7. _Truth_ of doctrine.—If it be allowed that hymns play an important
part in the teaching of the Church, it is hardly necessary to press
this point. Indeed, there is often more to be feared from theological
pedantry than from doctrinal sensitiveness. The essential unity of the
faith of Christendom is nowhere better illustrated than in the number
of hymns which belong to the common treasure of the Church. There is
already a union of hearts in the language of devotion which is the
surest promise of the reunion of Christendom. At the same time, there
are not a few hymns which must either be excluded from denominational
hymn-books, or be revised into accord with the faith of the
congregations that are to use them.
I well remember the distress of a distinguished Independent minister
when I quoted to him Wesley’s verse—
Ah! Lord, with trembling I confess,
A gracious soul may fall from grace;
The salt may lose its seasoning power,
And never, never find it more—
and the pained incredulity with which he deprecated my assurance that
the hymn was still in use in our congregations. I remember, too, how
abruptly an eminent Methodist minister closed his hymn-book and
directed the congregation to cease singing when he found them
approaching the last verse of one of Toplady’s hymns—
Yes, I to the end shall endure,
As sure as the earnest is given,
More happy but not more secure
The glorified spirits in heaven.
The verses set forth accurately and appropriately the teaching of the
Churches to which the hymns respectively belong, but they are
impossible in other theological regions. A very wide range should be
allowed to religious thought as expressed in hymns, but those which
contradict the things most surely believed in a Church are rightly
excluded from its hymnal.
8. We should add, I think, if not to the essentials, yet certainly to
the virtues of a good hymn, _Scriptural language_. Our greatest prose
writers have found in the English Bible the most effective, forceful,
impressive words; and the hymn-writer has the advantage not only of
its pure, strong diction, but also of the hallowed associations which
the words of Holy Scripture preserve for all Englishmen.
II
Hymns of the Bible and the Early Church
The hymn-book of the modern Church is the direct descendant of the
Hebrew Psalter. Had David and Asaph never sung, the hymns of Watts and
Wesley, of Keble and Montgomery, could hardly have been written. If
the praises of Israel had not rung through the courts of the Temple,
the choir of the Christian Church would have been silent. Primitive
Christianity struggled hard to free itself from the swathing-bands of
Jewish ritual; but it recognized from the first the riches of its
inheritance in the Book of Psalms. There, more than in any other
Scripture, the first Christians heard ‘the voice of Christ and His
Church.’[32] Our Lord Himself joined in singing these ancient hymns,
and bade His disciples understand that all things must needs be
fulfilled which ‘were written in the ... psalms’ concerning Him. St.
Paul and St. James alike commend the singing of psalms, and thus,
without controversy, the Psalter was claimed by the Church as her own.
The determination to hear the voice of Christ everywhere, led to
extravagances of exposition which a more critical age cannot tolerate,
but it gave the psalms a firm hold upon the heart of Christendom. The
ancient Scriptures would have passed away with the ‘worldly sanctuary’
had it not been for the witness of the priest, the prophet, and the
psalmist to Christ.
Religious poetry and song must long have preceded any collection of
psalms or hymns. One would like to know who first, in the far-off
days, said to his brother, ‘O come, let us sing unto the Lord’; but
that unknown poet or musician had been famous and forgotten before
history was born. The first Hebrew psalm is the Song of Moses at the
Red Sea, the earliest of the triumph songs of the people of God, the
hymns which celebrate Jehovah, who ever showeth Himself ‘a God of
deliverances.’[33] Sung first to ‘the loud timbrel by Egypt’s dark
sea,’ it becomes in the Apocalypse the Song of Moses and of the Lamb,
chanted to the harps of God by the glassy sea mingled with fire. At
the first the singers are the congregation, not yet a people, whom
Moses brought out of Egypt in haste; at the last they are the
white-robed army of them that have gotten the victory through the
blood of the Lamb.
I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously:
The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and song,
And He is become my salvation:
This is my God, and I will praise Him;
My father’s God, and I will exalt Him.
Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like Thee, glorious in holiness,
Fearful in praises, doing wonders?
Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of Thine
inheritance,
The place, O Lord, which Thou hast made for Thee to dwell in,
The sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have established.
The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.[34]
Moses, then, is the first singer in the Christian choir; and if to
this song of triumph we can add the 90th Psalm, we may well place
Moses amongst the sweetest and the sublimest of hymn-writers.
Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead’s most benignant grace.[35]
But Moses is not the founder of Hebrew psalmody. The fact that he and
others may have written psalms does not detract from the fame of
David, ‘the sweet psalmist of Israel.’ It was he who won for the psalm
a permanent place in the worship of God. It is not for me to discuss
here critical questions in regard to the Davidic authorship of
particular psalms; but I venture to deprecate a too ready or complete
acceptance of Wellhausen’s phrase that the Psalter was ‘the hymn-book
of the second temple,’ as though it settled the question of the
existence of previous Psalters used in the days before the Exile.
Unless we are prepared to reject history and tradition alike, David
must still hold his place amongst the singers of the Church of God.
There David stands, with harp in hand,
As master of the choir.
The builders of the great vanished cities of the olden time, of its
palaces and pyramids; the founders of its monarchies, empires, and
republics, pass into oblivion or preserve at best the dull memorial of
a name in history; but ‘he who sang the Holy Spirit’s song’ has an
audience that never wearies, though the individual listeners pass in
solemn and ceaseless order to the silent land. For man is one
everywhere and in all ages. The accidents of life vary, but its
essence abides. ‘The universal Church of Christ hath given its witness
that these psalms are not made for one age, but for all ages; not for
one place, but for all places; not for one soul, but for all
souls.’[36]
The contention that David’s history is not consistent with the high
religious tone of the poems ascribed to him need not disturb us. The
man who wrote the _Lament_ for Saul and Jonathan was no mere brigand
chief, but one who wore ‘the graces that adorn a king,’ and as a poet
and a friend deserves to rank with Milton and with Tennyson.
How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!
Jonathan is slain upon thy high places.
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan:
Very pleasant hast thou been unto me:
Thy love to me was wonderful,
Passing the love of women.
How are the mighty fallen,
And the weapons of war perished!
2 Sam. i. 25-27.
Is there not the same note in David as in Milton, the same lingering
on the loved name, the same reiteration of the words of sorrow?
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas?
But, O the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!
Jonathan is shrined as richly and as unfadingly as Edward King or
Arthur Hallam, and we may well believe that the man whom Jonathan
loved as his own soul loved God from his inmost heart—that the author
of the _Lament_ was the singer of the 18th Psalm. And if it be allowed
that David wrote that song—‘the Psalm of Clovis and John
Wesley’[37]—it is difficult, merely on the ground of personal
character, to deny him any psalm in the whole book.
I love Thee, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer;
My God, my strong rock, in Him will I trust;
My shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower.
I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised:
So shall I be saved from mine enemies.
In my distress I called upon the Lord,
And cried unto my God:
He heard my voice out of His temple,
And my cry before Him came into His ears.
Then the earth shook and trembled,
The foundations also of the mountains moved
And were shaken, because He was wroth.
He bowed the heavens also, and came down;
And thick darkness was under His feet.
And He rode upon a cherub, and did fly:
Yea, He flew swiftly upon the wings of the wind.
He sent from on high, He took me;
He drew me out of many waters.
He delivered me from my strong enemy,
And from them that hated me, for they were too mighty for me.
They came upon me in the day of my calamity:
But the Lord was my stay.
He brought me forth also into a large place;
He delivered me, because He delighted in me.
It may be true that the value of the psalms to the Church does not
depend upon the settlement, one way or another, of the rival claims of
singers before and after the Exile, yet the question is of vastly more
than mere literary or historic interest. We lose much if we lose David
and the psalmists of the kingdom from ‘the glorious choir’ which sings
for ever the praises of Israel’s God and David’s Son. And we are all
the poorer if the sources of Christian song are to be sought, not by
Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracles of God,
but by the dull canals of Babylon, where the exiled people wept when
they remembered Zion. Even the most extreme of modern English critics
tells us that, ‘As mere academical exercises, by not merely unnamed
but unknown individuals, the psalms will neither edify the Church nor
charm the literary student.’[38] But, after all, we have not yet lost
our fellowship with the men of David’s time. The psalms are to us a
memorial of the golden days of Israel’s history. They are still to us,
as to Francis Davison,
Hymns which in the Hebrew tongue
First were sung
By Israel’s sweet and royal singer.
