PART I

THE CHARACTER OF THE HYMN

_Chapter I_ WHAT IS A HYMN?

I. DEFINITION OF THE HYMN

_Importance of Accurate Definition._

Before undertaking the study of the hymn in its various aspects and relations, theoretical and practical, it should be very carefully defined. This is all the more necessary because the word “hymn” is used to cover so wide a sweep of religious poetry, and because our discussion is to be largely limited to its practical use in church work.

Dr. Austin Phelps’ test of a genuine hymn, “Genuineness of religious emotion, refinement of poetic taste, and fitness to musical cadence—these are essential to a faultless hymn, as the three chief graces to a faultless character,”[1] is a very clear and charming statement of some essentials of a hymn, which needed emphasis in his rather prosaic day, but does not include all the requisites of a useful hymn.

_Inadequate Definition._

The narrow etymological definition of a hymn would confine it to sacred poems that, in at least some part of them, are directly addressed to some person of the Deity. St. Augustine limits the word “hymn” to “songs with praise to God—without praise they are not hymns. If they praise aught but God, they are not hymns.” Even now there are hymnologists who insist upon this limited conception. No less a writer than W. Garrett Horder, in his fresh and illuminating _The Hymn Lover_, insists that “the cardinal test of a hymn should be that it is in some one, if not the whole of its parts, addressed to God.” This shuts out the use of sacred poetry in instruction, inspiration, exhortation, and special practical applications of hymns. Moreover, if the hymn is to be limited to worship, then the unconverted can never sing sincerely in the public service, and the ancient and medieval churches were justified in withdrawing the privilege of religious song from the general laity.

_Definition Must Be Based on Practical Considerations._

The hymn is simply a means to the supreme end of all religious effort. That form of the hymn, that method of its use, and that musical assistance, which realize most fully the immediate and ultimate ends in view under given circumstances can be approved and used. This practical basis of actual spiritual results must govern in formulating the conception of the Christian hymn, as well as in forms of worship and prayer, in preaching, or in church organization.

Since our discussion of the hymn has in view its contributing efficiently to concrete spiritual results, its definition must have a practical basis. Etymological, scholastic, traditional, abstractly idealistic considerations can have only minor weight.

_Types of Hymns._

The hymn may be viewed from too many angles to confine it to any one definition. Hence we must recognize different types of the hymn: (a) There is the poem regarding religious life and feeling that cannot be brought within the limitations of a musical setting, constituting the _Reading Hymn_; (b) we have the formless, but elevated, expression of worship or religious truth that at best can only be chanted, which we may call the Canticle, in which may be included such hymns as the Te Deum, the Sanctus, and unmetrical psalms; these, together with poems that are expressions of emotion, yet are not fitted for mass singing but may be effectively set to music of a different order, may be recognized as Solo, or Choral, Hymns, such of The Stabat Mater, The Dies Irae, and Sunset and Evening Star.

There is left us the sacred poem of such a form and type that it may be called the _Congregational_ or _Singing Hymn_, which is really the subject of the present practical discussion, and may be strictly defined as follows:

_Definition of the Congregational Hymn._

The Congregational Hymn is a poem expressing worship, praise, thanksgiving, and prayer on the Godward side; personal spiritual experience, emotion, and inspiration on the human side; and instruction on the religious side. It must be adapted to mass thinking and expression, in a form fitted to be sung by a Christian congregation, and calculated to express and stimulate or create religious feeling and purpose.

II. THE HYMN MUST BE POETRY

_To Be Poetry, It Must Be Emotional._

The initiating force of all poetry must be emotion of some kind. That emotion may be mere earnestness, it may be satire, it may be satisfaction in contemplation of beautiful scenes, or satisfaction in ideas and memories, or displeasure at impressions painful or abhorrent. Few of us realize how unfailing is the flow of emotion in our minds responding to the world about us and in us.

To view life and the world through the eye of reason is valuable, of course; but if that vision lacks the support of the eye of emotion, it brings only a silhouette, without perspective, wanting a sense of reality. That is the weakness of abstract thinking, whether in theology or political economy.

If the hymn, therefore, is to perform its functions, it must be definitely emotional to a greater or less extent. This is particularly true of hymns of Christian experience or in the hymn’s functioning in inspiration and exhortation. To confuse animal excitement with emotion is bad psychology. The genuine emotionality of a hymn is the best criterion of its practical value, for only through emotion can the will be reached.

_It Must Have Poetical Form._

The first requirement in this definition is that the hymn must be poetry. It should have meter and rhyme, else there can be no musical setting practicable for congregational use. The first task Calvin and his associates faced, after reaching the conclusion that only the inspired Psalms could be sung in the public religious assembly, was the preparation of a metrical version. True, the Psalms had been sung by the Greek and Roman Catholic churches, but only as chants by priestly choirs. In the English church service, these chants were frequently only led by the choir, the congregation joining in their singing. But this was practicable only in larger and long-established congregations, and even then there was more or less confusion. In general, this chanting was a failure, and the English church adopted the metrical versions. The use of the Psalms for responsive readings in our modern church services is a definitely practicable way of utilizing their liturgical and spiritual values.

The ostensible hymns of the Greek Church, of which Dr. Neale and Dr. Brownlie have furnished translations, or rather transformations, are not verse but prose. They were not sung by the congregations, or put into their hands, but were reserved for the reading of the clergy.

In like manner, the Latin hymns, although poetical in form—often complicated to an absurd degree—were not sung by the people, but were versified devotions inserted in the prose Psalms usually read by the priests.

In the Reformed churches for many centuries the word “hymn” referred to verses of “human composure,” as opposed to metrified inspired Psalms.

The famous American hymnologist, Dr. Louis J. Benson, lays less stress on this metrical form: “A Christian hymn, therefore, is a form of words appropriate to be sung or chanted in public devotions.” This opens the way for the inclusion of the “Te Deum Laudamus,” the “Sanctus,” and other canticles among our hymns. But as these historic texts are rarely or never sung by the people outside of the Church of England service, and used chiefly as texts for more or less elaborate musical compositions sung by choirs, we may accept the common conception of the hymn as a metrical composition.

_It Must Be Poetic in Spirit._

While having the superficial music of the regularly recurring accents, and the liquid harmony of the vowels and consonants of the words as they flow through the lines, there must be also the deeper, more entrancing music of the literary grace of spiritual thought singing its beautiful expression. If poetry is “the expression of thought steeped in imagination and feeling,” all the more must the hymn be expressive of religious thought transfigured by deep and sincere emotion.

While a hymn may be didactic, formulating doctrine, or enforcing obligation, it is not a really good and effective hymn unless the thought or exhortation is vitalized by imagination and emotion. Arid versification of Christian doctrines metaphysically conceived, or of ethical discussions with no heat of conviction, will stir no pulses of body, mind, or soul, but will conduce to the all too prevalent sense of the unreality of religious ideas and life.

_The Hymn Must Have Unity._

It must have unity of thought, emotion, and expression, all growing out of a definite vision of emotion, having a beginning, middle, and end, which mark the progress of the idea or feeling seeking formulation.[2]

_The Poetical Element Is Contributory Only._

Yet this element must be felt in the spirit of the hymn rather than in intention. Preciosity of phrase, elaborate metaphors and similes, obscure allusions, flights of fancy, are rarely in place. John Newton, the great hymn writer, speaks to this point in his usual forceful way: “Perspicuity, simplicity, and ease should be chiefly attended to; and the imagery and coloring of poetry, if admitted at all, should be indulged in very sparingly and with great judgment.” Sir Roundell Palmer is more detailed in his criticism: “Affectation or visible artifice is worse than excess of homeliness; a hymn is easily spoiled by a single falsetto note.”[3]

The emphasis of the literary and poetical elements in hymns has produced some most valuable sacred lyrics, notably the hymns of Keble and Heber; but occasionally it has also led to such refinement, to such sought-out subtlety, and to such conscious preciosity that the virility and emotional contagion of what might have been an otherwise really effective hymn have been lost.

