of a well-known story, or they are
familiar petitions and prayers. They nearly all repeat each other. Nor
is it frequently surprisingly fine and novel sentiments with which
they somehow permeate us; the novel and the fine are not objects in
the hymns. What, then, is it that touches us? _Simplicity_ and
_Veracity_. Here sounds the speech of a general confession of one
heart and one faith. Most of them are constructed either so as to be
fit for use every day of the year, or so as to be used on the
festivals of the various seasons. As these come round there comes with
them in constant recurrence their rehearsal of Christian doctrines.
There is nothing superfine in the hymns as regards either emotion, or
duty, or consolation. There reigns in all of them a general popularity
of content, expressed in great accents. He who seeks novel thoughts in
a _Te Deum_ or a _Salve Regina_ looks for them in the wrong place. It
is just what is every day and always known, which here is to serve as
the garb of truth. The hymn is meant to be an ambrosial offering of
nature, deathless like that, and ever returning.
“It follows that, as people in these Christian hymns did not look for
the grace of classic expression or the pleasurable emotion of the
instant—in a word, what we expect from a work of art, they produced
the strangest effects at once after their introduction. Just as
Christian hands overthrew the statues and temples of the gods in honor
of the unseen God, so these hymns contained a germ which was to bring
about the death of the pagan poetry. Not only were those hymns to gods
and goddesses, heroes and geniuses, regarded by the Christians as the
work of unbelievers or misbelievers, but the germ from which they
sprang, the poetic and sportive fancy, the pleasure and rejoicing of
the peoples in their national festivals, were condemned as a school of
evil demons; yes, even the national pride, to which those songs
appealed, was despised as a perilous though splendid sin. The old
religion had outlived its time, the new had won its victory, when the
absurdity of idol-worship and pagan superstitions, the disorders and
abominations which attended the festivals of Bacchus, Cybele, and
Aphrodite, were brought to the light of day. Whatever of poetry was
associated with these was a work of the devil. There began a new age
for poetry, music, speech, the sciences, and indeed for the whole
direction of human thought.”
As the Romanticist movement gained ground in Germany, attention to the
early hymns increased. Even Goethe, the _weltkind_ among the prophets,
was influenced. Hence his use of the _Dies Irae_ in the first part of
_Faust_, although he was pagan enough to care for nothing at Assisi
except the Roman remains. A. W. Schlegel made a number of translations
for the _Musen-Almanach_. Then came the long series of German
translators, of whom A. J. Rambach, A. L. Follen (brother of Professor
Charles Follen of Harvard), Karl Simrock (1850 and 1866), and G. A.
Koenigsfeld (1847 and 1865) are the most notable. Much more important to
us are the German collectors: G. A. Björn (a Dane, 1818), J. C. von
Zabuesnig (1822 and 1830), H. A. Daniel (_Blüthenstrauss_, 1840;
_Thesaurus_, 1841-56), F. J. Mone (1853-55), C. B. Moll (1861 and 1868),
P. Gall Morel (1866), Joseph Kehrein (1873). To the unwearied
thoroughness of these editors, more than of any other laborers in this
field, we owe our ampler access to the treasures of Latin hymnody. But
what field of research is there in which the scholarship of Germany has
not laid the rest of the world under obligations?