Or, to put the case in prose:
Both poetry and music existed before David’s time, and poetry had
been carried to a high development in such compositions as Exod. xv.
and Judges v. But with David a new era of religious poetry
commenced. The personal element entered into it. It became the
instrument of the soul’s communion with God.[39]
It is this ‘personal element’ which makes the Psalter a living book in
every age.
The earlier Hebrew psalmists, even when they wrote in view of the
imposing ritual of the temple service with its crowded choir, its
thousand white-robed priests sounding their silver trumpets, were
never bound by a narrow conventional opinion as to what beseemed the
order of public worship. Fettered by rule and rubric as the later
Jewish Church was, the psalmist as well as the prophet stands for the
right of the individual soul to enter alone into the presence of God.
Speak to Him, thou, for He hears,
And spirit with Spirit can meet.
The personal element is, in some respects, the most precious gift of
the Psalter to Christianity. Had the hymns of the mediaeval Church,
instead of the Hebrew Psalter, been the pattern for modern
hymn-writers, we should have lost the best, the grandest, the most
abiding of modern hymns. But the revival of hymn-writing, alike in
Germany and in England, was a result of the Protestant Reformation,
which set aside ecclesiastical in favour of Biblical precedents; so
our hymn-books are inspired by the Psalter, not the Breviary. And this
vindication of the rights of the individual soul we owe in the first
instance to David, or to the men who wrote the psalms ascribed to him.
As Edward Irving has said, with his majestic and unrestrained
eloquence:
The force of his character was vast, and the scope of his life was
immense. His harp was full-stringed, and every angel of joy and of
sorrow swept over the chords as he passed. Such oceans of affection
lay within his breast as could not always slumber in their calmness.
For the hearts of a hundred men strove and struggled together within
the narrow continent of his single heart.[40]
Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, in the elaborate preface to his _Holy
Year_, says:
The pronouns _I_ and _my_ are rarely found in any ancient Church
hymn. But in modern hymns the individual often detaches and isolates
himself from the body of the faithful, and in a spirit of
sentimental selfishness obtrudes his own feelings concerning
himself.[41]
This is an entirely superficial criticism, though, in greater or less
degree, it has been accepted in many modern hymn-books. It is unsound
in principle, and contrary to the highest precedents, ancient and
modern. It is the personal element that makes a hymn dear to the
congregation of Christ’s flock. It is the fit expression of profound
individual experience that gives a hymn its charm for the multitude,
who can think poetry, but cannot write it. Perhaps no hymn of the last
century has touched more hearts than Newman’s ‘Lead, kindly Light’;
yet it was written as a personal prayer, giving expression to a
special and temporary experience. Few hymns better illustrate the
appropriateness to others of the experience of one. In his later
years, Newman declined, almost querulously, to be ‘examined’ as to
what he meant exactly by the closing lines of his famous hymn, written
in a ‘transient’ state of mind, ‘when home-sick or sea-sick’; but to
Mrs. Tait, who inscribed the lines
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile
beneath the portrait of the children taken so suddenly from the
desolated Deanery at Carlisle, no lapse of years could ever dull their
meaning. The poet often speaks ‘not of himself,’ and his words may be
truer as well as richer to the man who repeats than to the man who
wrote them. A formal service, performed by professionals or by the
technically ‘religious,’ may find suitable expression in general
terms; but the Christian congregation
Learns the use of _I_ and _me_.
The grandest of all hymns, ancient and modern, throb with individual
life, whether they soar to heaven on the wings of ecstasy, or bow to
earth beneath an overwhelming sense of sinfulness.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And all that is within me bless His holy name.
Have mercy upon me, O God ...
Blot out my transgression.
Create in me a clean heart, O God;
And renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from Thy presence,
And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
The Lord is my Shepherd,
I shall not want.
O happy day that fixed my choice
On Thee, my Saviour and my God!
Abide with me! fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.
Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear,
It is not night if Thou be near.
Thou, O Christ, art all I want,
More than all in Thee I find.
Some of the most sublime passages in ancient chant and modern hymn are
those in which the singer turns from the confession of a common sin or
the expression of a common gratitude to claim a personal share in it.
Even that greatest hymn of the Church’s public worship, the ‘Te Deum
Laudamus,’ voices at last the cry of the individual believer—
In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped; let me not be ashamed for ever.
