Part 3

but by the dull canals of Babylon, where the exiled people wept when they remembered Zion. Even the most extreme of modern English critics tells us that, ‘As mere academical exercises, by not merely unnamed but unknown individuals, the psalms will neither edify the Church nor charm the literary student.’[38] But, after all, we have not yet lost our fellowship with the men of David’s time. The psalms are to us a memorial of the golden days of Israel’s history. They are still to us, as to Francis Davison,

Hymns which in the Hebrew tongue First were sung By Israel’s sweet and royal singer.

Or, to put the case in prose:

Both poetry and music existed before David’s time, and poetry had been carried to a high development in such compositions as Exod. xv. and Judges v. But with David a new era of religious poetry commenced. The personal element entered into it. It became the instrument of the soul’s communion with God.[39]

It is this ‘personal element’ which makes the Psalter a living book in every age.

The earlier Hebrew psalmists, even when they wrote in view of the imposing ritual of the temple service with its crowded choir, its thousand white-robed priests sounding their silver trumpets, were never bound by a narrow conventional opinion as to what beseemed the order of public worship. Fettered by rule and rubric as the later Jewish Church was, the psalmist as well as the prophet stands for the right of the individual soul to enter alone into the presence of God.

Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, And spirit with Spirit can meet.

The personal element is, in some respects, the most precious gift of the Psalter to Christianity. Had the hymns of the mediaeval Church, instead of the Hebrew Psalter, been the pattern for modern hymn-writers, we should have lost the best, the grandest, the most abiding of modern hymns. But the revival of hymn-writing, alike in Germany and in England, was a result of the Protestant Reformation, which set aside ecclesiastical in favour of Biblical precedents; so our hymn-books are inspired by the Psalter, not the Breviary. And this vindication of the rights of the individual soul we owe in the first instance to David, or to the men who wrote the psalms ascribed to him. As Edward Irving has said, with his majestic and unrestrained eloquence:

The force of his character was vast, and the scope of his life was immense. His harp was full-stringed, and every angel of joy and of sorrow swept over the chords as he passed. Such oceans of affection lay within his breast as could not always slumber in their calmness. For the hearts of a hundred men strove and struggled together within the narrow continent of his single heart.[40]

Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, in the elaborate preface to his _Holy Year_, says:

The pronouns _I_ and _my_ are rarely found in any ancient Church hymn. But in modern hymns the individual often detaches and isolates himself from the body of the faithful, and in a spirit of sentimental selfishness obtrudes his own feelings concerning himself.[41]

This is an entirely superficial criticism, though, in greater or less degree, it has been accepted in many modern hymn-books. It is unsound in principle, and contrary to the highest precedents, ancient and modern. It is the personal element that makes a hymn dear to the congregation of Christ’s flock. It is the fit expression of profound individual experience that gives a hymn its charm for the multitude, who can think poetry, but cannot write it. Perhaps no hymn of the last century has touched more hearts than Newman’s ‘Lead, kindly Light’; yet it was written as a personal prayer, giving expression to a special and temporary experience. Few hymns better illustrate the appropriateness to others of the experience of one. In his later years, Newman declined, almost querulously, to be ‘examined’ as to what he meant exactly by the closing lines of his famous hymn, written in a ‘transient’ state of mind, ‘when home-sick or sea-sick’; but to Mrs. Tait, who inscribed the lines

And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since and lost awhile

beneath the portrait of the children taken so suddenly from the desolated Deanery at Carlisle, no lapse of years could ever dull their meaning. The poet often speaks ‘not of himself,’ and his words may be truer as well as richer to the man who repeats than to the man who wrote them. A formal service, performed by professionals or by the technically ‘religious,’ may find suitable expression in general terms; but the Christian congregation

Learns the use of _I_ and _me_.

The grandest of all hymns, ancient and modern, throb with individual life, whether they soar to heaven on the wings of ecstasy, or bow to earth beneath an overwhelming sense of sinfulness.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, And all that is within me bless His holy name.

Have mercy upon me, O God ... Blot out my transgression.