In English literature the Romanticist movement begins properly with Sir
Walter Scott. Himself a Presbyterian, he was brought up on the old
Scotch Psalm-book, for which he entertained the same affection as did
Burns, Edward Irving, Campbell, Carlyle, and Archdeacon Hare. He opposed
any attempt to improve it, on the ground that it was, “with all its
acknowledged occasional harshness, so beautiful that any alterations
must eventually prove only so many blemishes.” But his literary tastes
led him to a lofty appreciation of the Anglican liturgy—a circumstance
which has led many to class him as an Episcopalian—and equally for the
poetry of the mediaeval hymns. His vigorous version of a part of the
_Dies Irae_ inserted in _The Lady of the Lake_ (1805) gives him his
smallest claim to mention in the history of hymnody. It was the new
atmosphere he carried into the educated world, his fresh and hearty
admiration of admirable things in the Middle Ages, which had been
thought barbarous, that makes him important to us. He gave the English
and Scottish people new weights and measures, new standards of critical
judgment, which emancipated them from narrow, pseudo-Protestant
traditions. He made the great Church of undivided Western Europe
intelligible. No doubt many follies resulted from this novel lesson, the
worst of all being contempt for Luther and his associates in the
Reformation. The negations which attend such revolutions in opinion
always are foolish exaggerations. It is the affirmations which are
valuable and which remain. And Romanticism for more than half a century
has been affecting the religious, the social, the intellectual life of
Great Britain and America in a thousand ways, and with, on the whole,
positive and beneficial results. Its most powerful manifestation was in
the Oxford movement,[30] but both in its causes and its effects it has
transcended the limits which separate the divided forces of
Protestantism.
Naturally the Oxford movement was the first to turn attention to the
hymns of the Middle Ages, or what it regarded as such. We use this
qualified expression because its leaders at the outset were much better
poets than hymnological scholars, and welcomed anything in the shape of
a Latin hymn as “primitive,” no matter what. Isaac Williams, in the
_British Magazine_ in 1830, published a series of translations of
“primitive hymns” which he gathered into a volume in 1839. They were
from the Paris Breviary, of whose hymns only one in fourteen were older
than 1685, and most of them not yet a hundred years old. Rev. John
Chandler, in his _Hymns of the Primitive Church_ (1837), drew on Santeul
and Coffin with equal freedom, evidently supposing he was going back to
the early ages for his originals. Bishop Mant, in his _Ancient Hymns
from the Roman Breviary_ (1837), did a little better, although not
half-a-dozen hymns in that Breviary are unaltered from their primitive
forms, and many are no older than the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
Rev. Edward Caswall, an Oxford convert to the Church of Rome, naturally
confined his _Lyra Catholica_ (1849) to the Breviary hymns,
supplementing those of Rome with some from Paris. The first collection
published by Dr. Newman (_Hymni Ecclesiae_, Pars I., 1839) was confined
to the Paris Breviary, but with the notice that they “had no equal claim
to antiquity” with “the discarded collections of the ante-reform era.”
But he claimed on rather slight ground that they “breathe an ancient
spirit, and even where they are the work of one pen, are the joint and
indivisible contribution of many ancient minds.” This is an opinion of
the work of Santeul and Coffin in which neither Cardinal Newman nor the
Gallican Church would agree to-day.
In fact, these English scholars, with their constant habit of making
Latin verse after classic models from their school-days, and their
entire want of familiarity with post-classic Latin, found what pleased
them best in the two Breviaries of Rome and Paris. With that they seemed
likely to stop. It was Dr. John Mason Neale (1851-58) who, among
translators, first broke these bounds, went to the older sources, and
introduced to English readers, both by his collections and his
translations, the great hymns of the Western Church. As a translator he
leaves much to be desired. His ideas as to faithful reproduction of the
form of his originals are vague. His hymns too often might be said to be
based on the Latin text rather than to reproduce it. But they are
spirited poems, whose own vigor and beauty sent readers to the original,
and they were not disappointed.
From that time we have had a series of excellent workers in this
field—John Keble, Rev. W. J. Blew (1855), Mr. J. D. Chambers (1857 and
1866), Rev. J. W. Hewett (1859), Sir Henry Baker (1861 and 1868), Rev.
Herbert Kynaston (1862), Rev. J. Trend (1862), Rev. P. S. Worsley
(1863), Earl Nelson (1857 and 1868), Rev. Richard F. Littledale (1867),
R. Campbell, of the Anglo-Catholic party; and Dean Stanley, Mrs. Charles
(1858 and 1866) and Dr. Hamilton Magill (1876) outside its ranks. Theirs
have been no inconsiderable part of those labors which have made the
last thirty years the golden age of English hymn-writing, surpassing
even the era of the Methodist revival.
In America the work was begun in 1840 with a modest little volume
published at Auburn, in New York, and ascribed by Mr. Duffield to Dr.