So Charles Wesley, celebrating the first anniversary of his
conversion, sings—
He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean,
His blood availed for me.
So Thomas Olivers at the end of his great anthem to the God of Abraham
adds his own voice to the voices of the celestial choir—
The whole triumphant host
Give thanks to God most high:
‘Hail, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,’
They ever cry:
Hail, Abraham’s God and _mine_!
I join the heavenly lays.
The contrast between the liturgical hymn written for others to sing
and the hymn of personal experience, the pouring out of the soul
before God, is well illustrated in the Psalter; e.g. compare Ps. cxv.—
Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory,
For Thy mercy, and for Thy truth’s sake.
with Ps. cxvi.—
I love the Lord, because He hath heard
My voice and my supplications.
It is in the earlier psalms, though not in them exclusively, that we
find the personal element conspicuous, and it is those psalms which
have inspired the highest forms of Christian song.
Even in psalms written for the congregation and with direct liturgical
intent there is often the introduction of the personal element, as in
Ps. cvi.
In the Book of Psalms we have not only the cry of the seeker after
God, but the voice of the Church in its common prayer and praise. We
find here, too, hymns for the Sabbath day and other festivals, hymns
in commemoration of the older saints, national prayers and anthems,
which confess the sin of the people or record the mighty works of God,
setting the nation’s history to music. Indeed, it is difficult to
discover in modern hymn-books any hymn which has not its prototype in
the Psalter, though the Incarnation and its manifold revelation
brought into Christian life and thought a light that far outshines the
brightest stars of the earlier dispensation.
Like other great hymn-books, the Hebrew Psalter grew by stages and
gathered into its treasury things new and old. In its final form it is
a collection of hymns ancient and modern—a fusion of various
hymn-books, in which, as in other collections, there is occasional
repetition, free quotation of one writer from another, reminiscences
of familiar psalms of earlier psalmists, and evidences of the exercise
of a wide editorial discretion in revision and emendation.
We should like to know something of the man who edited the final
_Collection of Hymns for the use of the people called Jews_. If he had
written a preface, or even a title-page, he would have solved for us
many interesting literary questions—though he would have added little
to the spiritual or liturgical value of the Psalter. It is enough for
us to know that the psalms as we sing them to-day are the Psalms of
which our Lord spoke, when He appealed to them as witnesses with Moses
and the prophets to His mission. It was a hymn-book ready for use in
the Church of Pentecost, and was adopted in its worship from the
beginning.
The influence of the Psalter upon Christian hymnody extends far beyond
the use of the rhythmic psalms. The metrical versions, which long
supplied the place of hymn-books, gave to the Psalms a double share in
Christian worship. Even to-day, when the metrical Psalter has lost its
hold upon the Christian congregation, many of our greatest hymns are
versions of Hebrew psalms. Nor is the rhythmic version outworn. No
complete order of Christian worship is possible which does not include
at least some portion of the Psalter in one or other of our three
grand English renderings.[42]
The birth of the Lord Jesus was marked, as so many critical periods
have been, by a ‘sudden blaze of song.’ The choir of heaven itself
sang the ‘Gloria in Excelsis’; Mary chanted the ‘Magnificat’;
Zacharias, the ‘Benedictus’; whilst Simeon’s swan-song, the ‘Nunc
Dimittis,’ closed the rich though scanty hymnody of that great
transition time.
The apostolic Church had no David. The Epistles preserve for us some
few lines of early Christian hymns; but it was left to later times to
give its sublimest songs to the Christian choir. Yet, if for a moment
we think of what might have been, surely St. Paul could have written
battle-songs grand as Luther’s; St. Luke, an earlier _Christian Year_;
and St. Peter might have sung with the simple pathos of John Newton.
But though other gifts were theirs in abundance, the gift of song was
not bestowed upon them; and since the apostolic Church had no poet,
the New Testament has no Psalter. Nor, indeed, does it need one; for
God’s great poem, His sublimest work, is the Man Christ Jesus.
And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds
More strong than all poetic thought.
But though the primitive Church had no great hymn-book, it had its
ephemeral ‘songs and solos,’ its minor poets who helped many an
earnest worshipper to draw nigh to God with the voice of a psalm.
Indeed, there is some reason to think that the Corinthian Church
suffered from too great a number of would-be poets, for there ‘every
one’ had ‘a psalm,’ and St. Paul would obviously have liked to issue,
as John Wesley actually did, a rule against the giving out of hymns of
the preacher’s own composing.