Create in me a clean heart, O God; And renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence, And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.

O happy day that fixed my choice On Thee, my Saviour and my God!

Abide with me! fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.

Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear, It is not night if Thou be near.

Thou, O Christ, art all I want, More than all in Thee I find.

Some of the most sublime passages in ancient chant and modern hymn are those in which the singer turns from the confession of a common sin or the expression of a common gratitude to claim a personal share in it. Even that greatest hymn of the Church’s public worship, the ‘Te Deum Laudamus,’ voices at last the cry of the individual believer—

In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped; let me not be ashamed for ever.

So Charles Wesley, celebrating the first anniversary of his conversion, sings—

He breaks the power of cancelled sin, He sets the prisoner free; His blood can make the foulest clean, His blood availed for me.

So Thomas Olivers at the end of his great anthem to the God of Abraham adds his own voice to the voices of the celestial choir—

The whole triumphant host Give thanks to God most high: ‘Hail, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,’ They ever cry: Hail, Abraham’s God and _mine_! I join the heavenly lays.

The contrast between the liturgical hymn written for others to sing and the hymn of personal experience, the pouring out of the soul before God, is well illustrated in the Psalter; e.g. compare Ps. cxv.—

Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory, For Thy mercy, and for Thy truth’s sake.

with Ps. cxvi.—

I love the Lord, because He hath heard My voice and my supplications.

It is in the earlier psalms, though not in them exclusively, that we find the personal element conspicuous, and it is those psalms which have inspired the highest forms of Christian song.

Even in psalms written for the congregation and with direct liturgical intent there is often the introduction of the personal element, as in Ps. cvi.

In the Book of Psalms we have not only the cry of the seeker after God, but the voice of the Church in its common prayer and praise. We find here, too, hymns for the Sabbath day and other festivals, hymns in commemoration of the older saints, national prayers and anthems, which confess the sin of the people or record the mighty works of God, setting the nation’s history to music. Indeed, it is difficult to discover in modern hymn-books any hymn which has not its prototype in the Psalter, though the Incarnation and its manifold revelation brought into Christian life and thought a light that far outshines the brightest stars of the earlier dispensation.

Like other great hymn-books, the Hebrew Psalter grew by stages and gathered into its treasury things new and old. In its final form it is a collection of hymns ancient and modern—a fusion of various hymn-books, in which, as in other collections, there is occasional repetition, free quotation of one writer from another, reminiscences of familiar psalms of earlier psalmists, and evidences of the exercise of a wide editorial discretion in revision and emendation.

We should like to know something of the man who edited the final _Collection of Hymns for the use of the people called Jews_. If he had written a preface, or even a title-page, he would have solved for us many interesting literary questions—though he would have added little to the spiritual or liturgical value of the Psalter. It is enough for us to know that the psalms as we sing them to-day are the Psalms of which our Lord spoke, when He appealed to them as witnesses with Moses and the prophets to His mission. It was a hymn-book ready for use in the Church of Pentecost, and was adopted in its worship from the beginning.

The influence of the Psalter upon Christian hymnody extends far beyond the use of the rhythmic psalms. The metrical versions, which long supplied the place of hymn-books, gave to the Psalms a double share in Christian worship. Even to-day, when the metrical Psalter has lost its hold upon the Christian congregation, many of our greatest hymns are versions of Hebrew psalms. Nor is the rhythmic version outworn. No complete order of Christian worship is possible which does not include at least some portion of the Psalter in one or other of our three grand English renderings.[42]

The birth of the Lord Jesus was marked, as so many critical periods have been, by a ‘sudden blaze of song.’ The choir of heaven itself sang the ‘Gloria in Excelsis’; Mary chanted the ‘Magnificat’; Zacharias, the ‘Benedictus’; whilst Simeon’s swan-song, the ‘Nunc Dimittis,’ closed the rich though scanty hymnody of that great transition time.

