While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
what Church would willingly give up
As pants the hart for cooling streams,
or—
Through all the changing scenes of life?
There is about such songs a gracious simplicity worthy of John Newton,
who might well have written—
O make but trial of His love,
Experience will decide.
How blessed they are, and only they,
Who in His truth confide.
or—
Extend to me that favour, Lord,
Thou to Thy chosen dost afford:
When Thou return’st to set them free,
Let Thy salvation visit me.
O may I worthy prove to see
Thy saints in full prosperity;
That I the joyful choir may join,
And count Thy people’s triumph mine.
Dr. Watts and the Wesleys did not scruple to borrow from the New
Version, and Watts, with characteristic modesty, is content to yield
them ‘the preference of’ their ‘poesy’ in some of their compositions.
Whatever its intrinsic merit or demerit, the New Version rendered an
important service in breaking the monopoly enjoyed by the Old Version,
and thus preparing the way for a larger view of Christian psalmody.
One condemned to tread the waste of metrical Psalters will consider
it an advance on its predecessors, suffering more from its own
success than comparison with them.... They asserted successfully,
and with an emphasis scarcely known before, literary and poetical
excellence (according to their light) as a principle of translation,
and the precedent thus set was seldom ignored afterwards.[91]
Tate, being Laureate, naturally considered the state occasions on
which psalms were to be used. The sentiments, at least, of his version
of Ps. cl., which is appointed for the day of the Sovereign’s
accession, are excellent.
The private slanderer shall be
In public justice doomed by me.
From haughty looks I’ll turn aside,
And mortify the heart of pride.
But honesty, called from her cell
In splendour at my court shall dwell.
Who virtue’s practice make their care,
Shall have the first preferments there.
No politics shall recommend
His country’s foe to be my friend:
None e’er shall to my favour rise
By flattering or malicious lies.
All those who wicked courses take,
An early sacrifice I’ll make;
Cut off, destroy, till none remain
God’s holy city to profane.
With the publication of the New Version a new era began. It was to be
the last ‘authorized’ metrical version. Hymns of the modern type were
beginning to be known, and soon there would be hymns in abundance.[92]
IV
Eighteenth-century Hymns