THE HYMNODY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

I. The Hymn

II. The Inauguration of Christian Song

In the studies of Christian Hymnody we are now to make, what I have really at heart are its present-day [26] interests rather than those of antiquarianism. None the less we shall have to proceed by the historical method,—a length-wise approach by the way things happened rather than a cross-country sketch of the way things are. Such is the common lot of all students of human institutions. For man is an old resident, and all that he is and has is mediated through the past.

In the study of a church ordinance the historical method is imperative. We must first seek its roots in New Testament times and trace its continuity through church history before we can frame a working theory for its proper administration.

Here and now, for example. Is there a Christian ordinance which we may call Holy Song, with Christ’s authority behind it? And if so, on what terms did the Apostolic Church receive it and practice it? What features were present from the beginning, and must therefore be regarded as essential to its being? And, among the features of its later church practice, which are to be regarded as developments contributing to its well-being and which as mere accretions and perhaps hindrances? When we have answered these questions, and only so, it seems to me, we have our working theory of church song.

The contribution which even a superficial study of Comparative Hymnology makes to the study of origins is in relieving us of any necessity to discuss a [27] theoretical relation of music and religion. It shows us that relation as already a condition and not a theory in early religions. It reveals the actual employ of hymns in ritual and life from a time earlier than all written records. It shows especially a relatively high development of worship-music and poetry in one of those national religions, the Hebrew, and how in the divine providence that Jewish Psalmody became the inheritance of the Christian Church, passing into it directly and unquestioned.

The actual point of transition is found at the institution of the Lord’s Supper. The simple record in its Englished form, “And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the Mount of Olives,” has always touched the Christian heart. For our present occasion its significance lies in revealing Christ as Himself the inaugurator of our church song and in His connecting it with the most characteristic feature of Christian worship—the Holy Communion.

This post-Communion hymn was ritual song, and must have been so sensed by the disciples. Thus it became at once not only the precedent but the spring of our church song, which in all the main streams that have started from it continues to be ritual song. But (the occasion being what it was) the precedent is just as valid, if one were needed, for the social simplicities of hymnody, the worship-song of a household, the friendly song of a brotherhood.

If we ask the manner of singing at the Supper, it was common song in the sense that all joined in, but antiphonal, or more likely responsive, in actual delivery. Would the disciples wait for the Master to begin? Or was there some one with special aptness to start the song?

If we put the question of our Western poet, “What song sang the twelve with the Saviour?”—the rapt and isolated song of spiritual possession was so soon to interrupt the common song, that I suppose the thought has come to most of us that in the stress of the occasion the parting song might have been an inspirational hymn of the Master, with some familiar response by the disciples. Such a thought came certainly to the author of the Acta Johannis, who pictures the little group standing hand in hand, and even gives the words of the hymn.^[3] He may have crystallized some rumor or tradition, or may have drawn at first hand upon a seemingly ample reserve of mendacity.

The record does not identify the hymn and the verb used does not point in any particular direction. It is a part of the case of our brethren who would for all time confine church praise to Old Testament Psalms that our Lord gave out one of them, establishing a precedent and implying a prescription. If so the Evangelists seem to have been very much at fault not to have told us.

And yet the company must have sung something familiar, and what so familiar as the Psalms? And [29] as the Master began by adhering to the Passover ritual, what so natural as to conclude with the second part of the Hallel, appointed as a thanksgiving for the fourth cup? Most scholars agree that He did so.^[4] Professor Bickell, who thinks the Hallel was concluded before the Communion, argues for the fresh selection of some appropriate Psalm, the 23rd preferably:^[5] a suggestion that at all events makes a sentimental appeal.

The Presbyterian Communion service, when properly set and administered, is unique in being a dramatic portrayal of the original occasion. Such was its intent, and so much of the record is quoted as to make it surprising that the post-Communion hymn was not dealt with more suggestively. Knox’s Book of Common Order provided that “the action being ended, the people sing the 103rd Psalm, or some other of thanksgiving”; but the Westminster Directory for Worship omitted this rubric altogether. Our American Directory, however, provides, a bit casually: “Now let a psalm or hymn be sung, and the congregation dismissed.”

III. Christian Song in the Jewish-Christian Church

Both precedents, the feast and the Psalm, were followed by the brethren at Jerusalem; who “breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat [30] with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God” (Acts ii, 46, 47). They had been accustomed to use the Psalms devotionally all their lives, and under the new circumstances would continue to use them with quickened feelings. St. Peter’s sermon shows how the Master had trained them to read new meanings into the hallowed words.

These first Christians are described as in that state of spiritual elation out of which song springs as naturally as flowers blossom. And plainly they felt perfectly free to add new songs to the old, which the more gifted among them did from the beginning.

St. Luke gathers up three of these Jewish-Christian Psalms into his gospel of the Infancy, the “Magnificat,” the “Benedictus,” and the “Nunc Dimittis.” So Jewish that, as Dr. Warfield said,^[6] to have met the Magnificat in the midst of the Psalter would have occasioned no suspicion: so Christian that they still form a part of the daily office of the Church. In view of which fact Dean Farrar has ventured to confer upon the anthologist the fanciful title of “the first hymnologist.”^[7]

Where did St. Luke get these lyrics? The suggestion that he found them in the Church’s hymn book has nothing against it except a lack of evidence of any such employment before the fifth century. On the other hand the suggestion that Jewish Christians did not feel as free to sing as to make such new songs is against the probabilities of the situation. It [31] is an intrusion of presumptions to support a theory that the Church inherited the Psalter as a sealed hymn book under a perpetual Act of Uniformity.

To most students that early atmosphere seems to embody a spirituality of the creative sort, of expansion rather than compulsory restriction. It appears to have been a divine providence rather than a divine prescription that laid the Psalter ready to the Church’s hand, and as though its contents rather than the urgency of its rubrics recommended its use to the first Christians.

The only example of a Jewish-Christian Psalm in actual employ is in Acts iv, where the company “lift up their voice to God with one accord” in words beginning “O Lord, Thou art God, which hast made heaven and earth, and the sea.” It shows a freedom in dealing with ancient formularies of prayer and praise.

The group in St. Luke more fully illustrates the earliest stage of the new Psalm making. Its structure closely following the Psalter model; its substance reminiscent of Psalm and prophecy; its criterion the clear note of Messianic fulfillment. It was a gospel appendix to the Davidic Psalter.

The thing most characteristic of this primitive Christian song, so memorable as to color the record, is the gladness of the singers’ hearts, the predominance of praise. It was natural that both of our [32] poets who celebrated the hymn at the Last Supper, emphasized its pathos. It was “a mournful song,” John Pierpont says;

adds Joaquin Miller. If this were so it is important to remember that the sadness belonged to the human as distinguished from the spiritual side of Christian song as there inaugurated. Nor was it in the words sung. It came from the foreshadow of the Master’s impending absence on human hearts, their failure of faith to foresee His abiding presence. And when they came more fully under the influence of His Spirit their song lost forever its human plaintiveness and bubbled over with joy and gladness, with “praising God” first of all and with the happiness of fellowship in and with Christ.

I infer, then, that this note of gladness is the special offering of Jewish-Christian song toward our theory of hymnody, whether as an essential thing necessary to its being or as a characteristic thing necessary to its well-being. I infer that our own hymns, in so far as they are fully spiritual, are cheerful and not sad, “joyful in the Lord”; that the plaintive and sobbing verse, the complaints and anxieties in which our hymnals are so rich, and most of all the obsession of so many of our songs with the foreshadowing of death, are not in reality nearly so spiritual as we have supposed them to be. They are voices of questionings and doubts that come from [33] the outward show of things and the lack of health within combining to obscure from the singers’ eyes the reality and joy of the perpetual Presence.

IV. Christian Song in the Gentile Churches

VI. The Materials of the Song

I. A Question: Around Which the Whole History of Hymnody Turns

In the first lecture I tried to show from the evidence that St. Paul authorized a freely composed Christian hymnody and encouraged the churches under his influence to use it as an enlargement of the ordinance of Psalmody.

To suppose that his proposals were welcomed by the Jewish Christian church at Jerusalem; to claim that St. James, in prescribing psalmody for the merry-hearted, included hymns and odes; to deny that St. Paul’s views were fought tooth and nail by the Judaizers in provincial churches; to claim that before the end of the apostolic epoch the whole Church was changed from a Psalm-singing to a hymn-singing church: not any one of these assumptions was a part of our case.

On the contrary the present lecture assumes that St. Paul precipitated an issue: Psalms vs. Hymns, and that it divided the opinion and practice of the Church. Has the Church a right to supersede or even enlarge the hymn book that is of canonical authority? [58] Is it not audacious to supplement inspired Psalms with hand-made hymns? And even if it be lawful is it expedient? That is the issue.

To many of us this question of the relation of our Christian song to Scriptural song has not given much concern, and to others it will seem as in no sense a modern question.

The purpose of this lecture is to show that through each succeeding period of the Church’s life this question has always remained a modern question, a case of conscience, a center of agitation; that for centuries after the Reformation a difference of opinion regarding the answer kept the Lutheran and Reformed Churches from worshiping together; that in the early days of American Presbyterianism it led to bitterness and division that were heart-breaking; and that it is still enough of a modern question to prevent our divided Presbyterianism not only from corporate union but from joining together in a hymn to Christ.

The scheme of this lecture is to discover the answers to the question the Church has given from time to time, or, in other words, to follow the fortunes of the Christian Hymn; for the two themes are identical.

II. The New Christian Hymns

It is probable that the histories of early Christian worship that are most technical are least true. In [59] attempting to trace the development of public ceremonial one so easily loses sight of the primary fact that the spread of Christianity was the spread of a devotional conception of the private life, which we have allowed to fade away. The essential thing was the spirit and exercises of worship in the individual and family life; and public worship was at heart an extension of these private devotions.

In this devotional life, if anywhere, Christian song, just because of its spiritual character, must find its springs. And evidently it played a large part in the personal and family life of second and third century Christianity.

At Alexandria, where East and West met, Clement, in his second century Miscellanies, pictures vividly the true Gnostic as moving in a very atmosphere of hymnody: “We cultivate our fields, praising; we sail the sea, hymning.”^[1] The Christian’s “whole life is a holy festival. His sacrifices are prayers and praises and Scripture readings before meals, psalms and hymns during meals and before bed, and prayers again during night. By these he unites himself to the heavenly choir.”^[2] As though by way of example, the famous hymn which Dr. Dexter has made familiar as “Shepherd of tender youth” was appended to his Instructor by his own or a later hand.

In North Africa Tertullian makes it an objection to the marriage of a Christian with an unbeliever that they could not sing together. Whereas, if both [60] are Christians, “between the two echo psalms and hymns, each challenging the other which shall better chant to the Lord.”^[3]

Tertullian was not, like Clement, a writer of hymns. “We have a plenty,” he told the Christians whom he would entice from the theater. “Plenty of verses, sentences, songs, proverbs.”^[4] Some he did not approve of: such as “the hymns of Valentine,” not to be rated “a respectable author.”^[5]

We know at least the names of other writers. The martyred Ignatius wrote a hymn to Christ.^[6] Another martyr, Athenogenes, left one as “a kind of farewell gift,” that was still circulating in the fourth century.^[7] Hippolytus, who came also to be accorded a martyr’s halo, is said to have composed a whole book of odes.^[8] Dionysius of Alexandria speaks affectionately of “the numerous psalms” of Nepos, an Egyptian bishop, “so dear to a vast number of the faithful.”^[9]

The very casualness of these scattered allusions shows how wide and free was the atmosphere in which the new hymns were composed and received. An impulse, which canonical Psalms did not satisfy, to render homage to Christ was behind most of them,—a motive that kept on renewing itself. So much so that at the end of the second century, an unnamed defender of the faith against the Arians could point out their unbroken continuity: “So great a number of Christian psalms and odes, composed by the faithful from the very beginning, in [61] which they celebrate Christ, the Word of God, proclaiming Him Very God.”^[10]

The hymns were in Greek, the language of the Christian community, East and West, except in a group of Syriac churches centering at Edessa. Even at Rome till the end of the second century not only the literature but the ritual was in Greek. The “Kyrie eleison” of the Latin liturgy survives as a living witness to the fact.

Some were modeled on the Septuagint Psalter, and gained the quaint title of “private psalms.” Some were “odes,” like the “Gloria in excelsis,” based on the angels’ song. Or the lovely hymn for the lamp-lighting hour, which Keble made familiar as “Hail! gladdening Light of His pure glory poured.” It was a relic of household worship that Basil called ancient even in his time.^[11]

But a preference for Greek classical meters arose very early. Clement’s hymn is an example. So is the metrical acrostic now in the Amherst collection.^[12] So, very likely, were “the psalms of a new kind” Epiphanius ascribed to the Egyptian ascetic Hierakas.^[13]

There is no room to question that the new hymns were used in public worship. Our earliest report happens to be from outside, due to Pliny’s anxiety at the spread of the faith in Bithynia. He describes for the emperor a night service very early in the [62] second century. His witnesses affirm “a custom of meeting before dawn on a stated day, and singing by turn a hymn to Christ as a god.”^[14] The Bithynians are reported as gathering for a common meal, and this Love Feast gave no doubt especial opportunity for Christian song.

In the Didache, where feast and sacrament are still connected, no one could draw the line between them or between prayers, thanksgivings and songs.

Tertullian, describing the Love Feast in North Africa, after it had been separated from the Eucharist, tells us that “after hand-washing and bringing in the lights each is asked to stand forth and sing as he can a hymn to God, either one from Holy Scripture or one of his own composing—a proof of the measure of his drinking.”^[15]

Clement of Alexandria devotes to the music of the Christian feast a whole chapter of his Instructor,^[16] which is no more than an amplification of St. Paul’s warning to the Corinthians, and shows pagan revelry and spiritual emotion, pagan song and Christian hymnody, still contending unseemly at the gate of an observance ideally so beautiful.

In respect of the Communion itself, Justin Martyr’s account of it (in Antioch perhaps at the middle of the second century) says nothing of psalm or hymn, unless such were included in the prayers and thanksgivings offered by the President and responded to by the people. But he had just mentioned the custom in their worship of offering thanks [63] in hymns.^[17] Probably the Communion was preceded by a course of psalmody as in the fourth century liturgies. To what extent private psalms entered in we cannot tell.

In Greek, as in Jewish and apostolic worship, there was no clear discrimination of praise and prayer or even singing and reading. Very likely what we call the prayers of fourth century liturgies are transcripts or compilations of earlier Christian psalms. In the Testament of our Lord the prayers which offer praise are throughout designated as “Hymns.”

III. The Greek Settlement of the Question

Private psalms and Christian odes never won a parity with canonical Psalms, the Church’s cherished inheritance of praise. This difference of level was used subtly in proceedings to depose Paul of Samosata, an adventurer who became Bishop of Antioch for a decade from 260. The charge was that he suppressed “the Psalms chanted there in honor of our Lord.” His plea was one of confession and avoidance. The psalms he had suppressed “were not the ancient Psalms of David: they were new and the work of new men.”^[18]

There was indeed growing up in “Catholic” circles a suspicion of the hymn of human composure. It was due in part to jealousy for the supremacy of [64] Scripture, but yet more to the activity of heretical parties, Gnostics especially, in using hymns as propaganda.

In Edessa, as early as 200, the accomplished Bardesanes had actually composed a rival psalter of 150 psalms; “deserting David’s truth and preserving David’s numbers,” as Ephraim put it.^[19] It seems to have been sung in Syriac churches for more than a century. And in that trial of Paul of Samosata it came out that in setting aside the psalms sung in Christ’s honor he had not hesitated to substitute a new series sung by female choirs, “composed in his own honor”; whatever that evil-sounding phrase may mean.

Of the hymns of Valentine, a Gnostic who came to Rome in the middle second century, we have already heard Tertullian’s opinion. Marcion also came to Rome about the same time to foster his special type of Gnosticism, and it is likely that his “new book of psalms” swelled the number of his followers.^[20]

By the fourth century the hymn had become the favorite common carrier of Arian heresy; not only among congregations, but by special “songs for sailors” and “songs for travelers,” which “insinuated their pernicious teachings into simple hearts through the charm of their music.”^[21]

The Church was witnessing an effective demonstration of the teaching power of hymns. It could hardly fail to arouse in the “Catholic” type of mind [65] a conviction that the freely-composed hymn had become a menace.

That conviction throws some light upon the action of the Synod that met at Laodicæa about 363. Its 59th canon, or the undisputed section of it, reads:

“Psalms composed by private men must not be read in the church nor uncanonical books, but only the canonical of the New and Old Testament.”

“Read” covers the psalmody as well as the lectionary, since the contemporaneous usage was to recite the psalm by a Reader in sing-song. The congregational participation consisted of responses or a chant-wise recitation of verses somewhat in the manner of the antiphons of the Roman Office.

It was these responses apparently, and anything else in the way of hymns the people were accustomed to sing, that were dealt with in another canon, the 15th, providing that “beside the psalm singers appointed thereto, who mount the ambo and sing out of the book, no others shall sing in church.”

Neander^[22] and those who follow his lead make this to mean no more than that a member of the congregation is no longer free to start the hymn, as we would say of a prayer-meeting. But there was undoubtedly a movement to get every part of the worship out of the people’s hands into those of officiants. The day of church-building had come and the call for a form of service corresponding to the architecture. With trained choristers in the lead the [66] ruder outpourings of an illiterate people would become indecorous. This canon looks like an official approval of the movement to silence the people. And in view of the fact that their part in church song was taken away from them and was put into the hands of the choir, in whose exclusive possession it remains until the present day in the Greek church, it does not seem unreasonable to interpret the canon as meaning just what it says.