The apostolic Church had no David. The Epistles preserve for us some few lines of early Christian hymns; but it was left to later times to give its sublimest songs to the Christian choir. Yet, if for a moment we think of what might have been, surely St. Paul could have written battle-songs grand as Luther’s; St. Luke, an earlier _Christian Year_; and St. Peter might have sung with the simple pathos of John Newton. But though other gifts were theirs in abundance, the gift of song was not bestowed upon them; and since the apostolic Church had no poet, the New Testament has no Psalter. Nor, indeed, does it need one; for God’s great poem, His sublimest work, is the Man Christ Jesus.

And so the Word had breath, and wrought With human hands the creed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds More strong than all poetic thought.

But though the primitive Church had no great hymn-book, it had its ephemeral ‘songs and solos,’ its minor poets who helped many an earnest worshipper to draw nigh to God with the voice of a psalm. Indeed, there is some reason to think that the Corinthian Church suffered from too great a number of would-be poets, for there ‘every one’ had ‘a psalm,’ and St. Paul would obviously have liked to issue, as John Wesley actually did, a rule against the giving out of hymns of the preacher’s own composing.

The fragments that remain of the hymns of the apostolic age are few and uncertain. The most distinctly rhythmic is the short creed, which may have been said or sung, found in 1 Tim. iii. 16—

Ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί, ἐδικαιώθη ἐν πνεύµατι, ὤφθη ἀγγέλοις, ἐκηρυχθη ἐν ἔθνεσιν, ἐπιστεύθη ἐν κόσµῳ, ἀνελήµφθη ἐν δόξῃ.

Manifested in the flesh, Justified in the spirit, Seen of angels, Preached among the nations, Believed on in the world, Received up in glory.

In Eph. v. 14 there are three lines which may have been taken from an ancient baptismal hymn.

Ἔγειρε, ὁ καθεύδων, καὶ ἀνάστα ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν καὶ ἐπιφαύσει σοι ὁ Χριστός.

Up! O sleeper, And arise from the dead, And Christ shall shine on thee!

Westcott and Hort print in metrical form not only these passages, but St. Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, which thus takes its place among the earliest Christian hymns.

Πάτερ ἡµῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς· Ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνοµά σου, ἐλθάτω ἡ βασιλεία σου, γενηθήτω τὸ θέληµά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς· Τὸν ἄρτὸν ἡµῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡµῖν σήµερον· καὶ ἄφες ἡµῖν τὰ ὀφειλήµατα ἡµῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡµεῖς ἀφήκαµεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡµῶν· καὶ µὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡµᾶς εἰς πειρασµόν, ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡµᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.[43]

Our Father which art in heaven; Hallowed Thy name, Come Thy kingdom, Be done Thy will Alike in heaven and on earth; The bread we need Give us to-day; And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors; And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil.

It is very possible that the metrical structure of St. Matthew’s version may to some extent explain its variations from St. Luke.

‘The hymns of the Apocalypse show, strange to say, no metrical arrangement of diction,’[44] but their influence upon Christian song has been great. Thus the New Testament makes a most important, though chiefly indirect, contribution to the hymnal of the Church.

St. Paul’s division of religious poetry into ‘psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs’ indicates the character and variety of the songs of the apostolic Church, but gives little information concerning its hymnals. We may assume, however, that whilst the Hebrew Psalter formed the first and greatest section of the songs of the Church, there were also a number of recognized ‘hymns’ and ‘odes,’ to which additions might at any time be made. By the law of spiritual selection these ancient hymns have passed out of the literature of the Church; they perished in the using, and having served their own generation according to the will of God fell on sleep.

The Church universal is indebted to the liturgical Churches for the inclusion in their Books of Common Prayer of the psalms which heralded the dawn of the day of the Son of Man. It is surely a narrow and superficial notion of divine worship which would exclude such canticles from our services as archaic or artificial.

How beautiful, for example, is the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ whether sung daily at eventide, or when the day of life is ended and the Lord now letteth His servant depart in peace! It is in Christian usage what the sounding of ‘The Last Post’ is to the British soldier, marking the close of the common day or sounding the last farewell to a comrade whose warfare is accomplished. A petty and prosaic criticism may regard as unreal such adaptations of ancient hymns, though consecrated by many centuries’ use, but there is as legitimate a poet’s licence in devotion as in literature.