Henry Mills of Auburn Theological Seminary, who in 1856 also published a
volume of translations of German hymns. His earlier book was _The Hymn
of Hildebert and the Ode of Xavier, with English Versions_, and
contained thirty-five duodecimo pages. Next in order came Dr. John
Williams, Bishop of Connecticut, with _Ancient Hymns of the Holy Church_
(1845). Dr. William R. Williams of New York, in his address on “The
Conservative Principle in our Literature,” delivered in 1843, made a
reference to the _Dies Irae_, which gave him the occasion to publish in
an Appendix the literary history of the great hymn, giving the text
along with Dr. Trench’s version and his own. This seems to have given
the impulse which has made America so prolific in translations of that
hymn, only Germany surpassing us in this respect. Dr. Abraham Coles may
be said to have led off with his volume, containing thirteen
translations in 1847. But it was not until after the war for the Union
that the productive powers of American translators were brought into
play. Much, no doubt, was due to foreign impulse, especially from Dr.
Trench and Dr. Newman; but it is notable that in America far more work
has been done outside than inside the Episcopalian communion.
Dr. Coles again in 1866, Mr. Duffield in 1867, Chancellor Benedict in
1869, Hon. N. B. Smithers in 1879 and 1881, and Mr. John L. Hayes in
1887 published volumes of translations. But far more numerous are the
poets whose versions of Latin hymns have appeared in various periodicals
or in collections like Professor Coppée’s _Songs of Praise_ (1866), Dr.
Schaff’s _Christ in Song_ (1869), Odenheimer and Bird’s _Songs of the
Spirit_ (1871), Dr. H. C. Fish’s _Heaven in Song_ (1874), Frank
Foxcroft’s _Resurgit_ (1879), and Dr. Schaff and Arthur Gilman’s
_Library of Sacred Poetry_ (1881 and 1886). Of these contributing poets
we mention Dr. E. A. Washburn, whose translations have been collected in
his posthumous volume, _Voices from a Busy Life_ (1883); Dr. Ray Palmer,
our chief sacred singer, whose versions of the _O esca viatorum_ and the
_Jesu dulcis memoria_ are as classic as his “My faith looks up to Thee;”
Dr. A. R. Thompson, to whom the present volume is under great
obligations; Rev. J. Anketell, another of its benefactors; Rev. M.
Woolsey Stryker, Rev. D. Y. Heisler, Rev. Franklin Johnson, D.D., and
Rev. W. S. McKenzie, D.D. Besides these we may mention the anthology of
translations published by the Rev. F. Wilson (1859), of texts by
Professor F. A. March (1874 and 1883), and of both texts and
translations by Judge C. C. Nott (1865 and subsequent years).
It is not, however, only as literature, but in the actual use of the
American churches, that the Latin hymns have made a place for
themselves. Since 1859, when the Andover professors published the
_Sabbath Hymn and Tune-Book_, with original translations furnished by
Dr. Ray Palmer, there has been a peaceful revolution in American
hymnology. Every one of the larger denominations and many of the smaller
have provided themselves with new hymn-books, in which the resources of
English, foreign, and ancient hymnology have been employed freely, and
with more exacting taste as to sense and form, than characterized the
hymn-books of the era before the war. While the compilers have drawn
freely upon Caswall, Neale, Chandler, and the Anglican _Hymns Ancient
and Modern_ (1861), in many cases original translations were given, as
in _Hymns of the Church_ for the (Dutch) Reformed Church, of which Dr.
A. R. Thompson was one of the editors; and Dr. Charles Robinson’s
_Laudes Domini_ (1884), to which Mr. Duffield contributed. And there is
evidence that the hymns thus brought into Church use from the storehouse
of the earlier Christian ages have helped thoughtful Christians to
realize more fully the great principle of the Communion of the saints—to
realize that all the faithful of the present are bound in spiritual
brotherhood with those who held to the same Head and walked in the light
of the same faith in bygone centuries, even though it was with stumbling
and amid shadows, from which our path by God’s good providence has been
set free.