above the dullest levels of devotion. There should be in a hymn a
restrained fervour, a reverent rapture of poetic inspiration free from
all admixture of the sensuous and morbidly emotional. ‘Be not drunken
with wine ... but be filled with the Spirit.’
Quench then the altar-fires of your old gods,
Quench not the fire within.[29]
Nay, rather, if we find no ‘minstrel rapture’ for the praise of the
Most High, may we not ask with Charles Wesley—
Why breaks not out the fire within,
In flames of joy, and praise, and love?
As might be expected, it is among the Anglican and the rationalistic
communities that there is the greatest dread of the emotional in
worship. Yet Dr. Martineau is the ablest apologist for fervour in
religious poetry.
The editor of a hymn-book will not think it necessary to graduate
the fervour, the imaginativeness, the grandeur of the compositions
admitted into his volume, by the cold, level, and prosaic condition
of mind which may possibly prevail among some who use it. Thus, to
damp the fire down to the temperature of the fuel, seems to offer
but a small prospect of kindling anything. We must not thus forgo
the glorious power which art exercises in worship. Its peculiar
function in connexion with religion is to substitute for the poor
and low thoughts of ordinary men, the solemn and vivid images of
things invisible that have revealed themselves to loftier souls, and
to present the objects of faith before the general mind in something
of that aspect under which they rise up before the great artists of
poetry and of sound. These gifted men are to lift us; we are not to
depress them. In sacred music we acknowledge this principle at once;
we confess that it is a noble thing, when we think of the origin of
things, and call God the Creator, to have within us the mighty
transitions of Haydn’s genius instead of our own puny dreams; to
have the incidents of sacred story glow and live before us at the
touch of a power like that of Handel or of Spohr; to find ourselves,
at such bidding, with the ‘Shepherds abiding in the field,’ not far
from the holy chant falling on the midnight air; or to hear in a
voice, melting as Christ’s, ‘Come unto Me, ye weary’; or, as we pass
from bereavement to bereavement of this world, to be haunted, as
with a sudden peace, by the echo of that unearthly strain, ‘Blest
are the departed.’ Not less elevating is the poetry than the melody
of faith, when it is equally left alone with its first fresh power,
and not reduced halfway to prose as a condition of its entrance into
worship.[30]
We should, perhaps, hesitate to say that a Christian hymn may have the
‘fine, careless rapture’ which is the glory of Browning’s thrush, but
we must not deny to it the ‘inward glee’ as well as the ‘serious
faith’ of Wordsworth’s stock-dove. The fervour of Christian song is
the bright expression of our glorying in the Lord.