III. THE CHRISTIAN HYMN MUST BE DISTINCTLY RELIGIOUS

_Poems of Semi-religious Fancy Are Not Hymns._

Poems of fancy with a few religious allusions cannot be classed as Christian hymns. The objection to the “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere”[4] has been rather heatedly urged, and there is no small justification for the criticism. The aboriginal idea of “the happy hunting grounds” might be referred to by its rather invertebrate fancy, instead of the heaven of the Christian faith. Eugene Field’s “The Divine Lullaby” so vaguely suggests the divine care that it can hardly pass muster as a hymn. For use as a hymn, a poem must be explicitly Christian in thought and expression.

_Mere Moralizing Will Not Serve._

That a poem has a good moral does not authorize it to pose as a Christian hymn. “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” cannot be recognized as a Christian hymn, since it has no direct religious significance. There are recent ostensible sociological and humanitarian hymns that are open to the same criticism. It is not enough that the underlying assumptions are of Christian origin; they must be fundamentally religious, no matter what the application to practical living may be.

_Special Propaganda Is Not Admissible._

The value of hymns as a method of introducing and enforcing doctrines was recognized by the enemies of Christianity early in its history. The Arians in Asia Minor and in Northern Africa, and later throughout the Roman Empire, flooded the world with songs sung to the popular melodies attacking the deity of Christ; and by their influence nearly wrecked Christianity. In our own day various “sports” from Christianity, and hybrids with other religions, are issuing collections of songs and garbled Christian hymns to serve their purposes. The Buddhists of Japan also are taking Christian songs bodily, with such changes as seem to them necessary. Unitarian hymnal editors have not hesitated to alter orthodox hymns to suit their own views.

That these emasculated hymns are no longer Christian hymns need not be argued at length. The difficulty is that they have lost the kernel of genuine Christian thought. The same is true of humanistic lyrics of propaganda in behalf of brotherhood or social welfare or economic justice, in which the religious motive is not urged. In general, a controversial poem cannot be recognized as a hymn; there is no religious help in controversy. Its emotions are combative, not devout.

_Christian Hymns Should Be Genuinely Christocentric._

A Christian hymn should express some definite recognition of God as manifested in Jesus Christ. Even if, as in metrical psalms, the name of Christ is not used, it should be implied, and unanimously accepted as implied. It may be worship, praise, prayer, confession, acceptance of salvation through Jesus Christ, spiritual experience, consecration, Christian doctrine, Christian hopes—or any other aspect or activity of the Christian faith. This is the very heart of the Christian hymn.

IV. SCRIPTURAL ELEMENTS OF THE HYMN

_Hymns Based on the Scriptures._

If the hymn is to be religious and Christian, it must be based on scriptural ideas, of course; we have no other authoritative source for our doctrines or experiences. All our other religious ideas and methods—our doctrines, our ethics, our religious ideals and impulses—find their roots there. We cannot afford to sing far-fetched inferences from unrelated scriptural passages when we have such bodies of stupendous truth awaiting our contemplation, and when the hymnic expression of the emotions which those high and conspicuous doctrines call forth is so freely available. Scriptural truth, so plain that he who runs may sing, is the only raw material from which Christian hymns can be produced. It will provide for every religious need of the individual and of the Church.

_Use of Scriptural Forms Desirable._

There can be no question but that when scriptural phraseology is used spontaneously, it adds very much to the impressiveness of the hymn because of the devout associations it brings up in the minds of the singers. The hymn by so much acquires an authoritativeness and elevation beyond ordinary verbiage.

But while the body of thought in a hymn must be distinctly religious, and therefore scriptural, it does not follow that the forms of expression must be scriptural as well. A distinguished writer on the subject here seems to be at fault: “Nothing should be called a hymn and nothing should be sung in our assemblies which is not virtually a paraphrase—and that a very faithful one—of Scripture passages, whether they are immediately connected in the Holy Word or not.” Apply that rule to our hymnbooks and what would we have left?

Although biblical phrases do occur in many hymns, a very close adherence to this rule would stifle the poet’s spontaneity and make his hymn stiff and mechanical, like most of the metrical psalms. Such a rule may seem very devout to the cursory reader, but really it is mischievous; it is sheer bibliolatry, an emphasis of the letter that killeth at the expense of the spirit that maketh alive.

V. THE HYMN MUST BE FITTED FOR MASS SINGING

That the hymn is a distinctly social expression, participated in by the varied personalities massed in a congregation, introduces marked limitations that cannot be evaded.

_Congregational Singing Is a Pronounced Christian Exercise._

It is a remarkable fact that only in Hebrew and Christian worship is a congregational use of hymns conspicuous. With all their literary and poetic urge for expression, the Greeks had no singing connected with their temple rites.[5] In so far as the Egyptians had musical elements in their temple ritual, it was choral and not congregational. In visiting pagan temples, one is struck by the utter absence of organized assembled worship; what worship occurs is individual only.

The Vedic hymns were not singing hymns, but reading hymns, for recital and meditation. According to Max Mueller, the only share the women had in the sacrifices was that the wife of the officiating priest, or head of the house, should recite the necessary hymns. Although in India there is singing connected with great festivals and processions, the songs used are so obscene that respectable Hindus are making an effort to have the public singing of them forbidden. They are usually sung by the female attendants of the idol, temple prostitutes, who are the professional singers of these ostensibly religious songs.[6]

The reason for this absence of true hymns is correctly indicated by W. Garrett Horder in his _The Hymn Lover_: “But so far as the material before us enables us to form an opinion, it is that hymns, as an essential of worship, have been mostly characteristic of the Christian and, in a less degree, of its progenitor, the Hebrew religion. Nor is this much to be wondered at, since it is the only religion calculated to draw out at once the two elements necessary to such a form of worship—awe and love—awe which lies at the heart of worship, and love which kindles it into adoring song.”

_Meter Essential to Mass Singing._

The form of the verse is practically of commanding importance. The musical form of the hymn tune definitely fixes the form of the stanza. It must not be complicated or free in form, else the tune loses its needed simplicity and symmetry. More elaborate forms of stanza may do for solo or choral numbers, where skilled composers write music that follows the vagaries of the form of the text; but the general congregation cannot be expected to sing tunes of elaborate and confusing structure. Although an occasional hymn of unusual form of stanza is fortunate in finding a happy musical mate, like “Lead, kindly Light” or “O Love, that wilt not let me go,” the usual hymn must be adapted to one of about a dozen fundamental meters. Although the Gospel song is not so circumscribed in its form, because its setting goes with it, its forms are only rhythmical variations of the standard meters.

VI. PRACTICABILITY FOR ACTUAL USE

_Ideas Must Be Plainly Evident._

The thought of a good hymn must lie on the surface. It must appeal not only to the scholarly and subtle minds in a singing congregation, but also to all who are expected to join the religious exercise. Paul’s word regarding unknown tongues applies here: “Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken?” The practical Paul enforces the parallel by saying a few verses further on, “I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.” No matter how high the thought or how deep the sentiment of a poem may be, or how felicitously they may be expressed, it is not an effective hymn if study (for which there is no time at the moment of singing) is required to bring out its meaning and feeling.

_Hymns May Not Be Extremely Individualistic._

While a hymn may be the expression of the individual poet, it must be an appropriate expression of the mind and heart of the whole congregation as it sings. Yet in addition to the evident, clearly expressed thought, there may be singing, _sotto voce_ between the lines, of deeper experiences and higher soarings of the spirit that only prolonged meditation can reveal.

Some sacred poems express a religious emotion in so individual and unusual a way that they are not at all fitted to express the emotion of a congregation. As an illustration of a poem too personal and individualistic, here are a few stanzas of a hymn of Rev. Samuel J. Stone, which is found in an increasing number of current hymnals:

“My feet are worn and weary with the march On the rough road and up the steep hillside; O city of our God, I fain would see Thy pastures green where peaceful waters glide.

* * * * * * *

Patience, poor soul! The Saviour’s feet were worn, The Saviour’s heart and hands were weary too; His garments stained and travel-worn, and old, His vision blinded with pitying dew.”