And so we get the FIRST, a GREEK CHURCH SETTLEMENT of the question that had been vexing it, the relation of its church song to Scripture; deciding the same by exalting the canonical Psalms to an exclusive place in honor and in use, and explicitly forbidding the introduction of psalms of human composition into church worship; and prohibiting the people from taking any part in the church song except as listeners to those appointed to render it.

Both the scope and the effectiveness of this ban put upon “private psalms” are debatable. Certainly it did not hinder the development of an extensive Greek hymnody. And it is hard to see how a small local synod could have done more than establish a precedent. Dr. Batiffol, the accomplished historian of the Roman Breviary, regards its action as final: “private psalms were banished from Catholic liturgical use.”^[23] He is perhaps thinking only of such as had wormed their way into the prescribed course of Psalmody proper that paralleled the Lectionary. At [67] most the canon appears to deal only with the sanctities of worship within church walls, and not with popular song or the singing of hymns in gatherings and festivals not covered by the liturgy.

Chrysostom must have thought so. When he came to Constantinople in 398 he did not hesitate to meet the Arians with their own weapons and to imitate their processions of singers by organizing rival processions trained to sing orthodox hymns specially composed for them. He must have felt that the springs of sacred song were not choked, and that there were channels through which it might still flow.^[24]

IV. The Latin Settlement

The Greek hymn passes out of the hands of the people, and so beyond the scope of these lectures. We turn now to the Latin hymn.

Dr. Warfield used to say that there is a real sense in which North Africa is the mother of us all.^[25] She was certainly the mother of the Western Church. And the Romanizing process that changed her language from Greek to Latin made Latin the mother tongue of that Church.^[26] It was at Carthage, not Rome, that the Psalms were first chanted in Latin, as they are still throughout the Roman communion. The Septuagint had been roughly translated, and the roll containing the Psalter furnished the text.

The great Tertullian had ceased to write in Greek by 213.^[27] That passionate heart did not turn to hymn writing, which was as well, in view of the virtuosity of his style. There is no tradition of Latin hymns as yet at Carthage.

Their writing began in the fourth century with Hilary in his remote Gallic diocese. He made a book of them for his people. Jerome tells us how he complained of finding the Gauls unteachable in sacred song.^[28] He was a theologian, and it may be overstrained its teaching office.

Their singing waited upon Ambrose of Milan, whose effective hymns were practically a new creation. They make him the father of Latin hymnody and the real inaugurator of modern hymnody in every tongue.

St. Augustine’s Confessions have made familiar to us all the first hearing of Ambrose’s hymns, in defending the faith against an Arian court. In 385 he had refused to yield the new basilica at Milan to the dowager empress Justina. She renewed her demand a year later, when the alarm spread that not only the church but Ambrose’s person were to be seized. Taking refuge in the basilica, he was surrounded by a concourse of the faithful, who for some days and nights guarded both church and bishop against the imperial troops. Ambrose organized his affectionate flock into a band of constant worshipers, preaching and arranging a course of devotions, [69] and training them to sing his hymns, “lest the people wax faint through the tediousness of sorrow.”

What an opportunity to try out his ideals of Christian song! He so used it as to make Milan a focal point in the history of the hymn. It gathers up the lines of development we have been studying, on the one side, and on the other the lines on which modern hymnody still proceeds.

What was new at Milan, apart from the antiphonal singing Ambrose brought over from the East, was the hymns themselves. The assembly, the fervor, the hymnody of edification, were apostolic,—the hymns were Ambrosian.

Their characteristic was in being composed in Latin meter, but so were Hilary’s. Their distinction was in using the metrical form so successfully as to make it inevitable. Even to-day in our remote American Protestantism, when we use the word “hymn” in common speech we are thinking of the Ambrosian hymn.

Ambrose’s difficulty lay in the artificiality of classical meters as a mold in which to pour Christian emotion. He chose the simplest of lyric meters, a strophe of four iambic dimeters,—a stanza of four eight-syllabled lines. So wisely that allowing for the gradual change from metrical to word accent, his chosen meter was almost invariably used in Latin hymns till the eleventh century, and is the familiar Long Meter of our present-day books.

St. Augustine’s references to Ambrose’s hymns show how they struck a contemporary. They won also the sincerest flattery of imitation, becoming the nucleus of a body of “Ambrosiani,” which still keeps its place in the Roman Breviary.

The popular hymn singing itself Ambrose set up at Milan spread rather quickly through Italy and even Gaul, and gave some promise of establishing itself as a permanent ordinance. Unfortunately it was fated to contract from the volume of congregational song to the narrowness of monastic devotion and of priestly soliloquy.

This is what happened.

The special chance to introduce popular hymn singing came when the morning and evening “hours of prayer” were turning into a church service. Two such “hours” had been observed privately by Christians from the first,—at the breaking of dawn and at lighting the household lamps. These are the primitive “Canonical Hours,” matins and vespers. In addition Daniel’s “three times a day” influenced the devout, and the three hours as indicated in Acts, happening to coincide with the divisions of the civil day, were also consecrated by prayer.^[29] This was still in private. But by the middle of the fourth century the churches were being opened for saying these daily offices under direction of the clergy. Why should the new basilicas stand empty while prayers and Psalms were recited outside? And then [71] there was the urge of the devotional intensity marking the groups of ascetics formed in the congregations. They were not yet set apart from common life, but already their specialty lay in emphasizing the “hours” set apart from common day.

These had become so many, it seemed expedient to assign to each one its special Psalms, to avoid repetition and monotony. An Ordo Psallendi thus developed. But the multiplication of services that made the Ordo necessary also made it impossible for most people to attend them. They were left to ascetics and the clergy.

When somewhat later the ascetics deserted the congregations for a life of prayer in the wilderness, they took with them the Ordo Psallendi and such Ambrosian hymnody as was included, and left behind nothing more than the obligation of the clergy to read the Daily Office which still edifies, or it may be burdens, the Roman Catholic priesthood.^[30]

And so it happened that the Ambrosian hymns themselves, and the singing of hymns Ambrose had set up at Milan, passed out of the people’s lives, and became the exclusive possession of the clergy. They were sung only by the monks in their communities or the choirs of monastic churches: outside they were read in private by secular priests.

In both community and church the staple of the monastic Office was the orderly cantillation of the canonical Psalms. Whether they might be supplemented [72] by metrical hymns, more suggestive of the hour or day or season being observed, was a question that would not be stilled, a case of conscience,—the old question of the supremacy of Scripture in praise: and behind it the ascetic spirit that glories in the clean hearth and the rigor of the game.

The decision lay with the monks as most concerned. It was practically settled when early in the sixth century Benedict of Nursia issued his famous “Rule,” reducing a monk’s life to clocklike regularity. He made hymn singing a part of it, adopted the Ambrosiani and distributed them among the various Hours.^[31] His example was followed by Aurelian, Bishop of Arles. And in 567 a Council at Tours went further, saying, “There are writers beside St. Ambrose whose hymns are beautiful enough to deserve singing, and should be received”; provided the author’s name is set forth in each case.

But there was strong opposition. The Ambrosian hymns were not received at Rome, and her influence was against them for centuries. In Spain a small council at Braga in 563 had forbidden the singing in church of anything “poetical” except Scripture songs. This hostility must have lingered long in Spain, for in 633 the Council of Toledo found it necessary to show cause why hymns should be allowed.

It is impossible to read its findings without a smile at the circles in which progress moves; for a thousand and more years afterward in far-off England [73] young Isaac Watts was to confront just the same situation, to meet it with the same impatience with the Psalm singers and just the same arguments for human hymns as were exhibited at Toledo.

“We possess,” it was there declared, “some hymns composed to the praise of God, the Apostles and the martyrs, such as those of the Blessed Doctors Hilary and Ambrose. And these are rejected by certain people on the pretext that nothing should be received into the liturgy except the text of Holy Scripture only. What do these people say of ‘Gloria Patri’? And what of ‘Gloria in excelsis’? And what of the lessons read in the Office? And of the prayers? There is then no more ground for condemning the hymns than the prayers, and in this matter Gaul and Spain ought to observe the same custom.”

And so, by the seventh century, in Spain as well as in Gaul the Ambrosian hymn had won its way into the Daily Office; and in Ireland also, as a surviving copy of the Bangor Antiphonary (now appropriately kept at Milan) testifies. To us, who associate them especially with the Roman Breviary, it is hard to realize the five centuries that elapsed during which Rome stood firm for the exclusive use of “the Bible only” as church song. It thus anticipated the position which some of us may have imagined was first taken by John Calvin. Not until the end of the twelfth century were hymns of human [74] composure admitted into the Office as sung at Rome,^[32] and only then was their victory complete.

But what a victory! The introduction of hymns at Rome probably involved little more than their singing by the monks attached to the basilicas. How far a remove from Ambrose’s project of an evening and morning prayer at which the plain people could do their own singing!

Thus we have the SECOND, the LATIN CHURCH SETTLEMENT of the vexed question of the relation of hymns to Holy Scripture.

The canonical Psalms are the source of the subject-matter of praise both in the Daily Office and the Mass. Scriptural canticles and a few ancient prose hymns from the Greek are also used in the liturgy. But the Rule of Benedict, providing for the chanting of the entire Psalter from beginning to end within each week of the year, makes the Psalms supreme if only for the overshadowing of their preponderating bulk, to say nothing of the loyalty to Scripture which such a Rule attests. In this daily diet of psalmody a limited number of approved metrical hymns of human composure are inserted at fixed points of the Office; serving to connect the Psalms with the hour, the day, or the season of the Christian Year.^[33] After the ninth century the provision was somewhat enlarged by admitting some hymns of freer meter, called Sequences,^[34] into the [75] Mass, which had become the principal service of parish churches.

The actual singing in churches, whether monastic or parochial, was to be done by officiants in the choir. For participation by the congregation in the nave there was no provision whatever and no opportunity.

V. The Lutheran Settlement

Such was substantially the situation as the Reformation dawned in Germany.

No one was more familiar with it than Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk. No one was better equipped to sponsor a Protestant movement to restore the hymn to the people: to restore it to its right place in worship by first making it a messenger of the gospel to men’s hearts. And he had the precedent and encouragement of the successful rise of a popular hymnody in the Hussite revival.

Luther brought away from the convent a real love for the hymns and plain song of the Daily Office. So real that he lacked heart to “banish the Latin language from divine service” altogether, for the sake of “so much fine music and hymnody the Latin has.”^[35] Nevertheless his great work lay in freeing the hymn from its shackling Latinity, and developing a vernacular hymnody more on the lines of German folk song.

He had first to find the hymns or make them. [76] “We lack poets, or else they are not known, who can write for us godly spiritual songs, as Paul calls them. Should there be any German poets, I say this to stimulate them.”^[36] Luther thus made himself responsible for the copious production of German hymns. Perhaps his choice of “spiritual songs” from St. Paul’s trio helped to fix upon them their characteristic concern with inward experience.

The best he could do at the moment was to point out two or three of the rather rude and not always decorous current songs as “grave enough.”^[37] His little booklet of 1524 had only eight hymns: his last hymn book of 1545 had 101, 35 by himself.

Luther’s hymns, so long disregarded in Reformed Churches, are nevertheless the foundation of Protestant song. They are as plain as Ambrose’s, with more metrical variety but hardly poetic. With him the hymn becomes evangelical, and it is cheerful by intention. “When we sing,” he said with customary good sense, “both heart and mind should be cheerful and merry.”^[38] His hymns belong mostly to St. Paul’s hymnody of edification.^[39]

From the hymn book prefaces and the discursive but very edifying liturgical writings, we can shape without difficulty the THIRD, the LUTHERAN SETTLEMENT of the relation of hymns to Scripture.

It retained canonical Psalmody as a distinctive ordinance, as in the Latin Church. “Let the entire Psalter, distributed into parts, remain in use at the [77] morning and evening service.”^[40] He of course relieved the congregation of the obligation to go through the Psalter in a week in the immensely protracted lengths of the “parts” of the Daily Office; which had rested on the Roman clergy. This obligation, in his plain way, Luther called “a donkey’s burden.” He expected the Psalms to be sung where practicable, and was quite willing they be sung in the customary Latin. In the schools the boys are “to sing some Psalms in Latin every morning.”^[41]

The Lutheran settlement appropriated the metrical hymn side by side with the Psalm, as found in the Latin Office. The inventor of our metrical hymn was Ambrose, not Luther. But he took it away from the closed hands of clergy and choristers and put it into the hands of the people. He translated it into their tongue and freed it from all the rubrical restrictions of office books. Not by comparing Roman and Lutheran liturgies do we come upon Luther’s dealings with the hymn. He took it out of liturgies and put it into people’s hearts and homes, that when they had learned it and loved it they might bring it to the church and sing it together. He revived, that is to say, St. Paul’s conception of hymnody as a spiritual function.

It is important to understand how these dealings with the hymn, so directly opposite to those of later reformers, were nevertheless made to accord in Luther’s own thinking with his governing liturgical [78] canon,—the supremacy of the Scriptures in church worship.

(a) He found his authority for composing and using spiritual songs in St. Paul’s coupling them with Psalms and in the practice of the Apostolic Church:^[42] the stand-point incidentally of our first lecture.

(b) He acknowledged that such authority and precedent may be rightly claimed “in an especial manner in respect of Psalms,” and therefore (note the logic) he favored “the attempt to transform a Psalm into a hymn,” retaining its sense but passing by “certain forms of expression and employing other suitable ones.”^[43] Thus he anticipated Dr. Watts’ The Psalms of David imitated.

(c) The thought that had troubled the early Church and was to divide the Protestant, that the provision of an inspired book of song precluded the intrusion of human composures, found no lodgment in Luther’s mind. To prevent its lodging in any other’s he calls “the songs of holy writ to witness that patriarchs and prophets composed original hymns,” and therefore a modern reformer and his friends who do likewise should “not be looked upon as innovators” but as following in the train of these ancient worthies.

(d) But the vital connection of the Lutheran hymn with the Bible is through its theme and subject-matter. The evangelical content of the hymn meant everything to Luther. “What I wish,” he [79] wrote his friend Spalatin, “is to make German hymns for the people, that the Word of God may dwell in their hearts by means of song also.” Upon that ideal the whole edifice of the new hymnody rested. Like everything in Lutheran worship it illustrated the conviction of its great founder that the supremacy of Scripture in Christian worship means that the worship must be a setting forth of Christ’s gospel.

From this we are now to turn to the fathers of the Reformed Churches, whose reverence for the same Bible led them not only to reject the Lutheran hymnody but to banish the hymn of human composure from the whole breadth of the Reformed world.

VI. The Calvinistic Settlement

We think of Zwingli and Calvin as taking Luther’s place in the Churches we have agreed to call “Reformed.” The name is unhappy. It was Luther, with his love of the Latin Church, who contemplated reforming it. Whereas Zwingli and Calvin had the vision of a primitive Church restored rather than an existing Church reformed.

But in discussing Calvin’s settlement of church praise we must remember that his work at Geneva belongs to the second period of the Swiss Reformation, and was constructive, not iconoclastic.

When he comes on the scene a model of worship [80] had been set up by Zwingli for the German-speaking cantons. In his church at Zurich, stripped and white-washed, the worshipers were auditors, except for a few responses, the Creed, Gloria, and a recited Psalm. These “ceremonies” were his concession to human weakness, but singing was not among them. Did Zwingli contemplate the anomaly of a religion without music? His most competent biographer thinks not.^[44] The facts are against him. There was no music at Zurich for seventy years. And it is the facts that are Calvin’s background.

At Geneva before Calvin came in July, 1536, they were using an order of worship made by Farel, an evangelist from German-speaking Berne to French-speaking cantons. Here, too, there was no singing, probably out of deference to Berne. But there was indeed nothing in French to sing.

After a survey of the situation Calvin drew up his “Essentials of a well-ordered Church,” giving prominence to the Psalms “we desire to be sung in church,” for these three reasons:

1. The example of the ancient Church and St. Paul’s testimony.

2. The warmth and uplift they would bring to our prayers, now so cold.

3. The discovery of what benefit and consolation the pope and his partisans have deprived the Church, by appropriating the Psalms to be mumbled between them without understanding.^[45]

Calvin’s thought was to begin by training the children to sing prose Psalms to some sober ecclesiastical chant; the people listening till they could grow accustomed to use their own voices in church. The scheme was rather in the air; Calvin’s influence was waning and political considerations induced the Council to adhere to the church usages Berne was pressing upon Geneva. This to Calvin meant the supremacy of State over Church. Rather than yield he suffered banishment.

It is well to note that in his humiliation and his appreciation of the need of complaisance, Calvin none the less made it the sine qua non of his return to Geneva that the singing of Psalms be made a part of public worship.^[46] This purpose, indomitable and perhaps not without a touch of the heroic, is the historical basis on which the whole structure of Metrical Psalmody rests.

Calvin’s banishment brought him at Strasburg the opportunity of hearing the Germans sing Luther’s hymns; and convinced him that French Psalms could just as well be turned into modern meters and set to congregational tunes. He soon had his little flock of French refugees there singing after some fashion and in 1539 printed a little psalm book for them. In direct contrast with Luther’s first booklet, its contents, excepting the Creed, were entirely Biblical: 17 Psalms in meter and one in prose, “Nunc dimittis” and the Commandments versified.

Calvin was back in Geneva by 1541, and could [82] have anything he wanted, even Psalm singing. He proceeded to enlarge and improve his little Strasburg book. But his standard was so high that twenty-one years passed before he fulfilled his purpose to provide his people with a complete metrical version of the Scripture Psalms.^[47]

We have then the FOURTH, the CALVINISTIC SETTLEMENT of the relation of the hymn to Scripture: as conservative as the Judaizers in the Apostolic Church could have wished for, or as was laid down by the Council of Braga in the sixth century.