The Old and New Testament alike, though the former more directly than the latter, gave to hymns a place in the worship of God. But the new wine of the gospel, which burst the wine-skins of out-worn ritual, could not be contained even in the golden chalice of the Psalter or the canticles written on its models.

Distinctively Christian hymns which, as we have seen, are occasionally quoted in the Epistles, and are referred to as a recognized part of public and social worship, date from the earliest times. The famous letter of the younger Pliny to Trajan tells how those who were terrified into the denial of their Lord, confessed no worse crime than that of meeting on an appointed day before the dawn to sing antiphonal hymns to Christ as to a god.[45] Judaism had its Messianic psalms, but the hymns which give praise to Christ as

God made Man for man to die

are the glory of the new dispensation. The early defenders of catholic doctrine appealed without hesitation to the fact that ‘whatever psalms and hymns were written by the brethren from the beginning, celebrate Christ the Word of God by asserting His divinity.’[46]

Orthodox and heretic alike—perhaps the heretic especially—sought to win acceptance for his teaching, to fix it in the memory of the congregation by setting it to music. The famous heretic Arius (d. 336) disseminated his doctrine in hymns which are said to have been written in metres associated with the most licentious songs. They were answered by the orthodox hymns of Ambrose. Later heretics, like Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea (d. 390), followed his example; whilst St. Augustine himself wrote an acrostic hymn or psalm against Donatist error. But it was in the beginning as it is in our own day, a man’s doctrinal aberrations were forgotten, at least for the moment, if he could write good hymns. So Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, writing against Nepos, ‘a bishop in Egypt,’ protests that he ‘greatly loves’ Nepos for his skill in psalmody, ‘by which many are still delighted.’[47]

In an often quoted passage in the _Confessions_, St. Augustine tells how he was affected to tears by the singing of ‘hymns and canticles,’ and records the introduction at Milan of antiphonal singing ‘according to the custom of the Eastern regions,’[48] whilst the people watched in the church ready, if need were, to die with their beloved bishop, St. Ambrose.

Ambrose of Milan and Hilary of Poictiers divide the glory of introducing the singing of hymns into the Church of the West. Hilary compiled a hymn-book—_Liber Hymnorum_—which is only known to us by a few hymns more or less doubtfully ascribed to him. Ambrose is the first great Latin hymn-writer who still lives in the songs of the sanctuary. His hymns are unrhymed, and, as Trench says, of ‘almost austere simplicity.’

It is as though, building an altar to the living God, he would observe the Levitical precept, and rear it of unhewn stones, upon which no tool had been lifted. The great objects of faith in their simplest expression are felt by him so sufficient to stir all the deepest affections of the heart, that any attempt to dress them up, to array them in moving language, were merely superfluous. The passion is there, but it is latent and represt, a fire burning inwardly, the glow of an austere enthusiasm, which reveals itself indeed, but not to every careless beholder. Nor do we presently fail to observe how truly these poems belonged to their time and to the circumstances under which they were produced—how suitably the faith which was in actual conflict with and was just triumphing over, the powers of this world, found its utterance in hymns such as these, wherein is no softness, perhaps little tenderness; but a rock-like firmness, the old Roman stoicism transmuted and glorified into that nobler Christian courage, which encountered and at length overcame the world.[49]

To St. Ambrose many of the earlier Latin hymns are attributed, and the ‘Te Deum’ is known in the Breviaries as ‘The Song of St. Ambrose and St. Austin,’ according to the tradition that it was composed and sung by them in alternate verses when the latter was baptized at Milan.