This is a beautiful poem that would make an admirable text for a solo, but it is out of place on the lips of a congregation. Compare with this the very useful hymn by Bonar:

“I was a wand’ring sheep, I did not love the fold; I did not love my Shepherd’s voice, I would not be controlled.”

Every one of the first eight lines of this once widely used hymn begins with the pronoun of the first person singular, yet there is no particular individuality in this confession; it is the expression of the common experience in a straightforward manner, void of all idiosyncrasy.

In some hymns there is found an intensity of feeling that leads to an apparent extravagance of expression that a single soul can sometimes sincerely accept as the vehicle of its own experience, but which a gathering of miscellaneous people cannot sing without the great mass of them being insincere. For a careless person idly to sing with Faber,

“I love Thee so, I know not how My transports to control,”

or

“Ah, dearest Jesus, I have grown Childish with love of Thee,”

is sheer blasphemy. It is the sin of Uzziah!

The following verses from one of Charles Wesley’s hymns combine the two faults of extravagance and too-intense individualism:

“On the wings of His love I was carried above All sin and temptation and pain; I could not believe that I ever should grieve, That I ever should suffer again.

I rode in the sky (freely justified I), Nor envied Elijah his seat; My soul mounted higher in a chariot of fire, And the moon it was under my feet.”

_Distracting Figures and Forms of Expression._

Other poems are so full of imagination, so crowded with unusual and almost bizarre figures of speech, that they fail to be the natural expression of the religious emotion of an assembly of religious people. George Herbert wrote a great many religious poems whose beauty and charm are only enhanced by their quaint and unusual imagery. Occasionally a hymnal editor ventures on a selection, but it is so foreign to the methods of thought and expression of the churches as not to appeal to their taste and feeling. Take the beautiful poem on the Sabbath day, “O day most calm, most bright.” The first line is spontaneous, expressive, and musical, and appropriate for a hymn. The second line, “The fruit of this, the next world’s bud,” with its antithetical structure, is already somewhat formal and forced. But when the third and fourth lines,

“The indorsement of supreme delight, Writ by a Friend and with His blood,”

offer a purely legal and unpoetical figure, one’s sense of song is entirely obscured.

Yet, when Herbert’s imagery is most matter-of-fact and ungenial, there is a body of thought and there are a certain fitness and a clearness of relation that command admiration.

_Verses Must Be Complete in Themselves._

Hymns that have long, intricate sentences extending through two or more verses are impracticable for use in a song service, as the break between the stanzas dislocates the development of the idea. Every verse must be practically complete in itself, no matter what its relation to the development of the general idea of the hymn may be.

_Musical Limitations._

It must also be recognized that there are limits to the expression congregational music can give. A poem that is vividly descriptive, or is in part intensely dramatic, cannot be recognized as a practicable hymn, since all stanzas have the same tune, a tune which cannot vary its musical effect to suit the differing stanzas.

Then there are hymns that are too majestic, too glowing, for a hymn-tune composer to write a fitting tune out of the limited resources of musical effects available to him. Such a hymn is that one of Henry Kirke White, of lamented memory:

“The Lord our God is clothed with might, The winds obey His will; He speaks, and in His heavenly height The rolling sun stands still.

* * * * * * *

His voice sublime is heard afar, In distant peals it dies; He yokes the whirlwind to His car And sweeps the howling skies.”

With a chorus of a thousand trained singers, an organ of extraordinary power, and an orchestra of five hundred instruments, all concentrated on “St. Anne,” one might make the music adequate to the words, but in an ordinary congregation the incongruity is painful. This must remain a reading hymn.

_Outworn Hymns._

The efficient hymn must not distinctly belong to previous generations in its style and vocabulary or in its peculiar formulation of doctrine. Only as many of the older hymns have been purged of their obsolete and archaic words and turns of thought have they survived. For instance, we no longer sing, “Eye-strings break in death,” as Toplady originally wrote it.

_Mistaken Objections to Some Hymns._

Some minds, although strong and keen, seem to have a very small visual angle. Some such persons condemn all hymns that are not direct praise. The line in Lyte’s “Abide with Me”—“Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes”—has been objected to as Romish by some, blind to the fact that it is a prayer to Christ.

Others exclude hymns in which the pronoun of the first person singular occurs. Bishop Wordsworth, himself a hymn-writer of no mean merit (_vide_ “O Day of rest and gladness” and “See, the Conqueror rides in triumph”), says, in his introduction to his _Holy Year_, that while the ancient hymns are distinguished by self-forgetfulness, the modern hymns are characterized by self-consciousness. As illustrative examples, he cites the following: “When I can read my title clear,” “When I survey the wondrous cross,” “My God, the spring of all my joys,” and “Jesus, Lover of my soul.” It is strange that so keen a mind should not have seen that his objection would apply to all liturgies!

The minister with his eye fixed upon his spiritual purpose can afford to ignore all these supersensitive critics who have refined refinement until sensibility becomes hyperesthesia, a veritable disease.

The use of hymns of a somewhat indifferent literary value is often thoughtlessly condemned because the importance of the recognition of its topic is overlooked. Such a topic as “Church Erection,” or “Education,” may not occasion the deep feeling necessary to the writing of a great hymn, and yet it must find a place in the practical work of the church. Here again Dr. Phelps gives a useful warning: “The severity of aesthetic taste must not be permitted to contract the range of devotional expression in song.... Our desire to restrict the number of hymns upon occasions, and other hymns of infrequent use, ought not to banish such hymns entirely.... A hymn intrinsically inferior, therefore, may be so valuable relatively, as justly to displace a hymn which is intrinsically its superior.”

Aside from the topical symmetry referred to, this principle will find other applications in the practical use of hymns. Some inferior hymns have for some occasions a greater immediate effect than much better ones, perhaps because of a more singable tune or because its sentiment fits into the situation or because it makes a desired impression in a more efficient way.

_Chapter II_ THE PURPOSE AND VALUE OF HYMNS

I. THE IMPULSE TO WRITE HYMNS

The writing of the best hymns of the Christian Church was not a matter of ulterior purpose, any more than is the singing of the hermit thrush in the wilderness. They are the result of the urge for expression that lies back of all the best architecture, literature, and art of the human race. There is the vision, the sense of reality, the subjective response to truth, to beauty, and to exalted experiences that must find an objective bodying-forth in some appropriate form.

The great doctrines of Christianity loom up in their dignity and majestic sweep, in their adequacy to the highest and deepest needs of the human soul. The spontaneous hymn is but a cry of astonished delight, of exalted inspiration, of self-forgetful contemplation of the revealed glory, an instinctive appeal to other souls to share the rapture of the vision. Such a hymn is not calmly planned; it forces itself upon the mind of the rapt poet.

II. PURPOSE IN WRITING HYMNS

_The Influence of Purpose._

This instinct for sharing with others, for winning their attention and participation in a blessed experience, may produce a measure of premeditation and become a more or less clearly defined purpose. The idea of the needs of other souls, or of the Church at large, may become an additional factor, bringing in the recognition of the importance of adaptation to the mental processes of those to be helped, or of practical methods of reaching them.

Also the originating impulse may grow, as in the case of Isaac Watts, out of the call of some perceived need among the writer’s fellows, or of some lack in the work of the Church. The emotional and poetic elements may be marshaled by bringing up the memory of some past exalted vision of the truth, or of some former quickening spiritual experience, or (better yet!) by an abiding realization of the truth of some doctrine, or by a perennial flow of devout feeling.

Dr. Martineau insisted that “every spontaneous utterance of a deep devotion is poetry in its essence, and has only to fall into lyrical form to be a hymn.” But he went further and declared that “no expression of thought or feeling that has an ulterior purpose (i.e., instruction, exposition, persuasion, or impression) can have the spirit of poetry.” His idealism failed to realize that the spirit of poetry in a writer may be associated with a purpose of helpfulness urging expression in an efficient form. To delete all the hymns in our church collections that have definite spiritual purposes would rob the Christian Church of most of its devoutest and most helpful hymns.