The hymn of human composure that had been sung so freely in the early Church, that had won so hardly a restricted place in the liturgy of the Latin Church, that had developed so phenomenally in the German Reformation, is now excluded from Reformed worship. The inspired songs of Scripture, substantially the Old Testament Psalter, furnish the exclusive subject-matter of praise. Translated into the vernacular, versified in modern meters, set to congregational tunes, they become the hymns of the Church.

The first question to emerge is whether Calvin aimed to lay down a hard and fast rule binding the Reformed Church for all time?

Undoubtedly all his arrangements at Geneva were by way of exemplifying “a well-ordered Church,” and among its essentials, he said, was “the singing of [83] the Psalms” in worship. Just as he insisted on singing against Zwingli’s silence, so he emphasized psalmody against Luther’s hymnody.

Calvin of course was dealing with a situation rather than the future. Like Luther before him, and practically all the Psalm versifiers after him who disclosed their motives in prefaces, he was nauseated by the unseemly and amorous songs that were corrupting the youth of his country. He was offended just as much by the Latin hymns of the Church, because by his time they had become vehicles of Mariolatry, saint worship and other things he abominated. Obviously then songs of human composure, to say the best of them, were subject to the contagion of levity and heresy.

“What is to be done?” Calvin asks in his preface of 1543.^[48] It is, he says:

First: To find songs not only pure but holy.

Second: But none can write them save he who has received the power from God Himself.

Third: “When we have searched all around, here and there, we shall find no songs better or more suitable than the Psalms of David which the Holy Spirit dictated and gave to him.”

Fourth: “And therefore, when we sing them, we are as sure that God hath put words into our mouths as if He Himself sang with us to exalt His glory.”

Expressions so cautious and considerate make us wonder if there were advocates of Lutheran hymnody at Geneva, whom it was prudent to placate.

In any event if Calvin felt more than he expressed, he kept it to himself. No one has produced any assertion that the canonical Psalter was the divinely prescribed hymn book for all time. On the contrary his Commentary on Colossians admits that St. Paul’s “Psalms and hymns and spiritual odes” covers “all kinds of song,” except that “spiritual” excludes “frivolities and trifles.” Calvin rested his cause (and won it) not on any divine prescription of the Psalter but on its inspiration. There is no evidence that he had scruples of conscience against the use of human songs. If he had he preferred to propose a counsel of prudence and not a case of conscience.

Most of us are likely to feel now that Calvin’s settlement of the matter lacks the finality that comes through comprehensiveness. But now is not then. As a handling of the situation it was masterly. In an emergency it is often the single-track mind that discerns the path ahead and commands the following. Calvin must have read deeply into the French character, and with some foresight of what French Protestants were to go through. If not, he was the unconscious instrument of a clear Providence.

In the Metrical Psalms he gave the people an appealing part of the Bible in their own tongue; which accounts for the thrill of Huguenot psalmody. In the little psalm books he gave it into their own [85] personal possession. The humblest of them might have a copy of his very own: the symbol and vehicle of his personal communion with God.

Some sixty-four editions within four years, supplying Switzerland and peddled through France, show how wide that sense of ownership became, and explain how psalmody became a part of personal life. The metrical Psalter made the Huguenot character. No doubt a character nourished on Old Testament ideals will lack the full symmetry of the gospel. But the Huguenot was a warrior first, called to fight and suffer for his faith. And in singing Psalms he found his confidence and strength. Now that we have seen an idealized pugnacity and a stolid endurance combined in the French soldiery in their war against Germany, we can understand how the Huguenot found no Psalm too militant, no imprecation too severe, against his Lord’s enemies.

In the wars of religion the Psalms in meter were the songs of camp and march, the war-cry on the field, the swan song at the martyr’s stake.^[49]

There was naturally no question of the proper subject-matter of praise when “the Reformed Churches of France” met in Synod in 1559. The Calvinistic settlement was read into the constitution. The bringing of his own psalm book to church by every worshiper was made a part of the discipline.^[50] It was a token of the believer’s personal share in church song. The injunction to uncover his head [86] while he sang was a token of the dignity of God’s Word in song.

VII. Doctor Watts’ Settlement

Calvin’s standard, “the Bible only” in praise, became a precedent for the Reformed Churches on the continent and in Scotland. Even the Church of England had to give the people a metrical Psalter to bind up with the Prayer Book. Naturally, as is the way of religious precedents, it hardened into a church principle. I have suggested that to us it may not seem a final settlement of the matter. But it was final to those who carried on the Calvinistic Reformation and to generations succeeding them through two centuries.

It was still regarded as final by the immigrants from various shores (except Germany) who laid the foundations of American Protestantism, and until the gospel fervor of the Great Awakening put the matter to question once more. In the Presbyterian Church, most conscious of its Calvinistic inheritance, the issue thus raised passed from the debate on an academic question into a living flame of controversy that scorched kind hearts, broke up parishes, and convulsed the Church. It was only after years of bitterness and disruption that Calvin’s settlement of praise was overthrown, and the right to sing hymns of human composure was vindicated.

It ought to enhance our sense of privilege in singing [87] them to remember how hardly that privilege was won. It ought to make us more tolerant toward others to realize that we can only exercise that privilege by turning our own backs on the most distinctive tradition of Reformed worship.

There is no reason for assuming that the body of Reformed Churches actually framed a theory that the inspired Book of Psalms was the divinely prescribed hymn book, or that they ever banned New Testament canticles. But, as things worked out, their practice did confine them to an Old Testament psalmody as rigidly as though prescribed.

And this was to prove the weakness of Psalm singing, the little rift within the lute. For it shut out the church’s song from the light of the gospel the pulpit was preaching. It barred even its mention of that Name in which the congregation was praying.

However long delayed, the break with the old Psalmody was bound to come in the interests of spiritual reality. A New Testament Church was bound to resume the new song.

Our immediate concern is with English-speaking Churches.^[51] The low estate into which their psalmody had fallen by the end of the seventeenth century, its spiritual indifference, the shocking dilapidation of its music, fairly cried out for a change. What was waited for was a leader willing to incur [88] the reproach of change and capable of furnishing the materials for an evangelical hymnody.

He appeared in the person of Isaac Watts, a minister among the Independents, of marked gifts, who wore the self-confidence of youth like a panoply, and advanced into what he knew would be a fray with full intent of being the aggressor.

And now as to his tactics. He first (1707) showed the feasibility of the new song in a volume of original hymns adapted to the Psalm meters. As an appendix he printed an Essay towards the Improvement of Christian Psalmody, proposing a new “System of Praise” that included Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.

This, in view of the novelty of its terms and of the general adoption of its proposals, must be reckoned the FIFTH, an EVANGELICAL SETTLEMENT of the relation of our hymns to the Bible.

In all fairness it should bear the name of Watts. In the light of its immediate surroundings it was so glaringly original. But, as we discuss it, I think we shall come to feel more and more that to a larger view, it was hardly more than a dislodgment of the Calvinistic settlement in favor of a reaffirmation of Luther’s, which was the original evangelical settlement of hymnody.

(a) Watts denied in general that we are under the call, either of God or of Christian prudence, to sing the Bible. Quite the contrary. The Bible is [89] God’s word to us. It is to be received as such and personally appropriated. That being done, our hymns represent, not our repetition of God’s word, but our response to it, our word to God. And our word to God can be expressed in the letter of the Bible only in so far as its language can properly be made our own. And thus he laid the ground for the free hymn of human composure, especially evangelical hymns responding to the fullness of God’s revelation of Himself in Christ.

(b) In particular Watts denied that the Book of Psalms was either a canonical hymn book for the Christian Church or adapted to its use. It was a Jewish not a Christian book. In a Christian praise book the supremacy must be given to the gospel, not to the Psalms. “Some of ’em are almost opposite to the Spirit of the Gospel; many of them foreign to the State of the New Testament, and widely different to the present Circumstances of Christians.” This thought he proceeded to elucidate by exegesis and illustration with a frankness no doubt trying to the lovers of the Psalms. All this was leading up to his conclusion that if we are to make Christian hymns of the Psalms we must first translate them anew; that is to say, rewrite them in the way David would have written them if he had been a Christian and not a Jew, and were a loyal citizen of eighteenth century England.

This he proceeded to do, on his own account, furnishing the churches with his famous The Psalms of [90] David imitated in 1719. I am looking while I write at a presentation copy of that book to his “Hon^d. Uncle,” and wondering if any other has been so momentous in the later history of Reformed Churches. It was the bridge across which many of them, including our own, forced their way, half unconsciously, from the restrictions of an imposed Psalmody to the more open country of which Christ is the Light and the Song.

(c) Further, Watts denied the claim of the Metrical Psalm to be the pure word of God. If it be our duty to sing only in the words of Scripture, metrical versions do not fulfill the requirement. The exigencies of rhythm and rhyme make a really faithful rendering of the Hebrew into English verse an impossible thing. Those who wish nothing but the pure word must resort to prose, and must learn the Hebrew music or at least employ the method of chanting practiced in Church of England cathedrals.

The point was a neat one from the contemporaneous point of view. Watts’ criticism of the Metrical Psalm is equally valid from the standpoint of modern culture. The English ballad meter, which was the favorite of the old psalm books, was an inadequate medium for transmitting either the form or spirit of Hebrew poetry. If the Psalms are to be read in English, prose couplets are best, and if they are to be sung the method of chanting “practiced in English cathedrals” is the most available.

It was no part of Watts’ proposal to give up either [91] the form or substance of metrical psalmody. He would carry it on not as inspired Scripture but as a department of Christian song whose “sense and materials” were taken from the Bible. And when to this evangelized and modernized Psalter was added a body of hymns of purely human composure, representing our appropriation of the gospel through Christian experience, we get the full terms of Watts’ settlement of the relation of Christian song to the Bible.

It worked. Among the humblest Independents first of all; more gradually throughout the Churches that had hitherto stood for “the Bible only.” The accommodated Psalms became the recognized standard of Calvinistic orthodoxy. The hymn of human composure won the place alongside from which it has never been dislodged. The twin volumes of “Watts’ Psalms and Hymns” made themselves at home in the pews, and represented respectively the Old and New Testaments in praise.

VIII. The Modern Disposition of the Question

The present-day attitude of the Church has not come about in the terms of another formal settlement of the matter but as a natural result of its own experimenting with the double standard of “Psalms and Hymns” set up by Dr. Watts.

When once the divide had been reached, those on whom the obligation or the custom of singing canonical Psalms still pressed were neither fooled nor conciliated by his Psalms of David imitated. They stayed, as considerable numbers of them stay apart yet, to praise God according to their conscience. It has been claimed recently that not less than thirteen Reformed communions adhere to the principle of an inspired psalmody. Presumably the Synodical action of 1925 by the United Presbyterians must be regarded as a defection.

But the congregations and communions that admitted human hymns to a parity with divine Psalms did so because the impulse to sing the gospel was more pressing than any duty they felt of singing Psalms. And in practice the evangelical hymns turned out to be more appealing than evangelized Psalms. The new psalmody was a little heavy with its adjustments of prophecy and gospel, its replacements of Israel by Great Britain or “the States.” And then it was static, while the hymnody was constantly being freshened with new composures and adjusted to changes in Christian feeling. And so the use of Psalms tended to diminish.

The era of “Psalms and Hymns” gradually merged into an era of “Hymns.” As the books labeled on their backs, “Psalms and Hymns” had replaced the Psalms in meter, so the “Hymnal” came to replace the “Psalms and Hymns.” Some still surviving can remember when the Old School [93] Presbyterian Psalms and Hymns was replaced by the Hymnal of 1866; a book futile enough, but a landmark still as the first to ignore the old division into Psalms and hymns.

In modern hymnals such Psalm versions as are retained are kept there generally for their intrinsic worth as hymns, or possibly for some association’s sake; but in either case without regard to their fidelity as translations. The fetters, whether of obligation, or of prudence, or of use and wont, that held the Church’s songs so close to the letter of Scripture, were in the minds and habits of English-speaking Christians finally severed by Dr. Watts.

Some of the eighteenth century writers seem to have had a feeling that it was proper to relate their hymns to particular passages of Scripture, either as a Psalm-version relates itself to a canonical Psalm, or at least as a sermon relates itself to a text. Of the three “books” of Watts’ Hymns the first bears the title, “Collected from the Scriptures.” The first book of Newton and Cowper’s Olney Hymns is “On select Texts of Scripture.” Even Charles Wesley printed two volumes of Short Hymns on select passages of Scripture. But probably this practice was largely occasioned by the general desire of evangelical preachers to find hymns on the text or passage from which they preached, to use as illustrations or enforcements of their sermon.

The Church of Scotland, where the tradition of a Scriptural psalmody was especially tenacious, did [94] endeavor, between the years 1743 and 1781, to cover the new hymnody with the old sanction by applying to it the method of Scripture paraphrasing. After much travail the General Assembly set forth in the latter year its Translations and Paraphrases, in verse, of several passages of Sacred Scripture. The hope was of finding common ground where the upholder of Scripture song and the clamorous advocate of the new hymns might dwell together in peace and sing in harmony. It was a vain hope and a poor expedient—largely camouflage. A few of the Paraphrases are still familiar, notably “O God of Bethel, by whose hand” and “Come, let us to the Lord our God.” But they abide because good hymns, and few of those who sing them think of relating them to the Scripture they paraphrase.

The modern feeling in these matters involves no special distaste for the practice of paraphrasing a Scripture passage in order to make a hymn, provided the paraphraser can make something that approaches poetry and stimulates devotion. Most congregations enjoy the simplicity of the Tate and Brady “While shepherds watched their flocks by night”; but I dare say they prefer Phillips Brooks’ contemplation of the “little town of Bethlehem” from a human point of view. The Communion paraphrase, “’Twas on that night when doomed to know” is still dear to many Scottish hearts. But a wider public prefers Montgomery’s “According to Thy gracious word,” [95] in which the singer does not recite but does appropriate the Words of Institution.

The fact is simply that, as this whole matter of the relation of our praise to Scripture stands to-day in the minds and hearts of most of us, the conviction abides that the Christian hymn has by a process of development disassociated itself from that inevitably close connection with the letter of Scripture which it took on at the Calvinistic Reformation. There has been indeed not so much a process of development as a reversion. To most of us the good Dr. Watts’ conception of the Hymn as the singer’s devotional response to God’s revelation of Himself—in Scripture indeed, and also beyond Scripture, through a living Christ and a personal experience, dominates the situation completely. And it seems to us to reveal and to deepen the true relation of our hymns to Scripture, because it is so obviously a reversion to the Pauline ideal of Christian song and so faithful to the spirit and the letter of such of the primitive hymns as have survived.

I. Leo X’s Scheme of a Classical Hymnody

The relation of the hymn to Scripture was presented in the last lecture as a phase of the subject that has been in the mind of the Church from the beginning, often pressing heavily upon its conscience also.

The same thing cannot be said of the relation of the hymn to literature. The great poetry of the Psalms was the specific inheritance of the Christian Church; so also was that Hebraic tone of mind Matthew Arnold so greatly deplores as an impediment to true culture. And that mind was more alert to what the Psalmist called the beauty of holiness than what a modern poet has called the religiousness of beauty. That some of the early fathers were deeply conscious of the poetic elevation of the Psalms hardly needs saying.

It is likely that the church hymns, as distinguished from the Psalter, were not very definitely subjected to what we would mean by literary criticism until after the spirit of humanism had taken possession of Papal Rome. When the classical Revival was at its height Leo X (1513-21) was minded [100] that the daily offices of the Church should find a new expression in a “Latin more pure, more spirited, more elegant.” He began the revision of the Breviary by committing its hymns to an accomplished Latinist, Zacharias Ferreri, for rewriting. And he in 1525 printed his new and classical hymnal with the approbation of Leo’s successor, Clement VII.

I cherish a copy of Ferreri’s hymnal,^[1] sumptuously bound as befits so elegant a specimen of typography, as an engaging and now innocuous memorial of the first concerted movement to ally church hymnody with literature. An intrusion of pagan mythology gave already a wrong turn to the movement, and yet the classical hymnal was not without its own felicities; as in this verse of the hymn on St. Francis:

II. Calvin’s Poetical Standard of Psalmody

Calvin’s distaste for the elaborated art of the Roman ritual has hidden from friend and critic alike his zeal for such beauty as was compatible with his simpler standards of worship.

Excepting Leo, he is the first church leader who deliberately set up a literary standard for his church song and called a poet to his service. But the Pope kept within church circles and committed his project [101] to one of his bishops. Calvin went farther afield. In a time of bitter controversy he ignored all party affiliations and chose as the poet of Reformed Psalmody Clement Marot, a reformer only to the extent of favoring a house cleaning, and with whose manner of life Calvin could have no sympathy. But a poet,—a maker of ballads, rondeaux, love songs, society verse and court poetry; graceful, debonair, light-hearted, sometimes hiding real feeling beneath trifling, sometimes revealing it in serious verse that charmed his generation. The last man in France, one would say, to attract Calvin, yet to his mind the only man in France to clothe his new psalmody with the grace he craved.

It is easy to say that Calvin’s scheme of a version of the Psalms put into current French meters, that people might sing them, was in itself a sin against literature. And that may be true. But it was Marot the poet, not Calvin the reformer, who first conceived the scheme. Fluttering around the court, ambitious to be court-poet, Marot began versifying Psalms in the meters of popular songs, handed them around among the ladies and gentlemen of the court, and with the Dauphin’s aid got them sung.

When Calvin made his little psalm book of 1539 at Strasburg, twelve of these court-songs had come into his hands. He appropriated them all, and added a few of his own making. Marot’s work became his standard, his own a temporary makeshift; discarded as Marot began to print more versions.

