Childlike though the voices be,
And untunable the parts,
Thou wilt own the minstrelsy
If it flows from childlike hearts.
Sincerity requires that the thoughts expressed should be real to the
singer as well as to the poet. They may not be such as would have
occurred to him, and the expression may be altogether beyond his
powers of origination, but they must be such as he can think in his
best moments or may be helped to enter into at the hour of prayer.
Sincerity does not require that all our hymns should be on the lowest
level common to a general congregation, but that the sentiment
expressed, the emotion presupposed or to be excited, be suited to the
heart of man in the presence of his Father in heaven. In the
compilation of a hymn-book something must be left to the good sense
and judgement of those who are to use it; and there is no part of
public worship which calls for more serious and intelligent
consideration than the selection of hymns suited to the occasion and
to the congregation.
It is perhaps too much to say that sincerity also requires that the
writer of a hymn should be not unworthy of a place in the Christian
choir. Happily this question rarely arises. The author’s name is often
an aid to devotion, and in most hymn-books there is hardly a
name—except Dryden’s—that seems wholly unfitted to this sacred
service.
2. _Reverence._—‘God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let
thy words be few,’ restrained, seemly. The profoundest reverence, the
lowliest adoration, shrinks from utterance when it hears and sees
unspeakable things. This is sublimely taught in those great lines of
Dante:
Here memory mocks the toil of genius. Christ
Beamed on that cross; and pattern fails me now.
But whoso takes his cross, and follows Christ,
Will pardon me for that I leave untold,
When in the fleckered dawning he shall spy
The glitterance of Christ.[26]
Even so profuse a hymn-writer as Watts feels that there are times when
it is best to ‘leave untold’ what the heart most desires to tell:
A solemn reverence checks our songs,
And praise sits silent on our tongues.
It is a less sublime, but not less acceptable, form of worship which
attempts that which yet it knows to be impossible. Praise must be
heard in Zion lest if men hold their peace the very stones should cry
out. Nor is it right that awe should silence love. We worship the
King, eternal, immortal, invisible, yet even so we praise Him who
‘like as a Father pitieth His children’; and when we sing praise to
Christ as God, we remember that He called His disciples not servants,
but friends.
Dr. Watts utters the thought of many hearts in one of his finest
hymns—
Join all the glorious names
Of wisdom, love, and power,
That ever mortals knew,
That angels ever bore;
All are too mean to speak His worth,
Too mean to set my Saviour forth.
But O what gentle terms,
What condescending ways,
Doth our Redeemer use,
To teach His heavenly grace;
Mine eyes with joy and wonder see
What forms of love He bears for me!
It would be easy to give illustrations of offences against the spirit
of reverence, especially in hymns of the eighteenth century and the
earlier part of the nineteenth. The Moravian hymns in particular were
often disfigured by the most revolting phrases, so had indeed that one
does not care to give them even the notoriety of emphatic
condemnation.[27] But such gross offences are rare in our time, and
are practically unknown to Protestant hymnals. Some of the Romish
hymns, and a few in Anglican books, refer to the details of our Lord’s
Incarnation and Passion with irreverent and even indecent realism, and
those addressed to the Virgin Mary are often as bad as any found in
the older Moravian books.
We are, on the other hand, in some danger of carrying our sense of
what is reverent too far, and of altering without reason the glowing
words of devout Christian affection. John Wesley shrank from including