_The Purpose Must Affect Only the Practical Aspects._

Both the literary and devotional value of a hymn of purpose will depend upon the writer’s ability to reproduce the mental conditions of a purely spontaneous hymn. If the purpose can be confined to the practical aspects of the hymn, while the spiritual and poetic impulses control the thought and spirit, then the most valuable and effective hymn may be produced.

But if the ulterior purpose fully occupies the mind of the writer, the hymn will be mechanical and uninspiring. In the more prolific hymn writers, like Watts and Charles Wesley, the relative influence of vision and purpose is easily detected. In their best hymns, the purpose is still present, but latent, and its guidance unconscious.

III. PURPOSE OF THE USER OF HYMNS

When we speak of the purpose of the hymn, therefore, it is not so much the mental attitude of the writer that is to be considered as that of the user of the hymn. He finds a body of religious verse ready to his hand, some of which is adapted to secure spiritual ends, or fitted to the social conditions which he seeks to improve. His purpose controls not the production of available verse, but the selection from existing stores of religious lyrics.

The choice of hymns by the user will be determined by the characteristics and limitations which his practical purposes demand. There are three inevitable factors: the end to be realized, the people to be influenced, and the hymns adapted to affect both.

IV. PURPOSES SERVED BY SINGING HYMNS

_Hymns Unite Christians in Worship and Christian Activities._

The singing of hymns is the most practicable method of uniting assembled Christians in worship and praise and of creating a common interest in the various church activities. This is really the leading purpose of such a gathering.[1]

Worship in prayer, when it is spontaneous, must be largely individual; when it is expressed in responsive ritual, there is great danger of mechanical stiffness in the outward form of the prayers and in their reading, and also in the limited area of the thought to be expressed. But song is the natural and spontaneous vehicle for exalted feeling and gives the greatest opportunity for varied sentiment. No one individual could hope to strike all the strings of noble praise as have a thousand saints who have written our hymns.

_Hymns Concentrate Interest and Attention._

There is a concentration of interest and attention. The common thought, the common emotion, the common impulse of devotion, the common expression, the unanimous attitude of will and purpose—all quicken the susceptibilities and enlarge the spiritual horizon. God seems nearer, more actual, and more realizable as the source of every blessing. Abstract ideas of God as Father, of his Son Jesus Christ as Saviour, of the Holy Spirit as Comforter, quicken into blessed realities. It is easy to appropriate the joy, the reverence, the adoration, the intimate communion with God, which the hymns so clearly, so movingly, so contagiously, even so rapturously express, and to make them intimately our own. This is true worship, the high peak in man’s experience of God.

The social elements in human nature come into play and intensify the religious emotions. The personal distractions and inhibitions that hamper devotion are eliminated. Under properly effective conditions there is a mass attitude, a mass emotion, that needs only a mass expression to affect every individual unit. The contagion of the crowd in expression and in action will affect the most sluggish and indifferent and carry them into an experience that they could not have reached alone. Add to this the stimulation of the music and the physical exhilaration of singing, and the worship is lifted to a pitch of enthusiasm not otherwise possible.

This worshipful use of hymns exercises a most inspiring and vitalizing influence on the participants. The reaction of the mind and soul of the singers to the exalted sentiments sung must have a profoundly spiritualizing effect upon their natures. One cannot sing the old Latin hymn, “Jesus, the very thought of Thee,” in any genuine way without feeling an accession of greater love to Christ; or “My faith looks up to Thee,” by Ray Palmer, without a deeper realization of one’s dependence on Jesus Christ for salvation and for keeping grace. [2]

_Hymns Afford a Means of Expression for the Congregation._

Another office of the church hymn is to give a voice to those deep experiences in spiritual things that enrich the lives of the children of God. Many excellent Christians are dumb, unable to give expression to their genuine spiritual experiences. Others find their means of voicing what they feel totally inadequate. The hymns they sing and appropriate to themselves unstop their silent tongue. High tides of spiritual blessings, times of refreshing when Christ is near to the soul, hours of privilege when the whispering of the Holy Spirit is heard, victories over fierce or subtle temptation when God’s grace proves sufficient, moments of God’s overshadowing presence when the whole world is transfigured, and a thousand other marvelous experiences in the Christian life—all call for hymns to express them. They must be tender hymns, ecstatic hymns, triumphant hymns that will satisfy the craving of the soul to voice forth its deepest love, its spiritual ecstasies, its strange sense of overcoming power. The dumb soul, unable to speak of its explorations of divine grace, finds a voice in these hymns written by saints who had the divine gift of expressing like glimpses of the divine glory.[3]

_Hymns Provide Help and Comfort in Dark Hours._

These hymns not only bring the joy of giving articulate expression to these mountain-top experiences, thus reviving them again and again, but they validate these experiences by showing that others have shared them and give them reality in the hours when faith fails and the temptation arises to consider them mere mirages and illusions. Others have been with us in Bunyan’s Beulah Land and verify our experiences of its delights.

_Hymns Afford Clear Expressions of Christian Truth._

Another purpose in the use of hymns is to secure the clearest, most impressive, most appealing, most rememberable statement of the leading truths of the Christian faith that will fix them most ineradicably in the consciousness and the life of the individual and of the church. Such hymns must not be dry formulations of abstract doctrines, desiccated by logical discussions and metaphysical hair-splittings. Truth that is dry is no longer vital truth. Its vitamins of reality, of the deep feelings called forth by a sense of its actuality, of spiritual and poetic intuition, of self-propagating vitality, have been lost. Aridity of orthodoxy begets aridity of heterodoxy and is usually responsible for it.

Didactic hymns that will serve the purposes of the Church must be living hymns, expressing truth transfigured by the feelings aroused by the contemplation of its glorious reality. “There is little heresy in hymns.” Heresies for the most part arise from arid mechanical reasonings; hymns flow from the intuitions of the heart.[4] This explains why some of our best hymns about Christ were written by Unitarians.

_Hymns Give Opportunity for Active Participation by All._

Another purpose of the singing of hymns is to secure the active participation of the whole congregation in the service. Although the responsive reading is valuable in this respect, the union of all the voices of the people in song is more striking, calls for more aggressive effort, and definitely wins the attention of all to the sentiments expressed in the hymn. It creates more interest and stimulates both body and mind.

_Hymns Provide Variety._

The singing of hymns also adds marked variety to the order of service and so renders it more attractive. It supplies climaxes in different parts of the program and relaxations of attention to the spoken word. It represents a greater contrast with the other exercises because it calls for active participation and produces entirely different effects. The lack of song in the services of the Friends has been one of the greatest factors in the limited growth of a movement representing deep earnestness, conscientiousness, and spirituality.

This variety and the opportunity to take a modest part in the service have proved among the greatest attractions. The more singing, the more people, is the universal experience.

_Hymns Create a Religious Atmosphere._

The use of hymns creates an atmosphere of religious interest and feeling that is realized not only by the believers in the congregation, but by the unregenerate as well. They may not enter fully into the spirit of the exercises, but an intellectual interest is awakened by the singing that may rise into spiritual interest and into an approach to the spiritual life. Rev. George F. Pentecost, famous in his day as a preacher and as a very successful evangelist, recognized the aggressive and practical value of hymn-singing: “I am profoundly sure that among the divinely ordained instrumentalities for the conversion and sanctification of the soul, God has not given a greater, besides the preaching of the Gospel, than the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. I have known a hymn to do God’s work in a soul when every other instrumentality has failed—I have seen vast audiences melted and swayed by a simple hymn when they have been unmoved by a powerful presentation of the Gospel from the pulpit.”

_Hymns in the Home._

No small practical value in Christian hymns is found in their use in family life where young and old sing them together and so sanctify and spiritualize the household atmosphere. The storing of the memories of the children with the leading hymns of the church is no small factor in their Christian nurture. The older members of the family also will be stimulated spiritually, finding in the memorized hymns strength and solace while they bear the heat and burden of the day. We have lost the spiritual atmosphere in many of our Christian homes, not only by the neglect of the family altar, but also by the neglect of the singing and memorizing of the hymns and tunes of the church.