Marot’s Psalms got him into trouble. The Sorbonne [102] thought they infringed the Theological Faculty’s monopoly in interpreting Scripture. And under the leadings of providence, as strange as it is kind, Marot came to Calvin’s very side at Geneva as an exile.

The sight of the great congregation in the cathedral and the volume of united voices praising God in their own tongue seem to have moved many travelers. It was all a novelty. It moved Marot most of all, for the French Psalms they were singing were his own.

He was easily persuaded to go ahead with his versifying, and Calvin was keen for a complete Psalter. I like to think of the ardent reformer and the debonair poet side by side in Genevan streets.

Marot added twenty Psalms to the poetic stock. Calvin urged the Council to make a grant that would induce the poet to carry on. They declined, whether from parsimony or from annoyance at the poet’s refusal to wear the yoke of Genevan discipline. Calvin did nothing toward completing his Psalter as long as hope remained of completing it on Marot’s level. It was not till after Marot’s death that he entrusted it to Theodore Beza.

III. English Psalmody Apart From Literature

The Psalms of Marot crossed the Channel in the active give and take between the courts of Francis I [103] and Henry VIII. And one might say that they crossed in two separate parcels.

To the rising school of poets at the English court they represented the work of a distinguished writer and a new sort of court poetry. They suggested the Psalms as a mine of poetic material. They started a fashion of versifying them. The Psalms of Surrey and Wyatt were literary exercises of this sort. They had no bearing upon an English ordinance of Psalmody.

There was, however, at Henry’s court, a groom of the chambers, Thomas Sternhold, to whom the French Psalms represented a Reformation movement to provide the people with religious songs in their own tongue. He felt a call to emulate Marot by turning some Psalms into the English ballad meter, in the hope of replacing the amorous songs popular at court.

These simple versions of Sternhold, as the Reformation gathered way, proved to be the nucleus of the metrical Psalter which in Elizabeth’s time became the congregational praise book of the English Church.^[2]

Its Psalms throughout follow Sternhold’s model. They are mechanical verse; sometimes doggerel bearing the same relation to literature that the lines above Shakespeare’s bones bear to Shakespeare’s plays. Only one exceptional passage survives in the poetic anthologies:

These Sternhold and Hopkins Psalms played a brave part while the Reformation glow lasted; and well into the nineteenth century they continued dear to the rustic mind, which likes its poetry plain. They never could have satisfied a sensitive taste, and, as their use lingered, they caused chagrin and aroused ineffective hopes for something better.

In that light we are to set the seventeenth-century Psalm versions of such writers as Bacon and Milton. They were not offered as poems but as samples of a betterment of the current psalmody on lines that might prove feasible. You could hardly expect a generation brought up on Martin Tupper to pass at once to Robert Browning. It was so, I fancy, that these proponents of new versions argued. None certainly, unless the Sidneys and Sandys, achieved anything resembling a poetic Psalter.

Nor could that be claimed for Tate and Brady’s New Version,^[3] which at the beginning of the eighteenth century won its way into London and beyond, and in time became the classic psalm book of Massachusetts Arianism. Unjustly ridiculed, it was a great advance over the Old Version, in the flowing [105] rhythms that make for singing and the happy phrasing that makes for poetry even though falling short of it. How many hymns have a better opening than “As pants the hart for cooling streams” and “With glory clad, with strength arrayed”?

There is less to be said for the new Psalms in meeter^[4] adopted by the Scottish Church in Westminster Assembly days. The manner of its rescension, line by line, in open meeting, the sacrifice of all beside to “purity,” remove it altogether from the sphere of letters; just as the inweaving of its strains into the fabric of Scottish piety remove it from the sphere of mere criticism. It was the romance of these tender associations, no doubt, that made Sir Walter Scott so hostile to any improvement of Scottish psalmody.

But indeed the whole vast body of English Psalm versions hardly relates itself to literature at all, as we define literature now. It is a transcription of Hebrew poetry on a great scale, in which conscience rather than taste presided over the long process of journey-work.

IV. Religious Lyrics and the First English Hymn Book

As long as Psalm singing was the established order in every English parish church, there was no motive for writing congregational hymns. But not even proscription can quite seal the fountains of [106] holy-song. As early as the times of Elizabeth and James, when the practice of music was common, there were sacred lyrics, adapted for part singing to the accompaniment of lute or viol.

Of Thomas Campion’s Two Bookes of Ayres (c. 1613) the first is given over to “Pure Hymnes such as the Seventh Day loves”: spiritual and poetic enough to tantalize the editors of modern hymnals. Josiah Conder adopted “Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore.” If we need more hymns of the heavenly homesickness none is lovelier. More lately The Oxford Hymn Book has included his “View me, Lord, a work of Thine.” These bring Campion into an actual connection with the origins of our English hymnody as unique as it is unrecognized.

Campion was not consciously composing congregational hymns. There was just one way of getting such into parochial worship at that date, and that was the application of force. It was soon applied by an ambitious poet, George Wither, in one of those eruptions from beneath the commonplace surface of things that upset the natural order of events.

After some years of quiet preparation Wither amazed the Church and challenged the book interests by printing in 1623 his Hymnes and Songs of the Church, fortified by an order from King James that the Company of Stationers should bind it in with every copy they issued of the Metrical Psalter. The English Church, that is to say, was to start singing [107] hymns under civil compulsion, and the hymns to be sung were Wither’s. His personal poverty afforded the occasion; his high appreciation of his own work was his apology.

But his work is as hard to account for as his temerity. The only trace of his earlier lyrical charm is in some unwanted love-songs from The Song of Solomon:

The body of the book is hardly more than doggerel, dull with platitude and piosity.

The hymns in his Hallelujah were written after he had given up his hopes of enriching church worship, and were designed to hallow private life. Aiming to cover every act and occasion, they burden each one by appending a string of moralizings. “A Hymn whilst we are washing” forbids us to regard even so simple a duty as its own reward. Two or three of better type have been revived lately,—“Come, oh come, with pious lays,” and “Behold the sun that seem’d but now.” There is no doubt that Wither aimed at allying hymnody and poetry; for in the preface he calls himself a successor of George Herbert in “turning his muse to divine strains.”

The Hymnes and Songs of the Church still holds [108] our interest; because if the Company of Stationers had not gone to law, it would have been the first hymn book of Protestant England.

It is interesting to speculate on what might have happened if Wither’s zeal had been less egotistical; if he had sought to enlist the services of the remarkable group of devotional poets who illuminated the evil times of Charles I. Supplying the motive, what a hymn book they could have made—Quarles, Herrick, Herbert, Crashaw, Traherne, and, later, Vaughan!

Only Quarles had the public ear. Herrick’s litany shows that he could write hymns. George Herbert’s lyrics of pure devotion, which he loved to sing alone, would have been less eccentric in form if many other voices were waiting to join in them. Crashaw’s emotion and lyrical gift needed the restraint that hymnody imposes. Traherne tried an apprentice’s hand at hymn making. And Vaughan really worked out alone the conception and form of congregational song in such lyrics as:

They are beautiful and still available. With little relation to the church hymnody that was to be, they are very suggestive of the church hymnody that might have been.

As things were, the figure of George Wither [109] stands alone, three-quarters of a century ahead of his time; an interesting and pathetic adventurer, an ineffective leader.

Even so we must grant him the third place in the succession of those who have striven for a poetical hymnody: Leo, Calvin, Wither.

V. The Poetic Hymnody of the Restoration

During the Puritan ascendancy, which Wither lived to see, all the zeal was for psalmody; and Parliament mingled piety and politics in futile debatings whether Rous’ or Barton’s version was “purer.”

Not till after the Restoration of 1660 the wind began to change; and it brought a feeling of hymns in the air. In Jeremy Taylor, inside the Church, and John Austin, who had left it, the feeling took shape in an effort to revive the Office hymnody. There were also a number (hardly a group) of men who felt more freshness in the air and the prophecy of a more modern hymnody.

Bishop Ken’s morning, noon and evening hymns also carry a reminiscence of the daily Office, but humanize it with a vitality that has defied criticism. The melodious hymns of Samuel Crossman, “My song is love unknown,” “My life’s a Shade, my daies,” are inventoried by Matthew Arnold among his “awful examples.” His objection is to the choppy “Hallelujah meter.” But, when a writer [110] turns a trying meter into melody, the criticism seems invalid. Richard Baxter’s “Lord, it belongs not to my care” is included in Palgrave’s Treasury of Sacred Song. As are four of John Austin’s and three of John Mason’s. There is the witchery of competent verse in Mason’s:

So gather at our call a number of writers of the late seventeenth century, the predecessors of Isaac Watts. By no means the equals of the Caroline group, yet their work responds to the reasonable demands of Christian culture, and at its best rises into poetry. It was, however, destined to be overlooked in a movement for a more popular type of hymn about to begin.

VI. Watts’ Divorce of Hymnody from Literature

These Restoration singers had neither the muscles nor the tools to make a breach in the solid bulk of the old psalmody. They left it to Isaac Watts to say what English hymns ought to be and to furnish them. We have studied his performance in its relation to the Scriptures, and must now put it into relation with literature.

For a century and more Watts held a supreme place in the worship and the imaginations of Nonconformists. They cherished a conception of his place among poets possible only to a very provincial point of view. Or one would think so. But one’s eyes open to find so late as September, 1858, The Christian Examiner, representative of Boston culture, gravely affirming that “Watts falls below Shakespeare and Milton in sublimity of thought.”

In recent criticism Watts hardly figures at all. Dr. Schelling brushes him aside from the path of The English Lyric. He finds no place in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, but elsewhere its editor counts him “one of those whose sacrifice of Art to direct usefulness have probably lost them those honors in literature to which they were entitled.”

That is very much Watts’ judgment of himself. He thought himself a poet, and the reception accorded his Horæ Lyricæ (1705) confirmed his judgment. In later life he came to feel that his Psalms and Hymns were the greatest things he had done. He did not regard them as poetry but as the evidence of his renunciation of poetry for edification’s sake.

To explain Watts and to justify his method we must recall the audience he addressed. Independency had only lately won through persecution and suffering and had not yet attained social respectability. The people who held on were mostly humble souls of dogged loyalty and narrow convictions. And for them Watts wrote his hymns. He kept his [112] eye, while writing, not on the exceptions or even the average level, but rather on what we might call the underworld of Nonconformity,—“vulgar Christians” he called them, and “the meanest of ’em.”

Dean Farrar, once asked how he managed to preach at Windsor to a congregation ranging from the royal family to the scullery maids, replied, “I prepare my sermon for the scullery maids, so that I can be sure the Queen will understand it.” Watts prepared his hymns for “the scullery maids,” but with even less thoughts for a Sir John Hartopp or Lady Abney of dissent.

These are phrases from the original preface:

[I have] “endeavored to make the sense plain and obvious.”

“The metaphors are generally sunk to the level of vulgar capacities.”

“Some of the beauties of Poesy are neglected, and some willfully defaced.”

“I have cut out the lines that are too sonorous ... lest a more exalted Turn of Thought or Language should darken or disturb the Devotion of the plainest Souls.”

He goes on to explain that he had excluded such hymns as were more figurative or more ambitious, and would reserve them for the next edition of his “Poems.”

The sum of it all is that the man who stood at the fountain-head of English hymnody chose to [113] open a spring outside the area which we call literature, and arranged a water-course for its outflow in the direction in which the two streams, poetry and hymnody, were least likely to meet and coalesce.

His motive (covering both his “Psalms” and hymns) was to furnish an evangelical church song. His method was to find the quickest available descent to the level of the humblest Christian.

One poetical result that method did achieve, however unintended. It relieved the hymns of a great deal of poetical baggage: those high-flying rockets of imagery, that opulence of artificial adornments, which were at that time regarded as essential to poetry, but which are so repulsive to us. Apart from that Watts’ method produced a body of virile verse that stated and applied the gospel to the various experiences of life very lucidly and so sympathetically that myriads of people learned to use his hymns as the natural expression of their own religious feelings.

In that fact lies the justification of Watts’ method; and it brought about the complete and final vindication of the hymn of human composure in English-speaking lands. And thus the whole body of Watts’ work earns a place in the literature of power; the literature that leaves esthetic critics cold while it moves men.

The body of his work now lies far behind, and there is none to suggest its revival. But however hardly Watts tried to suppress his poetic feeling, it was a priori unlikely that his work should never rise [114] above the level of his accommodated verse. In some hymns the poet seems to throw aside the preacher’s gown, to become unaware of the meanest Christian, to walk with God on higher ground. And these, unless we care to pose as meanest Christians still, are the songs by which Watts should be remembered, and which we may be glad to sing:

It is the fate of a man who succeeds conspicuously, especially of a pioneer, to set a fashion and furnish a model. Watts made the model for English hymns just as Ambrose did for Latin. And as Ambrose’s were succeeded by the “Ambrosiani,” so Watts founded a “school” of writers, procreated by his vitality and inspired by his facility. Dr. Doddridge was head scholar and Anne Steele a good second. Indeed her truly feminine emotionalism for a time deceived the elect into believing she was founding a school of her own.

A long train of writers followed, happily for us not needing to be catalogued in a survey of the relation of hymns to letters. You cannot get a sense of their number, and of their skill in reproducing Watts’ faults, from any book on Hymnology. You have to be a grim collector of their eighteenth century hymn books to understand how diligently they debased the [115] current coinage of the kingdom with alloy much less costly to the coiner than poetry is, though of course without any thought of counterfeiting.

VII. The Wesleyan Hymns as Poetry

The Wesleys were the first to contest the unliterary standard of the hymn Watts had set up.

The brothers had been reared in the very atmosphere of poetry. The love of it and the divine afflatus itself moved a number of Samuel Wesley’s household; surely the most interesting family of modern England, till we come to the Rossettis and Archbishop Benson’s.

Charles Wesley began writing hymns at once upon his conversion, and, one may say, wrote them spontaneously until his death. We have John’s assurance that his own part in the vast bulk of the Wesleyan hymnody was small. The translations from the German are certainly his, and remain the best ever made. They are so little appreciated that it is pleasant to remember that his “Thou hidden love of God, whose height” was the prime favorite of so high a soul as Emerson: to hear that gentle voice chiding Moncure Conway, after service in his London chapel, for omitting even one verse of it.

But the whole body of the Wesleyan hymnody may fairly be regarded as a joint enterprise. It was John who conceived the ideal of a Methodist poetry, who appointed his brother poet laureate of the [116] Movement; who stood behind him as patron and beside him as redactor, and who superintended the printing.

The hymns were a part of Wesley’s scheme of education. Behind the long succession of “Hymns and Sacred Poems,” hymn books, and the cheaper hymn-tracts that followed almost with the regularity of a periodical,—behind them all was the single purpose of elevating the humble minds of his followers by the inspirations of poetry, and the unfailing conviction that in his brother’s verse he had found the medium. The fullest expression of that purpose and conviction is the preface of the final Methodist Hymn Book of 1780; the largest collection he made of his brother’s hymns:

“May I be permitted to add a few words with regard to the poetry? Then I will speak to those who are judges thereof, with all freedom and unreserve. To these I may say, without offense. 1. In these Hymns there is no doggerel, no botches, nothing put in to patch up the rhyme, no feeble expletives. 2. Here is nothing turgid or bombast, on the one hand, nor low and creeping on the other.... 4. Here are (allow me to say) both the purity, the strength and the elegance of the ENGLISH language: and at the same time the utmost simplicity and plainness, suited to every capacity. Lastly, I desire men of taste to judge (these are the only competent judges) whether there is not in some of the following verses, the true Spirit of Poetry; such as cannot [117] be acquired by art and labour; but must be the gift of nature. By labour a man may become a tolerable imitator of Spenser, Shakespear, or Milton, and may heap together pretty compound epithets, as pale-eyed, weak-eyed, and the like. But unless he is born a Poet, he will never attain the genuine spirit of poetry....

“When poetry thus keeps its place, as the handmaid of piety, it shall attain not a poor perishable wreath, but a crown that fadeth not away.”

This is John Wesley’s characteristically complacent stand in the matter of the relation of the hymn to literature. He takes his place as fourth in the line of church leaders who have sought to ally hymnody with poetry: Leo X, Calvin, Wither, Wesley.

Was Wesley justified in regarding his brother’s hymns as poetry?

There is nothing conclusive in a suggestion that his judgment of poetry was capable of being warped by the pull of affection; as illustrated by his tribute to John Byrom’s verse. It is more to the point to ask if his judgment of his brother’s work did not in fact show a rather keen appreciation of just where the springs of poetry are to be found and as to what effects in us it is fitted to produce.

If we apply to Charles Wesley’s hymns the tests of poetry in Mr. John Drinkwater’s sane and pleasant book, The Muse in Council,^[5] we can hardly fail [118] to become aware of an unanticipated area of coincidence.

The essential thing behind poetry, Mr. Drinkwater tells us, its occasion as well as its spring, is “a most vital and personal experience.” The things “characteristic of fine poetry can be achieved by intense individual experience and from no other source whatever.” So far certainly Charles Wesley does not fail us. He had within him the springs of poetry in experiences as deep, as vital, as overwhelming, as man’s can be. His hymns spring from discoveries of great truths passionately appropriated through a great experience working through feeling and passing into the imagination.

Now “it is of the necessity that such experience finds, when it is most profound, to state itself in perfectly selected and ordered words,” that poetry comes into being. And its second test lies in the power of the poet’s “pregnant and living words” “to compel in us an ecstasy which is exactly a response to that ecstasy of his own.” It is questionable if any body of English verse ever met that test so fully as Wesley’s did. It was the hymns of Charles and not the sermons of John that reproduced in thousands of lives the deep experiences of the poet. They created a new type of spiritual experience (and we still call it Wesleyan) that clothed the whole man with a mental and emotional mood, exalted, affectionate, ecstatic, tinged by mystical suggestion, [119] lit by an aroused imagination. They imparted the touch of poetry to humble experiences.