The familiar English translation is by an unknown hand. Grand as it is, there are some verses in which a more literal rendering would have been still grander. As the Latin text may not be known by some readers, I give what may be called the received text—

Te Deum laudamus Te Dominum confitemur Te aeternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur Tibi omnes Angeli Tibi coeli et universae potestates Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim incessabili voce proclamant Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth Pleni sunt coeli et terra majestatis gloriae Tuae Te gloriosus Apostolorum chorus Te Prophetarum laudabilis numerus Te Martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus Te per orbem terrarum sancta confitetur Ecclesia Patrem immensae majestatis Venerandum Tuum verum et unicum Filium Sanctum quoque Paracletum Spiritum Tu Rex gloriae Christe Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius Tu ad liberandum suscepisti hominem non horruisti Virginis uterum Tu devicto mortis aculeo aperuisti credentibus regna coelorum Tu ad dexteram Dei sedes in gloria Patris Judex crederis esse venturus Te ergo quaesumus Tuis famulis subveni quos pretioso sanguine redemisti Aeterna fac cum Sanctis Tuis gloria numerari[50] Salvum fac populum Tuum Domine et benedic haereditati Tuae Et rege eos et extolle illos usque in aeternum Per singulos dies benedicimus Te Et laudamus nomen Tuum in saeculum et in saeculum saeculi Dignare Domine die isto sine peccato nos custodire Miserere nostri Domine miserere nostri Fiat misericordia Tua Domine super nos quemadmodum speravimus in Te In Te Domine speravi non confundar in aeternum.

In the Prayer-book version we miss the apostles’ ‘glorious choir,’ the martyrs’ ‘white-robed’ army; and the close would, I think, have been even more impressive as well as more literal had the last lines read—

O Lord, let Thy mercy be showed upon us, even as we have hoped in Thee. O Lord, in Thee have I hoped; let me not be ashamed for ever.[51]

In the primitive days, before the rise of the mediæval Papacy, before the time of Breviary and Mass-book, the singing of hymns was well established alike in the East and West. In almost every language in which the gospel was preached, hymns were written, and were used not only to aid the devotion of the devout worshipper in the services of the Church, but to arrest and teach the careless wayfarer. Thus Bishop Aldhelm of Sherborne ‘would sit on the bridge, as the people came out from Mass to loiter gossiping on their way home, and sing them sacred lays, teaching them their faith, as it were, in chance verses, and enlisting in God’s service the national love of music and song. It was Alfred, himself a singer, who preserved this tale.’[52]

In later days, when the Romish worship had become more elaborate and formal, it is chiefly in the Breviaries that we find the hymns of the Church, in Latin, of course, and as little understanded of the people as the rest of the service. A large number of these hymns are in existence, and whilst many are disfigured by the idolatrous and often coarse adoration offered to the Virgin Mary and the saints, and others dwell with dreadful particularity upon the details of the Passion, many give worthy and sincere expression to the profoundest experiences of the devout soul. Some of the best and sweetest of these songs, which are often reckoned amongst ‘ancient’ hymns, belong to the degenerate days of the Papacy. They are not only intrinsically precious, but are gracious evidence that the genuine spirit of devotion was found, and the voice of praise and prayer and penitence heard, in quiet places and pure hearts, even in a time of general apostasy. Any detailed reference to pre-Reformation hymns would be outside the limits of this lecture, but the translations of Greek and Latin hymns which are to be found in our modern hymnals will naturally claim attention at a later stage.

In concluding this brief and necessarily superficial preliminary sketch, I may refer to a few of the ancient hymns which are probably little known to the ordinary worshipper.

1. _Syriac._—These are chiefly known to us through the great teacher and writer, Ephraem Syrus, who died at Edessa in 373. His hymns were written to counteract the influence of the popular songs of the heretic Bardesanes, and his son Harmonius. Dr. Bonar, Mrs. Charles, Mr. Moorsom, and others have translated several of these Syriac hymns; but they are not likely ever to win such wide acceptance as the Latin or the Greek hymns, though a few are to be found in modern collections. Several of the most touching of St. Ephraem’s hymns are on the death of children, whilst others celebrate the hosannas of the children at the Triumphal Entry. I give a translation, or ‘imitation,’ by Dr. Bonar of a hymn for the Lord’s Day.

SABBATH HYMN

Glory to the glorious One! Good and great our God alone, Who this day hath glorified First and best of all beside, Making it for every clime Of all times the sweetest time.