One of the chief influences in the preparation of Ira D. Sankey for his great life-work was the singing of hymns as the family gathered around the great log-fire in the homestead. He not only familiarized himself with the old hymns and tunes and popular sacred songs, but he was impressed by their spirit and by their adaptation to the needs of the human soul.

_Hymns in Personal Work._

The use of hymns in personal work, in the visitation of the sick, in improvised religious gatherings in private homes, has been largely abandoned, much to the loss of the churches. When D. L. Moody was trying out Ira D. Sankey during the latter’s pregnant first visit to Chicago, his singing to the sick and to the spiritually needy ones they called upon was a notable item in the practical test.

Prof. Waldo S. Pratt, of the Hartford Theological Seminary, whose most valuable book has been quoted in these pages again and again, sums up the results of an intelligent and devout use of hymns most admirably: “Hymn-singing may surely be called successful when it affords an avenue for true approach to God in earnest and noble worship; when it exerts a wholesome and uplifting reflex influence on those who engage in it, establishing them in the truth and quickening their spirituality; and when it creates a diffused atmosphere of high religious sympathy and vigorous consecration, so that even unbelievers are affected and constrained by it.”[5]

But if these purposes of the singing of hymns are to be realized and their values exploited, they must be properly employed. They must be made vital and their messages brought home to the hearts of the people. There should be no listless, merely formal singing of noble Christian hymns. There is unwitting sacrilege in doing that. The truth of God, the high experiences of his saints, are rendered unreal and lose their appeal—they become stale.

There are multiplied millions of true believers who duplicate the unhappy experience of a prominent London preacher who declared that he did not exactly disbelieve the cardinal doctrines of Christianity, but that they had become unreal to him. They were only abstractions, playthings of his logical faculties, husks from which the living kernel had fallen, which left his soul hungry. How could a minister by the discussion of what seemed to him unrealities inspire and spiritualize his hearers? How can any minister to whom the hymns in his hymnal are dry and abstract rhymes about vague and uninteresting platitudes at best, be able to make his song service a vital contribution to the spiritual progress of his people? If the hymns stir him, he can easily make them stir the people.

V. REASONS FOR THE MINISTER’S APPRECIATION OF HYMNS

_Hymns Are Evidences of the Effect of the Bible._

The hymnbook is an evidence of what the Bible can do with unregenerate human nature. That the truth of the Bible should be able to take Newton, the slave driver, and make of him a minister of God, not only himself writing such hymns as “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” “Glorious things of Thee are spoken,” or “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds,” but inspiring and encouraging the poor hypochondriac, William Cowper, so that from his heart should well forth the hymns, “There is a fountain filled with blood,” “God moves in a mysterious way,” and “Sometimes a light surprises,” is in itself one of the great evidences of Christianity.

_Hymns and Psalms Affected the Life of the Church._

The extraordinary result of the use of hymns and psalms in the life of the church and of believers is another reason for the minister’s valuing hymns highly. The awkward lines of Sternhold and Hopkins’ version of the psalms entered into the speech and private devotion of Scotch and English Christians as even the Bible itself did not, becoming a very liturgy to the condemners and flouters of liturgies. Thomas Jackson in his life of Charles Wesley remarks that “it is doubtful whether any human agency has contributed more directly to form the character of the Methodist societies than the hymns. The sermons of the preachers, the prayers of the people, both in their families and social meetings, are all tinged with the sentiments and phraseology of the hymns.”

_Hymns in Personal Christian Experience._

Listen to the personal experiences of Christians in our own day and you will hear more reference to hymns than to the Scriptures. There is now no such committing to memory of passages of the Bible and of hymns as there was in preceding generations, but almost without set purpose, by simple absorption, the average Christian can quote more lines of hymns than he can of Scripture verses. This extraordinary place in the affections and life of Christian people is no derogation to the Bible, for the hymns are simply the Bible in another form.

_Hymns as Stimulating the Spiritual Life of the Minister._

To some men who lack emotional and poetic insight, the hymnbook may appear dry and uninteresting. It certainly is uninteresting to the unspiritual man, no matter how poetical he may be, and this will account for the occasional attack upon the hymns of the Christian Church as being without poetical power or merit. But the Christian minister, who deals with spiritual things, for whom the emotions of the human heart give a great opportunity for sowing the seed of life, ought to find the study of his hymnbook a great delight.

_Hymns Approved by Paul._

If there were no other reason why a minister should be profoundly interested in hymns and their use in religious work, the example and exhortations of Paul should be sufficient. He does not lay as much stress upon preaching, nor upon praying, as he does on singing. He admonishes the Ephesians that they “be filled with the Spirit”; and that divine possession should manifest itself in “speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” A part of this exercise of singing was to consist of “giving thanks unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[6]

He exhorts the Colossians, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom,” and one of the results of such indwelling was to be “teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs”; he even urges earnestness and sincerity in such singing, “Singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”[7] Such singing should not be with mere enthusiasm, for he assures the Corinthians that his singing was not only devout but intelligent as well: “I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.”[8] There is more than a suspicion that in some of his most striking passages he is quoting a current hymn or interjecting a part of an improvised hymn.

_Hymns in the Early Church._

The emphasis placed on the value of song by the early church is made clear by Tertullian, who states that at the current “love feasts” each person in attendance was invited at the close of the feast to sing either from the Holy Scriptures or from the dictates of his own spirit a song of adoration to God.

In the middle of the third century St. Basil testifies to the value of congregational singing as practiced in his day: “If the ocean is beautiful and worthy of praise to God, how much more beautiful is the conduct of the Christian assembly where the voices of men and women and children, blended and sonorous like the waves that break upon the beach, rise amidst our prayers to the very presence of God.” The remark is made by one of the ancient fathers that the singing of the churches often attracted “Gentiles”—i.e., unconverted persons—to their services, who were baptized before their departure.

_Hymns Prepared the Church for Periods of Marked Progress._

While by no means the only cause for such progress, a great increase in the writing and singing of hymns has been a conspicuous feature in every great religious movement. The converse is also true that when the privilege of congregational singing was curtailed or withdrawn, spiritual declension followed.

The victory of the Church over Arianism was a singing victory both in the Eastern and Western churches. The Crusades were marked by processional singing of religious songs. The singing Lollards and Hussites heralded the Great Reformation, and the most effective preaching of Huss and Luther and Calvin was the hymns and metrical psalms they introduced. Watts prepared the way for the Wesleyan revival, and the Wesley brothers entered the path he had blazed and made a great highway of Christian song. Dour New England found its voice during the Great Revival under Jonathan Edwards and later under Nettleton. The preachers who saved the pioneers of the Appalachian range of mountains and the budding Middle West from relapsing into paganism and savagery were “singing parsons” with their repertoire of “spiritual” revival choruses and religious ballads.

Even Charles G. Finney, the great praying evangelist and later founder of Oberlin College, whose revivals swept through New York and northern Ohio like a prairie fire, had the popular _Christian Lyre_, edited by Joshua Leavitt, as a breeze to fan the flame, although he often forbade the singing of hymns in certain conditions in his meetings. William B. Bradbury, S. J. Vail, Robert Lowry, William H. Doane, Fanny Crosby, George F. Root, Philip Phillips, P. P. Bliss, and many others had written and taught the American people the songs that prepared the way for the Moody and Sankey revival movement which so profoundly affected the religious life of both America and England and, through the missionaries, intensified the faith of the Christian Church throughout the world.

Through all the centuries it has been the singing armies that have won the religious wars. The successful denominations and individual churches have been pre-eminently singing churches led by singing preachers who swayed their communities. Cardinal Newman is now chiefly remembered for his hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light.” Washington Gladden, a great religious leader, will have his memory kept green by his hymn, “O Master, let me walk with Thee,” and Bishop Phillips Brooks fifty years hence will be chiefly remembered for his Christmas carol, “O little town of Bethlehem.”