I am far from accusing Mr. Drinkwater of saying that Charles Wesley was a true poet. I am only applying or perhaps misapplying his canons of poetry to a candidate of my own selection. In any case they can apply only to a small proportion of the vast production (some 6,000 hymns). That is all his brother claims for the selections he made,—that the body of it is good verse and that some of it exhibits “the true Spirit of Poetry.” That fatal gift of facility led our poet precisely where it has led his betters in the poetic world, into a low country. And yet the surplusage conveys to me at least an implication of being written by a poet. Here is a copy of the 1780 hymn book. I open it at random at page 146, to an unregarded hymn (No. 143). And this is what catches my eye first:

Was it not written by an artist’s hand?

The time-spirit is dealing more kindly with the Wesleyan hymns than with Watts? The Church at [120] large cherishes a considerable group of them among her spiritual resources:

Any one might serve to justify Wesley’s estimate of his brother’s gift. But the fact that all of them are still acceptable in use does more. It contributes something toward testing the permanent value of his proposed alliance of hymnody with poetry.

But I should like to test Wesley’s ideal by a single example he would regard as too extreme; by a lyric of his brother’s he would not admit into his hymn book. His reason is not far to seek. It lies exposed in the opening lines:

Wesley’s early experiences among Moravians, whose hymnody fell into a fleshliness altogether abhorrent, left a great repugnance to anything like fleshly imagery or terms of human endearment in prayer or song. The feeling is perfectly sound, and I share it to the full whenever I hear the popular “Safe in the arms of Jesus.” But what Wesley [121] perhaps failed to consider is that the fleshly image and the endearment are perfectly permissible in poetry; which, as Milton put it, should be not only “simple” (single in conception) and “passionate,” but also “sensuous” (sensible) in its imagery. And that is precisely what happened in “Jesu, Lover of my soul.”

It envelops us at once in the high atmosphere and transfiguring light of poetry, so that instinctively we lift the image and endearment to the height of spiritual exaltation, where the earthly love becomes the express image of the heavenly.

“Simple, sensuous, passionate.” And what artistry! “The mere word-music,” as Professor Saintsbury has said,^[6] “is fingered throughout in the most absolutely adequate manner.” The very opening word, “Jesu,” is not “churchly,” but marks a shrinking lest the hissing “s” mar the music.

Now we are dealing with the best-loved hymn in the language; the favorite of learned and illiterate, high and humble. And why is it so? No critic urged its acceptance. Average Christians could not analyze its appeal. Its tenderness is a part of that, but hundreds of the Wesleyan hymns are equally tender. Its spiritual reality is a partial explanation, but the hymns in general have as much. And after due tribute to these qualities the suspicion remains that the secret of its appeal lies in a poetic beauty that the average man feels without analyzing it, and [122] in a perfection of craftsmanship that makes him want to sing it simply because it awakens the spirit of song in him rather than a mood of reflection.

From this single instance of an actual coincidence of poetry and popularity, there are no doubt a number of conclusions we might draw without straining ourselves.

There are two we have to draw:

1st. That poetic beauty in a hymn is not necessarily a bar to spiritual edification, even among humble people.

2nd. That the particular type of poetic beauty exhibited by the best loved hymn in the language is the lyrical type. The hymn is lyrical in the primary sense. It is a song and it evokes singing.

VIII. The Unpoetic Evangelical Hymnody

Charles Wesley’s great lyric passed over to the Evangelical side of the Revival in Whitefield’s hymn book, and also, strangely enough, in Toplady’s. Toplady’s book was a sincere effort to embody his prefatory statement that anything designed for worship should keep in view that God is not only “the God of Truth” but also “of Elegance.” He had some gift and practice of poetry, and his “Rock of Ages” is the one hymn on the Evangelical side worthy to parallel “Jesu, Lover of my soul.” “Elegance” was not the divine attribute that especially [123] appealed to the Evangelical Revival or the Evangelical Movement that grew out of it.

The deep experiences and spiritual yearnings fostered by the Revival might very well have proved to be springs of poetry and were inevitably the occasion of much verse. Newton, Fawcett, Berridge, Cennick, Hart, Williams, Haweis, Peronnet,—these are some of the familiar names, not of poets but of authors of useful hymns fostered by the Revival. They were mostly humble people who wrote for their kind, occasionally rising to a height of emotional eloquence not untouched by imagination, as in Cennick’s “Children of the heavenly King” and Williams’ “Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah.”

Cowper was the poet of the Revival, but his share in its hymnody was accidental, a tribute to his friendship with John Newton. Many of his hymns are journey-work, produced at Newton’s request, to follow his sermons. “Oh, for a closer walk with God” is a genuine lyric, because born of an intense experience and wrought into melody. It was the singular virility of Newton’s contributions rather than the delicacy of Cowper’s that made their Olney Hymns a classic manual of the Evangelical discipline.

There is, to say the least, a general feeling that the Evangelical point of view and the Evangelical handling of life tended to ignore “Elegance,” to divorce rather than to cement culture and religion. The Wesleyan and Evangelical view-points met together [124] in the spiritual intensity they invoked, but in their bearing upon the cultural aspects of life the advantage lay with the Wesleyan.

It was of course the Evangelical side of the Revival, rather than the Wesleyan, that became the great influence in determining the hymnody of Evangelical communions in America; both in forecasting its cultural relations and in furnishing its actual relations. It fixed, for instance, the basis of Presbyterian hymnody, when the extreme devotion to Watts had given away; a basis solid in piety rather than molded by art. If this Evangelical hymnody was not poetic, it did sound that note of holiness which Oliver Wendell Holmes, a liberal even among Unitarians, caught and which he missed from so many later productions.

The growth of general culture is now militating against the continued use of some of these eighteenth century hymns, precisely as in that century it militated against the continued use of the rude metrical Psalms. The progress of culture in the mass of the people is extremely slow, and is now in a backwater: but viewing humanity long-wise it is perceptible. And any movement to keep our hymnody abreast of it may be viewed complacently, for it is inevitable.

And thus the ground is laid for considering the last movement toward securing an alliance of hymnody with poetry.

IX. Montgomery’s Critique of Current Hymnody (1823)

The accumulation of hymns, Wattsian, Wesleyan, Evangelical, awaited until 1823 the careful stock-taking by the poet James Montgomery in an essay prefixed to his Christian Psalmist.

“We have,” he says, “hymns without number,” but few “that lay claim to great literary merit.”

Dr. Watts he characterizes as “one of the least of the poets of our country” but “the greatest name among hymn-writers,” since “it pleased God to make his ‘Divine Songs’ a more abundant and universal blessing than the verses of any uninspired penman that ever lived.” But the critic lamented much prosaic phrasing and those “rhymes worse than none” that encouraged the incompetent to imitate his faults.

Montgomery put Charles Wesley next to Watts; a man of genius with an affluence of diction and splendor of coloring rarely surpassed in treating Christian experience. His limitation is a “predilection to certain views of the gospel” that narrows his range. Addison’s four hymns are “pleasing.” But they neglect that celebration of God’s grace which constitutes the glory of Doddridge, deficient as he often was in poetry and eloquence. Toplady “kindled his poetic torch at that of Wesley,” but showed “a peculiarly ethereal spirit” of his own.

The school of Watts does not interest our critic. [126] He praises Cowper’s poetry and Newton’s virility. Among the outpourings of the general choir he finds not a few which “refute the slander that hymns are necessarily the least intellectual or poetical specimens of literature.” “The God of Abram praise” is a noble ode. The short rescension of “Jerusalem, my happy home,” “by an unknown hand” (often since attributed to the critic himself) is “delightful.”

Montgomery was a facile poet in the narrative and descriptive manner, and was, Allibone tells us, “a favored guest at every fireside, and the companion alike of childhood and old age.” These words grew pathetic to me as I threaded the thousand pages of his “Poems” to find a passage or a lyric worthy a place in even a liberal-hearted anthology. But by some instinct Montgomery understood the hymn better than most. Two or three of his own would be his best contribution to a poetic anthology:

His estimate of what was then in stock was a fair appraisal. He finds a standing place for the hymn; that sometimes has been watered from the spring overflow of the stream of poetry on the one side, and never swamped by the wide waters of commonplace on the other.

X. The Lyrical Movement in Hymnody

This Christian Psalmist of Montgomery was an attempt to gather the best that had been done. Four years later, in 1827, two books appeared which looked forward rather than back, and caught the light of the newest movement in poetry which we are agreed to call the Romantic Revival. These were The Christian Year of John Keble and the Hymns of Bishop Heber.

The Christian Year, in its meditative way, brings the feasts, fasts and offices of the Church of England within the transfigured world of nature and life created by Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats; and views them through an atmosphere of romance. Keble was not thinking of church hymns. Those for morning and evening we have taken from his book, however effective, are merely extracts from his poems. But he furnished the point of view, the atmosphere, the manner, that make for poetry in many an English hymn.

The other book, the Hymns of Reginald Heber, still stands four-square against the background sketched by Montgomery. It was the memorial of an effort thwarted and yet so effective as to entitle Heber to a fifth place in the succession of church leaders who have sought to ally hymnody with poetry.

Early in life he had formed an estimate of the current hymns less favorable than Montgomery’s. He [128] then conceived the bold scheme of preparing a Church of England hymnal in which every number should be a lyrical poem. He sought his models and helpers in the current school of romantic poets. His affiliations were not with Wordsworth’s philosophizing. They were with the group led by Walter Scott; with his sense of the picturesqueness of olden times, with the romance of adventure in Southey, with the ringing melodies of Campbell and Byron and Moore. He appealed to Scott, Southey, Milman, and other friends for contributions to his book, and to the bishops for its authorization. Most of the poets failed him and the bishops hesitated. The book was never printed by him.

After Heber’s death John Murray brought out his Hymns in the wide-margined octavo bound in gray boards that was the recognized format of Byron and Murray’s other poets. Inwardly its distinction lay in the fifty-seven contributions of Heber, already a venerated figure, and twelve of Henry Hart Milman, then at the height of his fame as a writer of poetic drama.

Everything about the manner of publication was intended to suggest poetry. It was a recommendation of hymnody to high and dry churchmen disposed to decry it and a challenge to London literary circles. It was a hymnody with the spirit, the free rhythms and ringing melodies of the new romantic poetry.

There were no precedents for such picturesque hymns as:

Some of Milman’s might have been songs from his dramas:

The point is not that these lyrics were more poetic than the Wesleyan but that they were more aggressively so: as if Wesley had aimed to bring the hymn into the domain of poetry, and Heber had aimed to bring current ideals of poetry into the domain of hymnody.

He effected no revolution in sacred song as Watts had done, but rather injected his ideals to work as leaven. What his book accomplished was through the incorporation of every one of his own and several of Milman’s lyrics into current books of various communions. Once there their contrast with their more drab surroundings could hardly fail to raise the question whether it might not be well that this remainder of the hymnody should likewise be lyrical.

Heber’s hymns acted as a precedent, an encouragement toward a change in the literary standard pretty generally. I think it is fair to say that they are back of the very recent movement appropriating lyric poems even when it involves more or less of departure from the traditional hymn-pattern. Thus the Scottish Presbyterians led the way in adopting Tennyson’s “Sunset and evening star”: the American Methodists in adopting Lanier’s “Into the woods my Master went”: the Students’ Christian Movement in adopting William Blake’s

Such widely separated instances of what is coming to look like a common lyrical impulse are the more interesting because not concerted. Probably they suggest the direction in which our rapidly changing hymnody is pointed. But even so it would be premature, certainly, to claim at the present time that the English hymn is literature. There are in fact several interests which are not concerned that it should be or are actively in opposition to literary ideals.

There are, first of all, the strong pull of use and wont in the case of an inherited hymnody which was not framed by literary motives, and the more tender appeals of personal associations with familiar words. It is, however, also true that those who gauge hymns by old associations are continuously passing away. [131] I recall the venerable senior of those engaged with The Hymnal of 1895 pleading with tears for the retention of certain hymns that the immense majority of the present-day generation never heard of.

A second disturbing force is the downward pull of a Sunday school hymnody not brought under educational ideals and discipline. It is left very largely under the leadership that can be procured most cheaply. As things stand the songs taught through the most impressible years not only fail to familiarize our children with great hymns, but actually cultivate a taste for things that are unworthy. As the children take their places in the church the tastes and habits that have really been thrust upon them protest against acquiring a different and more elevated standard of praise.

The undeniable liking of the American people for light and catchy music readily coöperates with these graduates of the Sunday school in bringing into the church the kindred examples of what are called evangelistic songs. It is quite true that the words set to these melodies are seldom more than a verbal accompaniment to the tunes themselves. Only for some special ineptitude or on some special occasion does anybody give much thought to them.

There was such an occasion when “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere” was announced as part of the official program for the funeral of a President of the United States. The same song was included in the order of exercises at a vast rally of Sunday school forces at [132] Trenton in 1911. The then Governor of New Jersey, who was to occupy President McKinley’s chair, interrupted the harmony of that occasion by calling attention to the extreme silliness of the words, and uttering an indignant protest against the whole method of the Sunday school interests which made such inane sentimentalities not only possible but officially appointed.

This occasion was exceptional in the prominence it gave to the words of one of the current songs. But the words are fairly representative of the only hymnody in use among considerable sections of church people, and whose popularity makes it a disturbing force. Only those engaged in the practical work of making hymn books are in a position to know the pressure brought to bear upon them to lower the cultural standard of church song.

XI. The Hymn as Related To Poetry

Every man of letters loves The Book of Psalms: not one praises the Metrical Psalter: all view the modern hymnal in a spirit of criticism.

The precedent was set, when hymns as distinguished from Psalms were new, by the great Dr. Johnson; who viewed them with an extreme aversion, partly because they were new and partly because they were loved by dissenters.

The famous passage from his Life of Waller is [133] too long to quote. Its substance is that every attempt to animate devotion by poetry has failed. We get nothing but “pious verse,” useful only to assist the memory and please the ear. This failure is inevitable because intercourse between the soul and God is in a region beyond the scope of poetry, which loses its luster and power when it tries to decorate something more excellent than itself. Experiences of repentance, faith, supplication, thanksgiving, demand an expression the simplest and most unadorned.

All this seems rather empty of meaning till it dawns on us that Johnson shared with his time a definition of poetry long since outgrown. He thinks of art as opposed to simplicity. He thinks of poetry as the art of treating a theme by way of amplifying it, of hanging decorations on it, of recommending it by pleasing figures. So long as that definition persisted, Dr. Johnson’s huge shadow lay heavy on the hymns he detested and extended over the whole area of religious verse. To our modern notions the criticism has no value. As Dr. Schelling puts it,^[7] “The lyrist may sing the raptures of a pure soul in communion with God, or the apples of Sodom that turn to dust and bitterness between the teeth of the lost sinner.... There can be no limits set to art.”

The prevalent modern criticism is headed by the great name of Matthew Arnold. As an apostle of culture the subject was much in his mind. His [134] feeling is expressed as definitely as anywhere in his Literature and Dogma:

“Hymns, such as I know them, are a sort of composition which I do not at all admire.... I regret their prevalence and popularity among us. Taking man in his totality and in the long run, bad music and bad poetry, to whatever good and useful purpose a man may often manage to turn them, are in themselves mischievous and deteriorating to him. Somewhere and somehow, and at some time or other, he has to pay a penalty and to suffer a loss for taking a delight in them.”

Before brushing this aside why not note that Arnold is merely applying to the main body of our hymns very much the same words that most refined and thoughtful Christians are applying to current “evangelistic” songs.^[8]

May we not go a little farther with our critic? Is it not true of some of our church hymns that they fail to fulfill their high mission simply because they are not “good poetry”? Poetry has a singular property not only to arouse our dull feelings but actually to reproduce in us something of the high experience of the poet himself. Are we not prudent in coveting such a creative gift for our hymns?

Why is it lacking so often, even from those written by poets? Coleridge said of some of his own work that it was not poetry but thoughts expressed in verse. Apply that distinction to our hymns: for example to those of William Cullen Bryant. Every [135] conscientious editor of an American hymnal must have scanned the hymns which the first of our poets to win distinction thought it worth while to gather into a volume, printed twice. But he scans them to little purpose. Bryant himself has explained their motive and origin. The earlier were written at the solicitation of Miss Sedgwick, who wished the rising poet represented in a new hymn book. The later were furnished at the request of some friend or committee to give distinction to a corner-stone laying or ordination or installation or what not. They have no poetic experience behind them. They are simply “thoughts for the occasion” expressed in verse. And that is why they fail us.

The case is not very different with the hymns prepared with the express purpose of edifying us: with the homiletical verse of Watts or Davies, that in the end remains not poetry but sermons; or the hymns leading up to a moralizing conclusion, like the Sunday school stories we used to give the children. It is regrettable that pastors continue to make such large use of them, doubtless as mere “fillers” or to illustrate a sermon-theme. For these uninspired verses have hardly retained their old capacity for teaching and admonition. They do not penetrate the crust of spiritual apathy that is part of the price the average Christian pays for sharing the complications of modern life. They do not arouse the congregation to spiritual idealism and holy imaginings. They do not light a candle in the modern heart.

Now, if these things are true:

(a) If Johnson’s dictum that hymns are theoretically outside the sphere of poetry is unwarranted;

(b) If Arnold’s criticism that our hymns are in fact outside the sphere of poetry is wholly justified in respect of the “evangelistic” hymnody and to a certain extent in the church hymnody;

(c) If there are certain properties of poetry that make it capable of adding something to spiritual beauty and encouraging spiritual vigor;

(d) If the Wesleyan hymns have demonstrated that the lyrical type of poetic beauty has the particular appeal to Christian feeling that awakens the spirit of song;

Then we seem to find solid ground for a conviction that the present-day lyrical impulse that is affecting our church hymnody is turned at all events in the right direction; that in following it we are really seeking the old trail which Calvin opened and which the Wesleys extended.