The fragments that remain of the hymns of the apostolic age are few
and uncertain. The most distinctly rhythmic is the short creed, which
may have been said or sung, found in 1 Tim. iii. 16—
Ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί,
ἐδικαιώθη ἐν πνεύµατι,
ὤφθη ἀγγέλοις,
ἐκηρυχθη ἐν ἔθνεσιν,
ἐπιστεύθη ἐν κόσµῳ,
ἀνελήµφθη ἐν δόξῃ.
Manifested in the flesh,
Justified in the spirit,
Seen of angels,
Preached among the nations,
Believed on in the world,
Received up in glory.
In Eph. v. 14 there are three lines which may have been taken from an
ancient baptismal hymn.
Ἔγειρε, ὁ καθεύδων,
καὶ ἀνάστα ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν
καὶ ἐπιφαύσει σοι ὁ Χριστός.
Up! O sleeper,
And arise from the dead,
And Christ shall shine on thee!
Westcott and Hort print in metrical form not only these passages, but
St. Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, which thus takes its place
among the earliest Christian hymns.
Πάτερ ἡµῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς·
Ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνοµά σου,
ἐλθάτω ἡ βασιλεία σου,
γενηθήτω τὸ θέληµά σου,
ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς·
Τὸν ἄρτὸν ἡµῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον
δὸς ἡµῖν σήµερον·
καὶ ἄφες ἡµῖν τὰ ὀφειλήµατα ἡµῶν,
ὡς καὶ ἡµεῖς ἀφήκαµεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡµῶν·
καὶ µὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡµᾶς εἰς πειρασµόν,
ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡµᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.[43]
Our Father which art in heaven;
Hallowed Thy name,
Come Thy kingdom,
Be done Thy will
Alike in heaven and on earth;
The bread we need
Give us to-day;
And forgive us our debts,
As we forgive our debtors;
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
It is very possible that the metrical structure of St. Matthew’s
version may to some extent explain its variations from St. Luke.
‘The hymns of the Apocalypse show, strange to say, no metrical
arrangement of diction,’[44] but their influence upon Christian song
has been great. Thus the New Testament makes a most important, though
chiefly indirect, contribution to the hymnal of the Church.
St. Paul’s division of religious poetry into ‘psalms, hymns, and
spiritual songs’ indicates the character and variety of the songs of
the apostolic Church, but gives little information concerning its
hymnals. We may assume, however, that whilst the Hebrew Psalter formed
the first and greatest section of the songs of the Church, there were
also a number of recognized ‘hymns’ and ‘odes,’ to which additions
might at any time be made. By the law of spiritual selection these
ancient hymns have passed out of the literature of the Church; they
perished in the using, and having served their own generation
according to the will of God fell on sleep.
The Church universal is indebted to the liturgical Churches for the
inclusion in their Books of Common Prayer of the psalms which heralded
the dawn of the day of the Son of Man. It is surely a narrow and
superficial notion of divine worship which would exclude such
canticles from our services as archaic or artificial.
How beautiful, for example, is the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ whether sung daily
at eventide, or when the day of life is ended and the Lord now letteth
His servant depart in peace! It is in Christian usage what the
sounding of ‘The Last Post’ is to the British soldier, marking the
close of the common day or sounding the last farewell to a comrade
whose warfare is accomplished. A petty and prosaic criticism may
regard as unreal such adaptations of ancient hymns, though consecrated
by many centuries’ use, but there is as legitimate a poet’s licence in
devotion as in literature.
The Old and New Testament alike, though the former more directly than
the latter, gave to hymns a place in the worship of God. But the new
wine of the gospel, which burst the wine-skins of out-worn ritual,
could not be contained even in the golden chalice of the Psalter or
the canticles written on its models.
Distinctively Christian hymns which, as we have seen, are occasionally
quoted in the Epistles, and are referred to as a recognized part of
public and social worship, date from the earliest times. The famous
letter of the younger Pliny to Trajan tells how those who were
terrified into the denial of their Lord, confessed no worse crime than
that of meeting on an appointed day before the dawn to sing antiphonal
hymns to Christ as to a god.[45] Judaism had its Messianic psalms, but
the hymns which give praise to Christ as