VI. STRANGE INDIFFERENCE TO HYMNS

_The Minister’s indifference._

In view of the considerations and facts here marshaled, how strange is the general lack of interest among ministers toward their hymn service, toward the hymns themselves, their history, their meaning, the methods to be used in exploiting their great value. Is it saying too much to suggest that three out of five ministers have no adequate conception of the possibilities of hymn singing or appreciation of its value?

_Indifference of the Congregation._

Outside of the lamentable weakness of egocentric human nature it is difficult to discover why the part of the divine service devoted to sacred song should be so utterly subordinated to the other parts of the sacred program; but that it is true is so evident to any reasonable observer that it needs little or no proof. The janitor religiously postpones opening or shutting windows, or shaking down the furnace, during the prayer, or sermon even, until the hymn is being sung. Members of the congregation seize the opportunity to leave the room, or to consult with others about church affairs in all too audible voices.

The hymn ought to be the consummate note of prayer and praise and devout meditation on sacred themes, the great co-operative climax in the worship of God. It is too often looked upon as a merely physical stimulus to liven up the tedious service.[9]

This ought not so to be! For the primary object of assembling the saints is united worship—united praise. There can be no true public prayer without an element of worship; but it has a recognition of personal needs and even wants. This human factor makes it a composite of the human and the divine and lowers its dignity. In genuine praise there is a forgetfulness of the human element and a rising into the pure realm of the divine. In true praise the human soul is unconscious of self and utterly absorbed in God.

Hence it is not too much to say that congregational song is the supreme element in all worship.

_Chapter III_ THE LITERARY ASPECT OF HYMNS

I. WHAT MAKES THE HYMN LITERATURE?

_Its Character as a Transcript of Life._

In so far as a hymn is a transcript of a genuine conviction, intensified by emotion, or of a profound experience, it is literature. There have gone into it vision, feeling, imagination, sincerity, intimate experience—an appropriation of the influences life offers a soul that gazes upon it with wide-open eyes. It is not the measure or the rhyme that makes literature of a hymn. A bald formulation in metrical form of doctrines dissected by metaphysical processes may be called a hymn by courtesy, but it is not literature any more than would be a textbook on mathematics.

But a hymn in which the hurried pulse and the throbbing heartbeat of deep human feeling can be felt is genuine literature, a revelation of human personality and of the collective life of which it is representative. It is the story of the experience of an exploring soul seeking knowledge of the deeper spiritual relations with God and his Kingdom.[1]

_Its Wide Distribution._

The importance of the hymn as literature is further attested by the response to it of the many generations which have made it the vehicle of their religious life. Dr. Reeves calls attention to the wide distribution of hymnbooks; they have come from the printing press by the multiplied millions during the last four hundred years. Three millions of the _Methodist Hymnal_ have been broadcast over the United States, sixty million _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ over the British Empire. Hundreds of other contemporary hymnals, both official and unofficial, aggregate even more millions. If we add collections of Gospel Songs, we get many millions more. No other form of literature has had so wide a distribution. A single hymnal has had more active readers than all the poetry in the world, ancient and modern.[2] To dispose of an edition of one hundred thousand volumes of Palgrave’s _Golden Treasury_, the standard collection of the poems of the ages approved by critics, would take a score of years. Moreover, they would go largely into libraries, private and public, for occasional reference.

_Its Acceptance Through Many Generations._

But wideness of distribution is no final criterion of literary quality, else our newspapers might lay an earnest claim to literary standing. But these hymnals do not severally represent individual writers, as do most of the books of poetry; they contain a common body of hymns representing the major portion of all of them. That selection of hymns, fundamental to all of them, has been culled out from the great mass of sacred lyrics written through many centuries, by the consensus of different generations, of different backgrounds, of different grades of social and literary culture, of different peoples and even races, and accepted as the most complete expression of the fundamental Christian life of them all. If that unanimity of responsiveness and practical endorsement by continued use does not confer the accolade of literature upon that body of hymns, the accepted definition of literature is faulty and inadequate.

_Its Profound Influence._

No other verses have been read so often. They have not only shaped the religious thought and experience of vast peoples and developed their character, but have affected their general modes of thought and forms of expression and influenced their secular literature. Without their rugged, ax-hewn version of the Psalms, would the Scotch have become the stern, dour, conscience-driven people the world has learned to know and value? Without the vigorous “spirituals” and the lively rhythms of its gospel songs, would the American church life have developed the freedom from ecclesiastical tradition and formalism, and the fearless aggressiveness that has lighted the beacons of salvation in every land? The hymn has been the expression of life, and in turn has become the wellspring of life.

Whatever of culture and refinement other forms of literature have brought has directly touched only a small minority, and but indirectly the great mass of civilized peoples; but the hymn has had a direct influence on the life and character of the mass of the people, and has appealed to their instincts and imaginations and shaped their ideals in the most immediate and striking way. Where one person has been refined and enriched in mind by the poetry of Milton, or Wordsworth, or Tennyson, a thousand have been comforted, inspired, and transformed by Sternhold and Hopkins, Watts, or Wesley.

Archbishop Trench, the fault of whose hymns was chiefly that they were too few, was admonished by his friend, John Sterling, to give more attention to hymn-writing: “You would influence millions whom poetry in any other form would never reach.”

II. OBJECTIONS TO RECOGNIZING ITS LITERARY CHARACTER

_Due to Narrow Definition of Literature._

In spite of these facts that surely entitle the hymn to be considered literature in the most vital sense of the word, there are critics who look upon it with undisguised indifference, if not with scorn. Partly due to an utter lack of sympathy with the use of it, partly to an academic idea of what literature really is, emphasizing form and rhetorical interest, partly because its appeal is emotional and not mainly intellectual, these objectors are blind to the larger interests involved. If there is any truth in the insistence of some literary critics that there are few hymns that are good from a literary point of view, Montgomery’s statement may give a sufficient reason: “Our good poets have seldom been Christians and our good Christians have seldom been good poets.”[3]

_Due to Failure to Realize Limitations of Hymns._

A better reason is that such critics have seldom realized the limitations the singing hymn presents to the poet. Milton was a great poet, but he could not condense his ideas sufficiently or give them the needed terse expression. He needed a large canvas, while the successful hymn-writer is confined to a miniature. Even Tennyson, who succeeded in small lyrics, wrote only one hymn and that ill-adapted to actual congregational use.

Palgrave, in the preface to his _Treasury of Sacred Songs_, compares secular and sacred verse as follows: “Secular verse covers many provinces: manners, incident, love, landscape, the vast sphere of drama—in a word, all the many-colored romance of life. Sacred verse can hardly go beyond one province: to expect masterpieces in one field approximately numerous as those in the secular lyric is unreasonable. Even more unreasonable is it, when of this single province a district only is chosen for censure, and treated as the whole domain. Hymns, well-nigh limited to the functions of prayer and praise, are precisely that region in which a practical aim is naturally, almost inevitably, predominant!”

_Some Critics and Their Criticism._

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s criticism of hymns may be brushed aside as based on a wrong conception of poetry, which to his mind called not for simplicity, but for something near to that artificiality which he conceived of as art: “Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical.”... “The paucity of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of its matter rejects the ornament of figurative diction.”

In mitigation of the false judgment of the old literary dictator, it may be said that the golden age of English hymnody had not yet arrived.

The later criticism of the hymn by Matthew Arnold represents more fully the attitude of the literary critic in our own day. The practical aspects of life were not ignored by him, but they did not bulk large in his mind. Hence it is not surprising that, while he fully comprehended the wide influence of the hymn, he had little or no sympathy with its spirit and even less with its purpose, so that he could write about it after this fashion: “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.” Could anti-religious rationalism go further?

Among more recent critics, Edmund Clarence Stedman speaks of the hymn as “the kind of verse which is, of all, the most common and indispensable.” But Professor Boynton in the _Cambridge History of American Literature_, gives as much space to “Yankee Doodle” as he does to American Hymnody and refers to its “sentimental ornateness,” “tawdry sentimentalism,” and “banalities of evangelistic song,” unconsciously drawing an unhappy portrait of his own spiritual condition.[4]

The older criticism of the hymn had at least the merit of thoughtfulness and serious consideration of its value and of its shortcomings.