The lyrical movement no doubt has its own hazard, and it has two very definite limitations.

The hazard is implicit in the very motive of hymn singing; the heightening of religious emotion. The danger is of mistaking sugary sentiment for true feeling and its rhetorical expression in “soft luxurious flow” for true poetry.

The limitations of the movement are those suggested [137] once for all by St. Paul, the first critic of Christian hymns and obviously the patron saint of this lectureship. “I will sing,” he says, “with the Spirit”: thus defining hymnody for always as a spiritual function. The Christian hymn, that is to say, even though it force a passage through the needle’s eye of literary criticism, must always stand apart from the poetry that is dominated by purely esthetic ideals. It must compass spiritual beauty first of all: happy if, seeking the Kingdom of God first, His gift of poetry shall be added to it.

The other limitation St. Paul expressed by saying, “I will sing with the understanding also.” For, if the spiritual function of hymnody is to extend into a social function, the hymns must be kept within the understanding of those who do the singing. Simplicity is not only a tradition but a principle of congregational hymnody. It does not follow that church songs should be so commonplace and obvious that the inattentive man, though a fool, need not err therein. It is better if they teach something we had not thought about or admonish us of something we had forgotten in life’s rush.

At the worst St. Paul offers the alternate of “an interpretation.” It is enough if there be an interpreter in the pulpit, ready and patient to disclose deeper meanings and hidden beauties beneath words that however simple are never as transparent as we suppose to an average Christian.

At the same time there is no place in popular hymnody for verse overweighted by philosophical thought, flamboyant with decoration, complicated by self-conscious ingenuity, or soaring to mystic heights that present no foothold for companionship. When such hymns occur in our books they are to be regarded as the indiscretions of an editor.

These two properties of the Christian lyric, spirituality and simplicity, are differential. They hedge the hymn not only from verse as a whole but even from the main body of religious verse. Each limitation will perhaps continue to act upon many of our poets as a deterrent and upon many of our critics as a taboo.

There is, however, no valid reason why poetry should not concern itself with the deepest feelings and highest aspirations of the spirit of man. There is no reason why hymn writing should not be recognized as a legitimate type of lyrical art. There is no reason why the poet’s imagination and the poet’s craftsmanship should not bring fresh offerings of strength and beauty into the sanctuary of God through the medium of the modern hymn as well as through the ancient Psalm.

I. A Hymnody of Praise

And first the theory that the hymn’s special function is the praise of God.

This was St. Augustine’s, expressed in the first formal definition already quoted: ’Praise of God in song is called a hymn. It must be praise.’

The definition is still classical. Its echo is heard most clearly, oddly enough, in communions that are least liturgical. In them the hymnody is still “the service of praise.” The long Psalmody Controversy was designated then and since as dealing with “the subject-matter of praise.”

The practice of the Church never tallied with the theory. It accepted the Psalter, which contains much more than the praise-songs of Israel, but also enlarged it with songs of spiritual experience. The metrical hymns of Ambrose are more than praise.^[1] Those who introduced varying “human composures” [142] in the eighteenth century retained the Psalter for praise and appropriated the hymn to express evangelical convictions. The modern hymnal covers every type of religious expression, even the sigh of religious despondency, just as the Psalter did.

Nevertheless it remains true that reverence is the beginning of religion and gratitude the fount of Christian song; that St. Paul enclosed his “spiritual odes” in an atmosphere of thanksgiving; and that the hymn of praise is still the highest type of our church song.

Some recent hymnals, cumbered with many themes, tend to diminish songs of praise. The trend of their thought is away from a God above the world to a God immanent in the world and closer to life than breathing. The historic hymns that celebrate His infinite majesty lose spiritual reality to minds that pass through phases of mystical communion with God to what seems like coalescence.

Probably if all church song were praise, the praise would grow fulsome; certainly it would grow repetitious. Yet it has a high office all its own. Its loss would silence the leading note in the chord of devotion. Nothing but a “Sanctus” fitly anticipates those songs of the ransomed Church in Revelation. I have sometimes wondered whether it was his feeling for pure religion or his feeling for poetry that led Tennyson to regard Heber’s “Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty” as the greatest of English hymns.

II. A Hymnody of Edification

A second theory is that the hymn’s special function is the edification of the singers. And so far as praise has a reaction of uplift the song of praise retains a place.

It is a theory that particularly commends itself to a generation much more keen for efficiency than worship. And it is quite certainly within the limits of St. Paul’s charter. From this point of view the content of the hymn is:

1. An embodiment of some Christian truth; and hence the Doctrinal Hymn with its teaching power;

2. An embodiment of the spiritual interpretation of life; with its office of arousing spiritual feeling.

III. A Churchly Hymnody

The third theory is that the special function of the hymn is churchly. It is distinctively church song, as being the authorized medium through which the congregation, as representing the corporate Church, can offer its praise in a way consistent with its unity and the appointed ordering of its worship.

That hymnody exists to supply the Church with hymns was obvious even to old-fashioned Presbyterians, as appears from the title of Dr. Charles S. Robinson’s first book, Songs of the Church. And that the hymn fulfilled its function by contributing to public worship is implied in the title of his second, Songs of the Sanctuary. The theory that the hymn is church song in the sense of uttering the Church’s voice is something quite different, and if applied to the contents of Dr. Robinson’s books would much reduce their bulk.

The theory, as it affects English hymnody, is a product of the Oxford Revival of the eighteen thirties. It rests upon three foundations: a heightened conception of the Church, an ideal of worship as its corporate offering to God, and a new emphasis on the Church Year as the framework and calendar of that worship.

On these foundations the Oxford reformers proceeded to reconstruct English hymnody, partly by writing it anew, partly by shifting to the new basis so much of the old as it retained.

I. The Puritan Zeal for “Purity” of Text

The first book printed in this country was a psalm book.

The English Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century brought with them the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter they had used in their parish churches at home. Here, in the wilderness, far from the conventions of civilization, all alone with God, the familiar English psalm book raised, as most things did in that atmosphere, scruples of conscience. It dealt too loosely with the inspired Hebrew text. Whether the men who had made it lacked a sufficient acquaintance with that language, or felt the strain and shackles of versification, it was not literal. It lacked “purity.”

And so a little group of emigrant scholars, cut off from most of life’s comforts and most scholarly resources by the wide ocean, and threatened by savage neighbors, set themselves to the task of constructing a purer version of the Psalms in meter,—if meter it is to be called. Then they sent to the old home for a press and some fonts of type, and in 1640 printed their now famous Bay Psalm Book.

Their enterprise was quixotic, and the few copies [190] of their Psalm Book that survive are the most appealing memorial of what we now call the New England conscience. And it was all, we are tempted to say, by way of a pedantic concern for the text of their songs, a matter of the right word and the turn of a phrase.

That would be to overlook the fact that to the seventeenth century Puritan the text of their church-songs had come to mean everything. The metrical Psalm was to them not a hymn based on Scripture: it was a revised version of Scripture. Granting that principle of an inspired song discussed in a former lecture, were not the Church authorities bound first to provide and then safeguard a literal version of the Psalms that could be sung? The remote and romantic surroundings of the Bay Psalm Book make it an isolated cairn showing the extreme lengths to which a Puritan Church would go in this pursuit. But so far as the actual proceedings of the Bay divines are concerned, they were doing just what the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland did a very few years later in their protracted revision of “Rous’ Version” of the Psalms before allowing the Scottish kirks to introduce it into public worship.

When the eighteenth century revival awakened New England, both the Psalms and hymns of Watts were in many hands and hearts already. The evangelical enthusiasm aroused by Whitefield’s preaching cleared the hearers’ minds of the earlier scruples [191] and agitations concerning psalmody. The whole structure of Puritan psalmody gave way under evangelical pressure, and the singing of hymns started almost spontaneously.

It was now the Presbyterian churches that held on to Puritan traditions of psalmody, and even those who yielded to revival influences asked no more than permission to introduce Watts’ version of the Psalms. The desolating Psalmody Controversy that ensued was, on the face of it, nothing more than a controversy concerning the text of Psalms. The practical issue was whether the parishes be restricted to the “Rous” version of the Scottish Assembly, just referred to, or might substitute Watts’ free renderings of the substance of the Psalms, with their evangelical implications clearly expressed, and their text otherwise adapted to English feeling. The whole controversy relates itself to the original situation at Massachusetts Bay. The question raised was simply a new turn given to the Puritan scruple as to purity of the text.

In the Presbyterian Synod, as we all know, the accommodated Psalm as against the literal Psalm won through. The free hymn soon followed (as no doubt both parties had expected that it would) and was given full recognition in the Directory for Worship of 1788.

The new hymns quite naturally were an object of suspicion to those in any communion who questioned their use. Laying no claim to “purity” of text, they [192] had all the more on that account to submit themselves to rigid scrutiny by responsible representatives of the Churches, and by amateur theologians, very numerous in those more thoughtful days. Even more they had to be watched and guarded against error by those who had made themselves responsible for their admission, and were hoping so much from their use.

The text of hymns was thus much more of a concern, when the time came to prepare new hymn books of their own make for the various communions in this country. And to the average Christian, who cherished the hymn book in his private devotions and learned many of the hymns by heart, their text meant a great deal more than that of such poetry as he read, and which he could take or leave. It meant more than the text of Shakespeare means to a scholar, just because it came closer to his life.

II. The Textual Criticism of Our Hymns

In 1860, when hymn books were aplenty, Dr. Park and Dr. Phelps of Andover Seminary published their Hymns and Choirs,^[1] a book still instructive, and retaining the distinction of being the first American attempt at a systematic hymnology. In view of what has just been said it is not surprising that a good deal more than a third of the book deals with “The Text of Hymns.” The treatise is really an apologia for The Sabbath Hymn Book [193] its authors had published two years earlier after more years of careful preparation, and with a knowledge of the subject that in its time and place was probably unique. They had sought out many new hymns and had subjected the familiar ones to close criticism, constructing in many cases a text of their own, involving omissions, amendments and even additions.

Their hymn book encountered a storm of criticism, in which the publishers of Elias Nason’s Congregational Hymn Book,^[2] recently put on the market, took the part of Æolus. And of course the changes of familiar texts afforded the most vulnerable point of attack: and it became incumbent upon the authors of Hymns and Choirs to justify them.

It is possible therefore that the ample space allotted to “The Text of Hymns” in their treatise does not correspond precisely with their sense of proportion in constructing a hymnological system. Very likely it measures the extent of their chagrin at the reception their amended texts had met. Be that as it may the chapter remains the fullest presentation of the subject yet given. It is from the hand of Professor Park and is worked out with the precision and particularity to be expected from that hand. If one could reduce his many categories to more manageable bounds, the lines of his thesis would be something like these:

(a) That the criticism of hymns is as necessary as it is perilous. [The peril he had been forcibly [194] made to realize. The necessity he would no doubt impress upon many whose memory enshrined this or that text of familiar hymns learned in childhood, and who resented any changes of text without regard to their meritoriousness].

(b) That an immense number of textual alterations are present in current hymn books: [in all practically, though Dr. Park kept the “Old School Presbyterian Collection” well to the fore by way of illustration].

(c) That changes of text are really desirable for various reasons: [that range all the way from the sphere of sound doctrine to that of elementary grammar: and which he proceeds to catalogue and to illustrate with a wealth of detail].

(d) That all the omissions and amendments of text in “The Sabbath Hymn Book” are justified. This last, the heart of the discussion to Dr. Park and his colleague, has ceased to beat, now that their book lies buried beneath the strata of time. You cannot expect a wide public to take an interest in fossil remains, and yet both fossil and book are links in the chain of life, and each has a story to tell. If discriminating sermons were still wanted, a preacher could find many a theme in the alteration of hymn texts which the Andover Faculty thought necessary or desirable in 1858.

III. The Confusing State of the Text

The only one of Dr. Park’s propositions that was incontestable was that revealing the multitude of divergences in the text of the Psalms and hymns then in current use. It was not merely that so many differed from what their authors had written: there was a lack of uniformity in the text of even the cherished hymns as given in various books and sung in different congregations. Of most of them there was in fact no standard text and the clamorous or pathetic appeal against any alteration had little to rest upon other than prejudice or individual association.

“There is,” he says, “a multitude of readers who rely implicitly on the text of the Presbyterian (Old School) Collection, and regard every instance of departure from this text as a violation of the rights of authorship; yet in seven hundred and forty of the more common lyrics in that Collection, there are thirteen hundred and twenty-seven variations, exclusive of the frequent omissions. In the preface or advertisement of that manual it is stated: ‘The psalms have been left without alteration; the Committee believing that it would be extremely difficult to furnish a more acceptable version than that of Watts....’ But in the three hundred and forty-five versions of psalms contained in the Collection, there are six hundred and ninety-seven alterations. [196] Indeed there are not one hundred and ten of these psalms unaltered.”^[3]

In the New School Presbyterian hymn book, Professor Park found thirteen hundred and thirty-six variations of the original text in seven hundred and seventy-four of its most noted hymns. Of books used in Congregationalist churches he found eleven hundred and twenty-six changes in eight hundred and ten familiar hymns of the Connecticut Association’s book, and nine hundred changes in five hundred and fifty hymns he examined in Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Collection.

These figures are hard to grasp and to retain, but they leave an impression of the actual state of the hymns then in use. That impression may perhaps be deepened by selecting the single case of a hymn whose words lie familiarly in the memory of most of us: Toplady’s “Rock of Ages, cleft for me.” So it began in Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches; but many Baptist congregations, who used Rippon’s Selection,^[4] were singing “Rock of Ages, shelter me”; and Episcopalian, Methodist and Lutheran congregations were using a recast of the four verses into three.

These are but some of the variances in the text of a single hymn. They are brought forward here, if you will remember, simply to illustrate the fact that in the texts of the body of hymns that grew up here and was sung in the eighteen sixties, let us say, and which was the inheritance of my generation, there were countless divergences from the author’s text and variant readings even of the emendations. There was a striking lack of uniformity. There was no common text, even among Old and New School Presbyterians, or among Baptists or Congregationalists.

This state of things made itself felt as an annoyance to anybody who really cared for the hymns and a great embarrassment when different groups of Christian people tried to sing together. But the actual situation was little apprehended then by those who blamed it on the compilers of their hymn books, and is not very generally understood even now. It is perhaps worthwhile therefore to ask how it happened [198] that the text of our hymnody fell into such a state.

IV. The Causes of This Confusion

Dr. Watts was not actually the first writer who aimed to ameliorate the Psalms by injecting evangelical interpretations into their text. But his The Psalms of David imitated (1719) must be held responsible for the project of making the whole structure of the Psalter and the substance of its text a framework on which to weave an evangelical psalmody of mingled praise and British patriotism; and all in David’s name, now, as Watts put it, converted from a Jew into a Christian. In the face of such proposal the recent efforts of a Weymouth or a Moffatt to give us a Bible in modern English impress us by their restraint.

Who would imagine that in the following lines Dr. Watts is giving us the opening of the 75th Psalm:

It is much easier to understand the violent protests of Romaine and others aroused by such a handling of the sacred text than it is to explain how these accommodations and modernizations were gravely accepted by the churches in lieu of more [199] literal versions, yet still “Psalms.” But such was the case.

Watts’ Psalms imitated were reprinted in the American colonies up to the time of the Revolution without change of text. But with the dawn of the spirit of independence his frequent allusions to Britain and King George wore out their welcome. I have copies of early American imprints in which they are erased and more patriotic phrases inserted by the pen of some one, probably a precentor. After the Revolution the Connecticut Association employed Joel Barlow to revise Watts’ text and to accommodate it to American worship. After several editions of this, Barlow fell into such personal disrepute that the Association engaged President Dwight to make a fresh rescension. The Presbyterian Synod had already adopted Barlow’s revision, and now the General Assembly approved Dr. Dwight’s. Dr. Worcester soon followed with an independent rescension of his own. So that there were in circulation at once Barlow’s revision of Watts’ Psalms, partly superseded in Connecticut, but adhered to by Presbyterians, almost universally in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; Dr. Dwight’s revision, favored by Connecticut Congregationalists who distrusted Barlow and by many Presbyterians, especially in New York; and Dr. Worcester’s revision, favored in New England, especially Massachusetts. The textual confusion was further increased [200] by several publishers who got out editions of their own, which adopted emendations from these three revisions, with some further changes, made possibly with a view of avoiding the infringement of copyrights.^[5]

Turning now to Watts’ Hymns—he had expressed in his preface, and perhaps felt, a willingness that his words should not be regarded as sacred. The leader of worship should be at liberty to substitute a better for an “unpleasing” word: it was the day when hymns were given out line by line by the precentor. “We are not,” he said, “confined to the words of any one man in our public solemnities.”

But he could not have anticipated the drastic changes his texts underwent at the hands of the English Presbyterians in their progress to declared Unitarianism. These Arian rescensions were still printed under Watts’ name, and without intimation that they had been changed. The protest this aroused among orthodox contemporaries was met by the claim that they, the Unitarians, were doing to Watts just what Watts had done to “David,” and what Watts himself would have done had he rewritten the hymns according to his changed views in later years. An Arian text of Watts was thus set up and justified, in time to be a precedent for our Massachusetts Unitarians.

When there was a prospect of introducing human compositions into Scottish Presbyterian worship, the [201] successive committees on Hymns and Paraphrases wrestled with the text of them just as their fathers had with “Rous’ Version,” and they produced a Scottish rescension of some of Watts’ hymns that has become more familiar than the original text.

But in a wide circle of Independent and other churches Watts’ Hymns were regarded with a reverence that kept their text sacrosanct. They were accepted not individually but en masse, as in themselves a complete hymnal; their number, their arrangement “in three books” and their text, all unchanged. It is striking, certainly, that in Boston as late as 1819, a hundred and twelve years after their publication, Dr. Worcester’s attempt in his Christian Psalmody to present some abridgment and alteration of the Hymns encountered a resentment so great that his publishers had to recall the book and insist on restoring “Watts entire,” as it was then called, without abridgment or alteration of a word.

And yet many of the hymns cried aloud either for exclusion or for some amendment; there was so much careless composition, so many breaches of good taste. How could a critical editor be expected, for instance, to approve an expression of the Christmas situation such as that of the 13th hymn of the first book:

Even this Dr. Worcester was compelled to restore [202] in his later book, known as Worcester’s Watts. The committees who compiled the Presbyterian Psalms and Hymns of 1831 and 1843 handled the hymns of Watts more selectively and more critically, amending where they could not admire.

John Wesley, a warm admirer of Watts, had from the first felt no more hesitation in altering his text than in blue-penciling his brother’s hymns or adapting the poems of George Herbert. Not even that deft hand could make Herbert congregational. But his method vindicated itself permanently in dealing with Watts’ ineffective 100th Psalm, beginning:

which he transformed into the fine hymn:

John Wesley desired that the text of his brother’s and his own hymns, furnished in his large Collection of Hymns for ... Methodists (1780) should be final. As for hymn tinkerers, he said in the preface, “I desire they would not attempt to mend them; for they really are not able. None of them is able to mend either the sense or the verse.” The reference here very likely was to Whitefield and Toplady, both of whom had altered the hymns they appropriated. [203] After Wesley’s death his wishes were disregarded even by the publishers of his own book. Charles Wesley’s hymns suffered long at editorial hands that were all thumbs. His “Jesu, Lover of my soul,” being the most lyrical, suffered most, and only in our day has been restored to its original beauty.

The poet Montgomery in his anthologies and hymn books covered the whole range of materials available at the opening of the nineteenth century with his purpose to elevate the literary standard of praise. With a self-confidence as great as Wesley’s, he was even freer of hand than Wesley. In editing Cotterill’s book of 1819^[6] he put into circulation many modified texts. It was he who changed Cowper’s “There is a fountain filled with blood” to “From Calvary’s cross a fountain flows,” and who made the 3-verse rescension of “Rock of Ages” that so long prevailed in English and American Episcopal Churches. He said that the time and thought he gave to amending the Moravian hymn book would have sufficed for the composition of a like quantity of original verse. And he predicted quite truly that when he was gone his own hymns would be “altered to suit the taste of appropriators.”

With Montgomery we are come down to the nineteenth century and to a period when hymn books began to multiply on all sides in the effort of enlarging or freshening the service of song in various [204] communions. And with this multiplication of books the confusion of text became worse confounded. Partly because every compiler felt the duty of conforming the materials at hand to the doctrinal beliefs of his constituency. Partly also because he felt free to alter any expression not commending itself to his judgment or his whims.

But the great cause of confusion lay deeper.

V. The First Attempts to Verify the Texts

All these compilers of hymn books were working in the dark, with very little knowledge of their materials. Apart from reprints of Watts and Olney Hymns in circulation, the sources were vague, or, if known, quite inaccessible. A new book was made up from such earlier and current selections as its compiler had on hand. The guess-work or blunder of one compiler as to the authorship or text of the hymns became the assurance of the next. The emendations of one compiler, made freely and unacknowledged, became the original text to the one copying it into the later book. And for such an enterprise a pair of shears and a blue pencil seemed equipment enough. In the complacency behind such a statement as that of the compilers of the Presbyterian Psalms and Hymns of 1843 that they had determined to adhere to the text of Watts’ revision of the Psalms, their ignorance, in view of the not remote [205] contests and excitements within their own communion, can only be described as willful. Certainly it was abysmal. The thought that the matter of preparing the Church’s songs called for anything in the nature of scholarship was slow to dawn. The Andover Faculty caught the light, and pursued it. Some hymn books from Dr. Park’s library with his annotations, now in my possession, show his concern and suggest how limited were his resources.

Strange as it may seem to-day Roundell Palmer’s Book of Praise, published at London and New York, in 1862, was the first attempt to recover and restore the original text of our hymns. Even this could not have been made without the help of Daniel Sedgwick, a second-hand bookseller of London. The flotsam of literature drifted his way, and he thought it worth while (he was the first who did) to collect and collate the old Psalm and hymn books; until, as Palmer said, “he knew more about them and their authors than any one else” then living.^[7]

The Book of Praise proved an incentive to a wider inquiry into sources and texts. Sedgwick’s little shop became its center, and he the oracle to whom for many years the more ambitious hymnal editor was accustomed to resort.

During the next thirty years the study advanced so far that it became possible for Dr. John Julian, Vicar of Wincobank, to assemble quite a group of scholars in preparing his Dictionary of Hymnology, [206] published in 1891. This was at once a survey of and a guide to what had been a very roughly charted territory.

With the Dictionary at hand the least industrious compiler could now give the authorship and date of a great number of his hymns. But that is as far as such a book could serve. Except in a few cases of unusual interest it could not within its limits reproduce the texts of the hymns. And the sources remain difficult of access. Dr. Julian himself was obliged to go to press without having seen a copy of the original edition of either Watts’ Hymns or his Horæ Lyricæ, and was therefore unaware of the many variances of text in different issues of these books. Not even a thesaurus has been made of English hymns, such as Koch and Wackernagel have made of the German, and Dreves and Blume of the Latin. Nor is there likely to be. The mass of the materials is so overwhelming, and much of it so unrewarding from any standpoint.

Editorial work of the right sort had been done before Julian’s day by such men as Charles Rogers, Godfrey Thring and Canon Ellerton, and in this country notably by Frederic M. Bird, the first extensive collector here of the sources.

But on the whole it is not unfair to say that the textual confusion and uncertainty already described at some length was not greatly relieved when the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. gave to its Board of Publication the instructions [207] which eventuated somewhat tardily in The Hymnal of 1895.

VI. The Textual Canons of 1895

We are now in a position to discuss intelligently what we may call the textual canons of our hymnody. Instead of dealing with them in the abstract I propose now to bring to a focus this whole matter of the text—its purity, its modifications, its acceptability—by way of restating the actual principles by which the text of The Hymnal of 1895 was constructed.

Perhaps I ought to begin with an attempt to justify such proposal.

In view of the conditions shown, those to whom the project of the new hymnal was committed could hardly fail to feel the need of a fresh study of the text of the whole body of our hymnody in use, and the opportunity for an attempt to put it on a firmer basis.

Their field was clear. They were neither helped nor hampered by traditional texts common to all who were likely to make use of the new church hymnal; many of whom indeed had given up the use of authorized books in favor of one or another of Dr. Charles S. Robinson’s, with whom textual criticism was not a strong point. They were also confronted by what may be called “the awful example” of the new Protestant Episcopal hymnal of 1891, [208] whose textual vagaries are still unexplained. It is enough to say here that in that book “Nearer, my God, to Thee” was relieved of all allusion to Jacob’s dream: that “My Country, ’tis of thee” was cut in half, and the half joined on to “God bless our native land” to make a whole: and that Cowper’s “Hark! my soul, it is the Lord,” was so dealt with that the cultured Dr. Huntington, who had loved it, was heard to declare he could never give it out again in Grace Church.

Obviously the work on the hymns considered for the new book should begin, where scholarship of any sort begins, with a first-hand knowledge of the sources. And so a systematic search began for all the books or periodicals in which the hymns first appeared and the hymn books whose rescension of them completed their textual history.

When these had been gathered up in England and this country to the fullest extent possible to enterprise and patience, the way was opened to the construction of an acceptable text, whether by restoration or amendment. And that brings us to the textual principles of 1895.

I. The Hymn and the Hymn Tune

So far we have been dealing in the main with hymnody as a body of religious verse furnishing the subject-matter for congregational song, without special reference to the tunes which are as essential as the hymns themselves in the actual practice of hymnody. In thus postponing until now any consideration of the hymn tune we have simply followed the logic of the situation. Any words chosen to be sung have a natural priority over the music they are to be set to and the act of singing them.

But in the case of our hymns the logical priority of their words over their tunes is immensely emphasized. The body of its hymnody is primarily the sacred poetry of the Christian religion; the record of the highest appropriations of truth and the flowers of Christian experience, gathered out of all ages of the Church and conveyed through the appealing medium of verse. The verse, just because it is lyrical, is so much the easier to read and remember. To a considerable body of the brotherhood hymnody is the only religious poetry that counts, if not indeed the only poetry, apart from the newspaper waifs [228] and strays, with which they come into personal contact.

It is as devotional verse rather than as song that our hymns have entered into the spiritual experience of a myriad hymn lovers, to whom the church hymnal has meant most as the companion of silent hours, the source of remembered inspirations. It would be as futile to contend that Christian hymns have no office and no message until sung in the congregation as to say that the poetical and spiritual uplift of The Book of Psalms was confined to the comparatively few Jews who participated in the Temple worship.

It is more to the point to say that it is only the precedent appropriation of the hymn’s message by each individual heart that makes its congregational singing worthwhile. It is the truths and experiences expressed in them that makes the music to which they are sung to be religious music.

Except in intent and through association there can hardly be such a thing as Christian music. Indeed if we are to divide life into compartments and set apart only one as dedicated to religion, it is questionable if there is such a thing as distinctively religious music. There is of course carnal and spiritual music. But in music that is pure in feeling and uplifting who can draw the line between secular and religious? Until it be clothed in words who can say whether the strains that incite us to activity incite us to the activities of brotherhood or the [229] struggle for supremacy; whether the music that brings visions of peace points to Nirvana or to Heaven? Schumann’s Nachtstücke No. 4 is secular, I suppose; but as embodied in our tune, “Canonbury,” it is a fit vehicle of religious expression. Sullivan’s “St. Gertrude” would serve as a march of the marines in Pinafore: if it is religious, it is the somewhat spectacular Christianity of Baring-Gould’s “Onward, Christian soldiers” that transmutes it.

It is then the thought and feeling of the hymn that imparts anything like a specifically religious tone to the music to which it is set. It would seem to follow that any theory of hymnody that subordinates the hymn to the hymn tune is definitely unchristian: and that any tendency in our hymn books or choir lofts to treat the words of our hymns as a mere libretto of the music, however beautiful it be, should be dealt with very frankly.

We have already before us sufficient materials for a rationale of the hymn tune. We have first of all the hymn whose message, being spiritual, is necessarily, like the gospel itself, a message to the individual soul; but whose function is fulfilled only by being sung in fellowship by the brotherhood who have apprehended the message. And so we must find music fit to express spiritual values in unison.

The essentials of the hymn tune are, first, a simplicity that brings it within a congregation’s reach, [230] and, second, the spiritual impression it makes upon them. And, if church song is to rise above a perfunctory performance of an assigned duty, it is equally essential that the music have the quality we call charm,—the gift of approaching the spirit by the avenue of sense, gratified by the appeal of beauty.

The spirituality of the hymn tune is no doubt overstressed in describing it as “an offering to God,” which on that account should be solemn and stately, with feeling duly repressed. The music is sufficiently spiritual if it encourages the deeper enterprise of offering ourselves to God. To that end an element of sentimentality is allowable: probably necessary so long as we are human beings rather than academic liturgiologists.

The essential of simplicity can hardly be over-stressed. The limits of a congregational tune are so narrowly rigid. It cannot cover the whole hymn anthem-wise, or adapt itself to varying verses as a song may. It must begin and end within the limits of a single verse, to be repeated as often as verses occur. It must be a clear melody that will carry itself without the inner parts, kept within the range of the average voice and the available musical ability.

Great musicians feel the constraint of these limits, just as in hymn writing Tennyson felt the constraint of what he called “commonplace.” It used to be pleasant to talk over these matters with Horatio [231] Parker, most scholarly of our composers, who had a part in editing several hymnals and composed some tunes of exceptional brilliancy. He liked to say in private what he is reported as saying publicly, that the hymn tune is quite the lowest form of music. He had no instinctive sympathy with congregational singing, which he found inartistic; and he had an idealist’s contempt for the common level and for popularity. One of his earlier tunes, “Garden City,” that attained wide vogue, became an offense to him, just as the popularity of John Hay’s early ballads became an irritation to that writer. Dr. Parker told me he would recall his tune if he could.

And yet effectiveness need not be a bugbear to an artist. The restraint that adapts a composition to its appointed function is an art motive in itself. The miniature may exhibit qualities as sound as the colossal canvasses of Benjamin West, and is much better adapted to be cherished. Certainly Parker’s “Mount Sion” is, within its limits, as good music as his prize opera “Mona.” And one can imagine the hymn tune being sung on church occasions till the end of time, while it is doubtful if the profoundly accomplished opera, having had its official hearing, will again be performed.

The moral of which things is that the Church must not submit to an academic decree banishing its hymn tunes from the realm of art, lest the tunes shall be satisfied to clothe themselves in the shabby [232] garments of the outcast, or in the tinsel and motley of the cabaret, as our popular song has already learned to do.

The Church and its pastors must really enlarge their minds to let the hymn tune share whatever concern they feel for the hymns. In the actual administration of hymnody as an ordinance there is no room for distinction between words and music. The hymn and its tune together compose the unit of the hymn as sung, and together stand or fall. An inartistic tune will kill the most poetic hymn ever written. A dull or unwelcome tune will impart to the most spiritual words an atmosphere of insincerity that makes one’s spirit shrink. A tune adequate to the spiritual values of the words, interprets them. A great tune does more: it adds something to the printed words by way of suggesting things of the spirit unprinted between the lines.

II. The Primitive Singing

It is a quaint providence that has preserved as a part of our English Bible the names of several tunes to which Psalms were sung, by indicating the title of some familiar song to the melody of which the Psalm was set. Thus Psalm xxii was sung to “A Hind in the Morning”; xlv to “The lilies”; lvi to “The silent Dove of those far off”; lx to “The Lily of Testimony.” The ascriptions add nothing to our [233] knowledge of Hebrew music, but they do confer a grace of pedigree upon the hymn tune.^[2]

No Hebrew melody survives. The attempt to trace a connection of one or another with traditional synagogue melodies fails because the inherited tunes differ among themselves, reflecting the country and period of their origin. The opinion that the Hebrew music is continued in the ecclesiastical chant of the Roman Church must be relegated to the sphere of pious tradition.

The Hebrew tune had no harmony in our modern sense. It was a unison cantillation, free, and not measured like an Anglican chant, and following more closely the rhythms of the words. The melodies had individuality enough to be remembered and handed down; for there was no way of recording them.

At the Last Supper the company would use the one they associated with the Hallel. Our Lord had no intent of imposing upon His Church His national music or ritual. The particular tune they used did not become an oral tradition, and could not have been made a part of the written gospel, since no system of notation had been invented. I have often thought how happy that circumstance was. If the music had been included in the narrative, as it would be in a modern phonographic record, it would inevitably have acquired a sacrosanct character. It might have formed the basis of a system of church [234] music that would have kept the later Church outside the development of modern culture.

It would be surplusage to recall that our Lord imposed no type of music upon His Church, were it not for the recent order of the Pope (acting as His Vicar) prescribing the sole use in all churches of the Roman obedience of that plain-song music which some claim as primitive. In view also, I might add, of the pronouncements from time to time of Protestant leaders of ecclesiastical music, venturing to lay out its metes and bounds with equal precision but with less authority.

The singing of the Pauline Churches is often made the precedent for congregational song as distinguished from the singing of a later time by officiants. The psalmody most characteristic, the charismatic, was certainly not congregational, but delivered solo-wise to a listening assembly.

There were practical difficulties in the way of “conjoint singing.” There was no common musical standard. It is not clear that Jewish Christians would find the Septuagint Psalms adaptable to the only music they knew. Nor can we say how far either Jew or Gentile brought to the meetings the tradition of simultaneous singing. What was more practicable and presumably more familiar was that simplest type of antiphonal song in which a leader carries the Psalm and the congregation makes such responses as are agreed upon.

Many of the proper tunes of the Psalms had been lost from memory before our Lord’s time; and the musical ideals of the scattered Jews must have been already modified by Hellenistic influences. Renan^[3] would infer the character of the music not so much from that of the synagogue as from the Eastern practice of to-day. He argues that a common practice among religious communities separated since early times testifies to its great antiquity:

“The chanting with which they accompanied the new hymns was probably that species of sobbing without distinct notes which is still the chant of the Greek Church, of the Marionites, and generally of Eastern Christians. It is not so much a musical modulation as a manner of forcing the voice and of emitting through the nose a sort of groaning, in which all the inflections follow each other rapidly. They perform this singular melopœia standing; the eye fixed, the forehead knitted, the eye-brow contracted, giving an appearance of effort. The word ‘Amen,’ above all, is uttered in a tremulous voice with bodily shaking.”

Instrumental music being still excluded from Greek Church worship, the same method of arguing back from present-day practice, would raise a presumption that the psalmody was unaccompanied.

Calvin at Geneva took a definite stand against it, and ever since “the instrumental music question” has vexed the Puritan conscience. In the days of Puritan [236] ascendancy in England it wrought great iconoclasm. Perhaps it is settled now. But in “cases of conscience” one never knows.

Certainly it is not settled by the record. St. Paul’s verb, “psallein,” is cited as implying instrumental accompaniment: his “making melody in the heart” is cited as proving that the heart-strings are the instrument referred to. In I Cor. xiv, 7, 8, the Apostle refers familiarly to several musical instruments; but Dr. Porteus, debating The Organ Question,^[4] detects a note of contempt in his allusion to “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal” in I Cor. xiii, 1.