The hymns that would have satisfied literary critics would have required a spiritual delicacy and refinement, an elegance and artistry of phrase, a vagueness of religious idea devoid of genuine feeling, that would shut them out from use in the workaday world in which we live. To set aside the “good and useful purpose” acknowledged by Matthew Arnold in the consideration of the hymn is to ignore its whole reason for being, and, what is vastly more important, to ignore the deepest needs of the human soul.

III. THE WRITING OF HYMNS

_The Handicap of Thought and Diction._

Alfred Tennyson clearly recognized the limitations that handicap the writer of hymns. “A good hymn is the most difficult thing in the world to write!” The hymn he did write, “Sunset and Evening Star,” beautiful as it is, failed in practicability for congregational use. Its unfitness for mass singing in its various phases is the chief stumblingblock.

The hymn writer finds in the limitations, which he must bear in mind as he writes, no small hindrance to spontaneity and poetic vision. He must limit the thought not only to the comprehension, but to the natural feelings of the people who are to sing what he writes. He must not use unusual or polysyllabic words. Striking figures, startling tropes, involved similes, obscure metaphors, allusions to things known by but few, descriptive or dramatic lines, are all forbidden. Every verse, whether in single or double meter, must be complete in itself, whatever its relation in thought to what precedes or follows. There must be unity, simplicity, condensation of thought, and yet a clearness that shuts out involved thought or mysticism that cannot be instantly grasped. The hymn writer is like a violinist called upon to play on a single string.[5]

Thomas Hornblower Gill, an English hymn writer who is slowly gaining recognition in current hymnals—_The Revised Presbyterian Hymnal_ has five of his hymns—gives his conception of what hymns should be, in his preface to his first volume, issued in 1868. He insists that the true hymn is a true poem in every case, while it is debarred from liberties of luxuriance which may be claimed by other poetry. “It may easily be too figurative; it cannot be too glowing or imaginative... They should exhibit all the qualities of a good song—liveliness and intensity of feeling, directness, clearness and vividness of utterance, strength, sweetness, and simplicity and melody of rhythm: excessive subtlety and excessive ornament should be alike avoided.”

_The Handicap of Meter._

Not the slightest handicap is the necessity of choosing a form of stanza that will at the same time fit the writer’s sentiment and be adapted to singable tunes known to the congregations which are to be lyrically served. This range of form is quite limited. Most of these tunes call for iambic or trochaic measure, because anapaestic or dactylic numbers lack the dignity and the impressiveness necessary for general hymns.

The form of the stanza may take the elevated, heavy “Long” Meter, the more widely expressive “Common” Meter, the sententious “Short” Meter, “Sevens and Sixes,” “Eights and Sevens,” plain “Sevens” or “Sixes,” or the more lively “Sixes and Fours” or “Sixes and Fives.”[6]

These different meters have very marked characteristics. It is really marvelous how the instinct of true hymn writers in all generations has unconsciously, or at most subconsciously, taken account of them and with practical unanimity observed them.

The Long Meter is stately and dignified. It is the fit expression of noble praise like the Long Meter Doxology, “Lord of all being, throned afar,” “From all that dwell below the skies,” “Before Jehovah’s awful throne,” or elevated sentiment like “God is the refuge of His saints,” “When I survey the wondrous cross,” and “’Tis midnight, and on Olive’s brow.” Its long, even lines, broken by no strong stops, afford a smooth, graceful expression for general truths and Christian doctrine in poetic form, such as “O Jesus, our chief cornerstone,” “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun,” and “O Love! how deep, how broad, how high!”

The Common Meter is much more varied in its possibilities of expression, as its unequal lines and alternate rhymes give greater freedom. It is the prevailing meter of the old English ballad. It is really the most adaptable and pliable form of stanza open to the hymn writer, giving equal opportunity of expression to all emotions and classes of truth. It is a fit vehicle alike for the elevated praise of “All hail the power of Jesus’ name,” the majesty of “I sing th’ almighty pow’r of God,” the doctrinal statement of “There is a fountain filled with blood,” the tenderness of “Jesus, the very thought of Thee,” the vigor of “Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve,” and the quiet resignation of “Father, whate’er of earthly bliss.” On account of this adaptability it has become the Common Meter in fact as well as in name. Its exclusive use in some of the collections of metrical psalms shut out the use of tunes in other meters and so led to the singing of only a few of the more popular Common Meter tunes; the result was that the congregational singing in the churches in England, Scotland, and America was nearly wrecked.

S. M. might stand for sententious meter as well as for Short Meter, as the two short lines and the long pauses at the end of each of them give it an emphatic, terse, even epigrammatic style. This may be seen in “My soul, be on thy guard,” “Welcome, sweet day of rest,” “Stand up and bless the Lord,” “Crown Him with many crowns,” and “Come, Holy Spirit, come.” John Fawcett was not happy in the selection of this meter for his otherwise very useful and precious hymn, “Blest be the tie that binds,” as the strong pause at the end of the first line in all but one of his stanzas cuts his sentences in two and makes the hymn alike difficult to read and sing. The same difficulty will be found in the reading of other hymns in this meter, the limitations of which have not always been recognized by writers using it. It would be a very slow, heavy meter did not the longer third line give it needed movement.

The meter known as 6s lacks the longer third line and is therefore peculiarly grave and disjointed. It is well adapted for hymns of passive faith or resignation, such as “My Jesus, as Thou wilt,” “Thy way, not mine, O Lord,” or for dolorous prayers like “My spirit longs for Thee,” and “I hunger and I thirst.”

The meter 6s and 4s in its various forms might be supposed to be even slower than the 6s because of the additional short lines of four syllables each. The opposite is true. In some cases the first four lines are rhythmically equivalent to two lines of ten syllables each, so slight is the pause of actual thought at the end of the six-syllable line, with the result that the slowness is quickened into simple dignity and elevation. But even where the pauses at the end of the first and third lines are long, the shorter second and fourth lines, as in common meter, give added movement. In the other form of 6s and 4s, the first two six-syllable lines are so knit together by their common rhyme and, if properly written, have so markedly a common goal of completeness of thought in the third line toward which they hurry that again the movement is hastened and the severity of the 6s is mitigated. The same principle applies to the following three or four lines, depending on the form examined. Hence we have in the various forms of this meter some of our noblest hymns of prayer, praise, and victory, such as “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” “More love to Thee, O Christ,” “We are but strangers here,” “Fade, fade, each earthly joy,” “My faith looks up to Thee,” “Rise, glorious Conqueror, rise,” “Come, Thou Almighty King,” and “My country, ’tis of thee.”

IV. THE LITERARY QUALITY NOT TO BE OVERESTIMATED

_Literary Quality Not the Supreme Consideration._

Although poetical feeling and imagination and nice literary craftsmanship are not to be undervalued, but rather to be earnestly sought for in our hymns, after all, they are not the supreme considerations. Practical use has proved many hymns that conspicuously lacked them to have been supremely useful because of their spiritual content, sincerely and lucidly expressed. When hymn writers like Watts and Newton have deliberately ignored and even avoided literary values, and yet have written among the most useful hymns in our collections, the critic who insists on poetical quality has by no means a _prima facie_ case. Charles Wesley was a poet, but in his valuable hymn “A charge to keep I have” he is a pedagogue without poetic afflatus. Standards of literary value, when not artificial, as in Samuel Johnson’s case, have their place, but a place that is modest and not supreme.

_Literary Quality Should Be Subconscious._

The danger in unduly emphasizing the literary aspect of hymns is well expressed by Dr. Louis F. Benson: “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.” In other words, the conscious seeking of the hymn writer after literary atmosphere and skill of treatment is fatal to genuineness of feeling, and to his success in producing a true hymn.

It will do no harm to iterate here that the two essentials to a successful hymn are spirituality and the power to express it so as to reach the understanding as well as the hearts of the people who are to sing. According to Paul, the first commandment in hymn writing and singing is: “I will sing with the spirit”; the second is like unto it: “I will sing with the understanding also.”