Perhaps we might agree that the record is noncommittal. The enlightened imagination has indeed a great deal to do with the settlement of these questions of history and of conscience. And the Christian imagination continues to hear the blast of Temple trumpets making a loud noise unto Jehovah, and persists in giving audience not only to a voice from heaven as the sound of many waters, but to the voice of harpers harping with their harps as the new song arises to the throne of God itself.

III. Plainsong Melodies

Church music had become little more than recitation when Ambrose introduced at Milan the antiphonal singing by the congregation of his new metrical hymns. For tunes he reverted to the Greek scales [237] or modes; and in four of them composed those Psalm and hymn melodies whose rendering in the basilica so deeply moved the heart of St. Augustine. Readers of his Confessions will recall the ecstasy of his delight and the suggestive cross-examination of that delight to discover if his emotions were not sensuous rather than spiritual. And yet the tunes were rudimental, without the charm of harmony, and the voice production distinctly nasal.

On this Greek basis was developed the musical system of plainsong, to which the labors of the great Gregory have attached the name of Gregorian Chant.

To any Christian with the historic sense a worship-music with traditions so venerable makes an a priori appeal: to one ecclesiastically-minded there is a heightening in the appeal of the only music the Church can claim as distinctively her own.

When the Oxford Revival turned the English Church mind to Medievalism, a definite movement began, under Thomas Helmore’s lead, to engraft the Gregorian music upon English worship. This beginning, in the eighteen fifties, was premature and misinformed.

With the great prominence given to it by the Motu proprio of Pius X in 1903, restoring the purity of plainsong and enjoining its use in Roman Catholic churches, a new movement has begun to introduce it into Anglican and Episcopal Churches and [238] some congregations outside. The typical Church of England book, Hymns ancient and modern, in its 1904 edition triples the number of plainsong melodies of the original issue of 1861. The newer English Hymnal has a hundred; The New Hymnal of the American Episcopal Church has fourteen.

Some traces of plainsong influence are in all hymnals: in Lowell Mason’s “Hamburg” for instance. Some of its melodies in a popularized form are familiar and useful: “Veni Emmanuel” for instance. With these possibly the plainsong movement might be allowed to rest for the present. It should be cross-examined in the interests of the congregation. The tunes are without the aid of harmony, written in unfamiliar keys, timeless and unbarred. Their beauty depends on adapting the free rhythm to the mutations of the words. They are confessedly difficult even for trained choirs. Badly sung they are totally uninteresting.

Such reports as reach me from Episcopal parishes are uniform in their complaint that the purer plainsong melodies in their New Hymnal shut out the people from participating in the hymns set to them. Those who are outside the line of this particular musical tradition may wisely heed a practical estimate by one born in it and long experienced in it. So I quote from the History and Growth of Church Music by Father Taunton, a Roman Catholic musician:^[5]

“Although I personally admire and take a delight [239] in joining to the best of my poor abilities in the Plain Chant, yet I am convinced it does not do for our people. It does not appeal to them, it does not awake in them any echoes of the religious life. The impressions it produces are gloom and monotony, and these are not religious.... The truth is that Plain Chant is suited to and can only be sung, as it ought to be sung, by the clergy and religious.”

Nevertheless the wide concern of The English Hymnal with plainsong, suggests that the movement to acclimate it will have to be tried out in the Church of England. Should the movement win through it will no doubt affect the more cultivated congregations in non-liturgical communions, so oddly sensitive as they are to prevailing fashions in liturgical Churches.

I hear already of one pastor whole-heartedly training his people in the love and practice of plainsong. Others of us who cherish no expectation that it will ever be popularized, and are conscious of no wish that it should be, may yet welcome such a training-school. No music teaches so impressively the rightful supremacy of holy words over musical notes. Its measures are the marks of punctuation: its accents the emphasis given to a syllable in careful speech. A training in it would give the habit of unremitting attention to the words of a hymn, so lacking at present. To me it would seem obvious that each melody should be applied only to the specific hymn to which it was so carefully adapted, and [240] that the hymns should be sung in the original Latin, whose speech-values and fluctuating rhythms cannot be reproduced in English.

IV. The Lutheran Chorales^[6]

Ambrose’s task of finding congregational tunes for new hymns came afresh to Martin Luther. The task was congenial to one who thought the singing of united voices “the most beautiful thing in the world”; and not too difficult for one so familiar with the traditions and so accustomed to the performance of both plainsong and folk song.

Luther invented or shaped the Protestant hymn tune, in that form which, as harmonized and developed in the century following, we are accustomed to call the “Lutheran chorale.” Its essence was a sober and elevated but buoyant melody, in the idiom of the songs in which a musical people were accustomed to express their feelings, without any great distinction between those definitely religious or simply human.

Whether Luther composed “Ein’ Feste Burg” and other melodies that bear his name is a problem of no great import, as neither he nor his helpers sought originality. Their tunes were largely made up from phrases from plainsong or adaptations of current songs, some of which were already associated with sacred words and some with secular. He was chided for going so far afield as to bring folk songs into the [241] sanctuary. What he did was just what the editors of the recent English Hymnal are now so widely commended for doing as a relief from the academic monotony into which Anglican song was falling. And the practical effect of Luther’s course was not to secularize church song so much as to turn the current of German music into a religious channel.

Luther’s equipment was unique, combining his knowledge of the rich resources, Latin and German, his ability to handle them, his sympathy with plain people, his saving common sense. The twice-told tale of his phenomenal success in making popular song his agent in spreading the gospel and heartening the gospelers does not need to be repeated here.

By a gradual process culminating in the eighteenth century and often attributed to the relaxed spiritual feelings of a cold rationalism, the chorales suffered a decadence like that of plainsong. Their rhythmical movement was often destroyed by reducing them to notes of equal length too much drawn out, which impart a certain dullness in place of the buoyant life and motion of the original.

In this duller form the chorales came into this country and have been presented to American churches: a fact which partly explains why so few have been appropriated. Lutheran worship itself has been a losing struggle to keep to the fore its own hymnody with its proper tunes, during the process of Americanizing successive generations of its people, [242] who acquire a preference for lighter types of song prevailing among the people they daily associate with. There is also a temperamental difference between Germans and Americans that militates against the adoption of the chorales, especially in the slower and heavier form most familiar. Most people respond to this great music sung en masse or orchestrated by Bach; but, when asked to join in, some difference in training or something in nervous make-up breeds an impatience in the vocal chords.

Unfortunately there is no pope in Lutheranism to ordain the restoration of the chorale to its primitive beauty. In the meantime a party has arisen with that end in view. It is at least possible that the chorale restored to buoyancy would make a fresh appeal to American congregations. It is indeed worth hoping for.

The extreme Lutheran restorer of the old paths who at times seems to imply that the chorale is the one and only hymn setting for our day, awakens less sympathy. He seems to an outsider to be putting the letter of Luther’s tunes in place of the freedom of Luther’s method. If any one thing was characteristic of his settlement of Protestant music it was the free spirit that could welcome a contribution of available music from any source whatever, ecclesiastical or human, of a sort that could be adapted to holy words and consecrated by holy associations.

V. The Genevan Melodies

Calvin’s problem at Geneva was to find popular melodies that would carry the difficult measures of Marot’s Psalms. His attempt to solve it has been treated by a succession of historians as a blot on the record of sacred music.

What Calvin did may be summed up in a sentence. Lacking Luther’s equipment he singled out a competent musician, Louis Bourgeois, living at Geneva under needy circumstances, and put into his hands the preparation of suitable melodies. We may be quite sure that he impressed upon the musician just the sort of thing he wanted. Hence the long series of hymn tunes that graced the Genevan Psalter of 1551. After Bourgeois had left Geneva, the setting of the balance of the Psalter had to be committed to inferior hands.

When critics protest against Calvin’s insistence on unison singing, his repudiation of “curious music,” and his banishment of the organ, they are within their rights. Even so one could wish that they might add the historic sense to their critical equipment and, applying to Calvin’s musical settlement William James’ pragmatic test, acknowledge that “it worked.”

Professor Dickinson in his very well-known Music in the History of the Western Church is somewhat alone in appreciation of the historical situation. But just what does he mean by calling the Genevan [244] melodies “unemotional unison tunes that satisfied the stern demands of rigid zealots,” “not having in themselves any artistic value”? Had Professor Dickinson any first-hand knowledge of this branch of his subject?

Let us turn without further remark to the present Poet Laureate, who has added a grace to our hymnody by his devotion to it, and whose Yattendon Hymnal is ample evidence of his musical taste. This is from his twice-printed Practical Discourse on some principles of Hymn-singing:^[7]

“Bourgeois turned out to be an extraordinary genius in melody.” Of his eighty-five tunes in the Genevan Psalter “almost all ... are of great merit and many of the highest excellence. Bourgeois’ tunes are masterpieces, which have remained popular on the continent from the first ... and the best that can be imagined for solemn congregational singing of the kind which we might expect in England.”

It was their beauty that made the Genevan Psalmody and gave it wings. If a hymnologist relied on the French Psalms to prove the power of the hymn to move and sustain the heart, a musician might urge that it was the tunes that won French hearts. He might go further and say that they carried the psalmody across the borders and opened the hearts of many who could not read French. The proof is that it became necessary to translate the Genevan Psalms into most European languages, always preserving [245] the meters and rhythms that so they might be sung to the original melodies.^[8]

The Reformed Churches, then, have a musical inheritance of their own; spiritual, artistic. In English-speaking communions it lies practically unclaimed. Among ourselves it has left no traces beyond a reminiscence embodied in the familiar “Autumn” and the survival of the 134th Psalm melody (our “Old Hundredth”), which, like so many chorales, has been reduced to notes of equal length.

The question arises how this loss happened. It was the hearing of the Genevan song that inspired the English exiles of Mary’s reign to undertake an English psalm book. Why did they make so little use of what they heard? The answer is quite simple. No one of them could imitate the delicate French lyrical meters which carried the Genevan tunes. They were hard put to get the Psalms into English measures which would pass for verse at all. Their disability finally determined the character of the English Psalm tune as embodied in the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter of 1562; for the most part a rather dull performance; regrettably so because dull tunes are fated to become in time the mother of a dogged congregational hymnody.

Is it worthwhile for English-speaking Reformed communions to claim a musical inheritance so distinctive and so beautiful? Speaking for his own Church of England Dr. Bridges is an enthusiast for [246] the revival of the Genevan melodies, as “thoroughly congenial to our national taste,” whereas the failure to bring German chorales into general use testifies to “a difference in the melodic sense of the two nations.” The primary difficulty of finding words to fit the French measures Dr. Bridges has begun to meet with some lyrics of his own in his Yattendon Hymnal. The editors of The English Hymnal have taken up the task, and given currency to sixteen of the melodies. The late Dr. Burnap of Brooklyn was equally anxious to become a pioneer in introducing them into American hymnals. He found the books inhospitable, and the leaders of church music indifferent. It may possibly be that an adequate presentation of the Genevan Psalmody with some simplification of its rhythms might awaken in Reformed Churches something of the pride Lutherans have in their great inheritance. “These tunes,” says the Poet Laureate, “in dignity, solemnity, pathos, and melodic solidity leave nothing to be desired.”

VI. The English Psalm Tunes

The Psalm tunes of the Reformation period embodied in the English Psalter of 1562 and the Scottish of 1564 are unharmonized, and in their unadorned severity of outline suggest the Puritan influence back of them. They conform to Cranmer’s advice to Henry VIII upon translating the liturgy: “The song made thereunto should not be [247] full of notes, but as near as may be for every syllable a note, so that it may be sung distinctly and devoutly.”

Some effort was made to provide a proper tune to each Psalm; or, if not, to refer each to the melody of some other. The 8-line C. M. tune was greatly favored. Such Genevan melodies as were used were badly marred in adapting them to English meters, and the new tunes are generally uninteresting. Some half dozen of the 8-line tunes survive in English hymnals, but are less known here.

Either these 8-line tunes taxed peoples’ memories or else proved dull, for the harmonized editions of the Psalter that soon began to appear replaced them with “short tunes” of four lines. It is they to which we commonly refer as “the English Psalm Tunes.”

William Damon’s edition, as early as 1579, gave us “Cambridge” and “Oxford,” “Southwell” and (later) “Windsor.” Thomas Este’s in 1592 gave us “Winchester” and “Cheshire.” Thomas Ravenscroft’s of 1621 merely reflected the prevailing taste in gathering up from various places a large reënforcement of 4-line tunes. Among his sources was Andro Hart’s 1615 edition of the Scottish Psalter, in which a group of twelve appeared as “Common Tunes,” applicable to any C. M. Psalm; easier to remember than so many proper tunes. Among them were “Dundee” (“French”), “The Stilt,” “Dumferline,” “Martyrs” and others that played so great a part in Scottish life, and came to be regarded by [248] many Scottish hearts as having been composed by David himself.

The “short tune” has ever since proved effective, and has often dominated our church song. Nevertheless it marked a decline and not a progress; a lapsing of Reformation fervor, a decadence of the general aptitude for music in Elizabeth’s time.

During the long struggle between Puritan and Cavalier the Psalm singing fell between the two stools of high church and low church, and lay in a neglect as great as could befall an ordinance destined to survive. Even the short tunes became unmanageable. With the Puritan ascendancy it fell into a musical collapse, with Parliament wrangling over the version of Psalms to be authorized, and the Scottish Assembly putting forth “Rous’ Version” in 1650, mostly in common meter, and (for the first time in Scotland) without any provision of music whatever.

After the Restoration of 1660 something had to be done to revive the lost art of congregational song among a people who did not even know the traditions of a better day. In 1671 John Playford put forth a folio of tunes old and new; complaining in his preface that nearly all the choice tunes were lost and out of use and that very few parish clerks even in London knew enough music to set them. His folio falling flat, six years later he compiled a setting of the old Psalms in a handy twelvemo, with simpler harmonies and a 4-line alternate for every [249] 8-line tune. This became, and for a century continued to be, the musical standard, although contributing very little to our present-day resources.

Outside the Church Dr. Watts regarded his System of Praise as rescue work from the intolerable conditions of psalmody among dissenters. But he depended upon the reviving power of evangelical sentiment, and had no thought musically of any thing more than getting some snap into the few tunes the people knew. It was other hands who found his vigorous hymns an encouragement of a parallel movement to freshen up the musical side also. To this we owe both words and tune of the ringing Easter Hymn, “Jesus Christ is risen to-day.” Its appearance was almost simultaneous with that of Watts’ Hymns and Spiritual Songs.

Within the Church of England the New Version of Tate and Brady, at the end of the seventeenth century, had been an effort to better things by providing Psalms more lyrical, singable to current tunes; but its Supplement enriched hymnody permanently with three fine tunes of Dr. Croft, “St. Anne,” “Hanover” and “St. Matthew’s Tune.” So far as these were sung at all, even in London, it was disconnectedly, as the clerk droned out the Psalm line by line, and some in the congregation, or some singers representing it, responded with so much of the melody as covered the line.

The average parish church remained unaffected by the New Version. It was the deplorable conditions [250] of parochial song that inspired John Wesley to set up the Methodist singing which restored to his people the old fervor of Reformation song. As an educator Wesley taught them how to sing and as an administrator published several tune books. He used German tunes and Psalm tunes, when they pleased him, and, like Luther, secular songs. He was scrupulous both as to musical exactness and spiritual tone. He hated dullness but rebuked “horn-pipes.” The “Old Methodist Tunes” are later, and often more florid than he would approve.

Any impression you may get from Green’s Short History of England that Wesley set all England a-singing Methodist hymns is altogether erroneous. The Wesleyan zeal for song overflowed into the Evangelical side of the Revival through Whitefield and the Countess of Huntingdon’s chapels, and even tapped the Church of England through the Evangelical party she inspired. But to the stodgy churchliness of the time the Methodist “enthusiasm” was simply hateful. It was distasteful even to Dr. Watts and dignified dissent. The field-song of the revivals had no more direct influence upon parochial psalmody than the tambourines of the Salvation Army have now upon English cathedrals.

The Wesleyan side contributed little to the common stock of tunes. But a number of our hymns are still associated with tunes used in Lady Huntingdon’s chapels or Evangelical services elsewhere. The most striking original contribution is “Miles [251] Lane,” still in England the proper tune to “All hail the power of Jesus’ Name.”

An abundance of eighteenth century tune books testify in their way to a desire to improve congregational singing. The fresh tunes they offer are an effort to get away from the rigid outline of the old Psalm tune, and may be viewed as presenting a new type.

This eighteenth century hymn tune has two characteristics: its freedom in using two or more notes to a single syllable, often expanding into trills and runs; and its more unconstrained use of vivacious triple time. The Advent tune, “Helmsley,” so dear to the heart of Queen Victoria, is an example, perhaps the more delightful for being somewhat questionable.

These eighteenth century tune books must have found their market for the most part among dissenting interests. These more or less florid tunes, associated in our thoughts with the English Church, were as a rule hers only by adoption. William Knapp, it is true, was parish clerk, and made an opportunity to introduce his useful “Wareham” into his Devonshire parish. But Barthélémon’s “Morning Hymn” was the peculiar property of a London charity school; Wainwright’s ringing melody to “Christians, awake” was an open-air Christmas carol; “Adeste Fideles” was familiar only in Roman Catholic chapels.

The Church of England had a minor part either in [252] introducing or countenancing the more florid type of hymn tune that marks the eighteenth century development of hymnody. Dr. Burney, writing in 1789, assures us that only two new tunes had been adopted in church services for a hundred years; Dr. Croft’s “Hanover” and the “Easter Hymn.”

VII. American Song