_Chapter IV_ THE EMENDATION OF HYMNS

I. THE CHANGES IN OUR HYMNS

_Early Changes._

The question of changes made in hymns by others than their writers deserves consideration. The point is not that the individual preacher is supposed to air his critical skill, but that he should understand why changes have been made by hymnal editors and better appreciate the principles involved and the literary niceties that are to be observed.

In the first compilations of hymnbooks, the rights of the authors of the individual hymns were entirely below the horizon. Many hymns were published without the names of their writers. To this day Charles Wesley’s claim to “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” as against that of his brother John, depends wholly on considerations of style and form of stanza. There is not even a well-founded tradition.

It was the adaptation of the hymn to immediate actual needs that counted, not the writer. There was no moral copyright, much less legal, to stay the hand of the mutilator.

Watts did not hesitate to incorporate in his hymns lines and even whole stanzas from the hymns of others. John Wesley had no scruples in rewriting lines and stanzas and even whole hymns already in print. Toplady’s alterations were often quite radical, as, for example, his drastic revision of Charles Wesley’s “Blow ye the trumpet, blow”[1] to suit his intensely Calvinistic views.

_The Abuse of the Editorial Revision._

Dr. Worcester, in this country, who issued several collections of psalms and hymns, chiefly by Watts, was lavish in his alterations, mostly for the worse—so much so that the New England churches revolted. Lord Selborne said of these mutilations by many hands, “There is just enough of Watts left here to remind one of Horace’s saying that ‘you may know the remains of a poet even when he is torn to pieces.’”

The needless alteration of hymns that occurred in these early days is to be greatly deplored, especially of those most widely known. “Rock of Ages” and “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” were fair targets for the editorial spear—out of the twenty-four lines of the former only eleven have escaped change. The line “When mine eyestrings break in death” was the only one peremptorily demanding a change, although a few other alterations may be accepted as slight improvements, as, for instance, “wounded” instead of “riven” side. So many people have committed this hymn with its differing lines to memory that when it is sung there is frequently the clash of these variations instead of the desirable uniformity of utterance.

The same is true of Wesley’s hymn. In spite of John Wesley’s warning against changes in the Methodist hymns—“Hymn-cobblers should not try to mend them. I really do not think they are able”—more than thirty variations occur in the first stanza of “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.”

The pity is that while uniformity is extremely desirable in these and many other hymns, it is now out of the question. The several variations have their partisan upholders.

James Montgomery spent years of his life amending and modifying the hymns of others, but asked that others should not change his verses. He insisted that if good people could not conscientiously adopt his doctrines and diction, it was a little questionable in them to impose theirs on him.

It is interesting to note that Montgomery could not “conscientiously adopt the doctrine and diction” of the first verse of Cowper’s “There is a fountain filled with blood” and substituted a verse of his own of which he said, “I think my version is unexceptionable.” But hymnal editors did not find it so and unanimously repudiated it. It was regarded as “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.”

_The Return to Originals._

This abuse of the editorial revision produced a reaction, and in the last half century, under the leadership of Dr. Louis F. Benson, a strong movement appeared among hymnal editors whose slogan was “Back to the originals!” In many cases that was not practicable, as the changes made were evident improvements, but the new tendency often proved to be a very useful one in restoring many a good original phrase in place of a much inferior alteration.

II. PRINCIPLES OF EQUITY INVOLVED IN THESE CHANGES

_The Rights of the Original Writer._

There are some principles of equity that lie upon the surface. The writer of hymns has rights that must be recognized. His name should be given as its author. No name other than his own should be connected with the product of his pen. Unless there are sufficient reasons, the hymn should be given as he wrote it. If his name is given, no doctrine or experience should be interpolated. In business affairs that would be adjudged forgery in the second degree. If interpolations or changes of ideas become necessary for practical reasons, due notice should be given that the original writer is not responsible for the new ideas or the changes of phraseology. Unitarian hymnal editors have not always recognized this obligation. Our recent well-edited hymnals have been scrupulous in this particular.

_The Limits of the Author’s Rights._

But there are distinct limits to the author’s rights. If the hymnal were a merely literary compilation, the liberty to make changes would not be admissible. But the hymnal is not an anthology; it is a collection of hymns for a definite and practical purpose of an exalted character—to aid congregations in the worship of God and in the realization of the spiritual aims he has set before them. That purpose has the right of eminent domain. If the original hymn has faulty lines or weak verses that jeopardize its otherwise practical effectiveness, competent editors of collections of hymns for congregational use have the right to amend, or condense, and so add to its usefulness in the work of the church, in so far as it does not affect the general spirit and tenor of the original. Isaac Watts recognized this principle, saying, “Where an unpleasing word is found, he that leads the worship may substitute a better one.” Indeed, in 1737, he acknowledged that “Many a line needs the file to polish the roughness of it and many a thought wants richer language to adorn and make it shine—but I have at present neither inclination nor leisure to correct and I hope I never shall.”

III. EFFECT OF CHANGES ON QUALITY

_Loss of Original Writer’s Vision._

It has been strongly urged that the emendation of hymns is dangerous to their quality; that the original writer was a better judge of both thought and phrasing than the cold critic whose very attitude prevents the high feeling that must inspire the most appealing forms of expression.

But the protest overlooks the fact that the very fervor and urge of fresh vision and its consequent emotion may prevent attention to nice details of phraseology or even to the proper balance of parts of a hymn. Furthermore, the writer with the creative urge may lack the critical faculty and fine discrimination necessary to polish up his verses after the impulse of writing has spent its force.

This being true, the editor who supplies the wanting critical attitude shows no presumption, provided his vision is clear and his skill in supplying more accurate, more melodious, or more practical phraseology adds value to the hymn. Martin Madan was no hymn writer, but when he rewrote Watts’ hymn,

“He dies, the Heavenly Lover dies! The tidings strike the doleful sound On my poor heartstrings; deep he lies In the cold caverns of the ground,”

and gave us the noble stanza,

“He dies, the Friend of sinners, dies; Lo! Salem’s daughters weep around; A solemn darkness veils the skies, A sudden trembling shakes the ground,”

he not only gave it a dignified and Biblical content and form, but he rescued the hymn for the spiritual edification of coming generations.

_Biblical Precedent._

There is plenty of Biblical precedent. The original compiler and editor of the Psalms, be he Asaph or Ezra, inserted a version of the eighteenth psalm differing from the original as found in the twenty-second chapter of Second Samuel. It cannot escape the most casual reader of the New Testament that its quotations from the Old Testament, whether poetical or prose, are by no means accurately reproduced. Moreover, the writers of psalm versions from Marot and Luther down to Watts did not hesitate to condense, alter, or interpolate new ideas in their transcriptions of the sacred originals. They had no sense of presumption; their minds were preoccupied with the practical ends they were trying to serve.

IV. ANALYSIS OF CHANGES MADE

It may be instructive to study more in detail the occasions for changes made in our hymns and learn the justification for many of them. If some of them seem somewhat microscopic and even captious, none the less they make for exactness, for nice discrimination, and for more intelligent appreciation of the literary and spiritual values of our magnificent body of hymns.[2]

_The Omission of Verses._

A very important change from the original of many hymns is the omission of some of the less valuable stanzas, or even a condensation of some of them by omitting unattractive lines.

“Oh for a thousand tongues to sing,” the fine hymn that opens all but recent Methodist hymnals, originally began, “Glory to God and praise and love,” and had eighteen stanzas. The hymn as now used consists of stanzas 7 to 12 of the original. Some hymnals omit stanza 10.

In the Trinity hymn sometimes ascribed to Charles Wesley, “Come, Thou Almighty King,” the second of the original five stanzas is always omitted:

“Jesus, our Lord, arise, Scatter our enemies, And make them fall; Let thine almighty aid Our sure defense be made, Our souls on thee be stayed; Lord, hear our call.”

The evident imitation of the second stanza of the British National anthem is too obvious:

“O Lord, our God, arise, Scatter his enemies, And make them fall. Frustrate their knavish tricks, Confound their politics, On Him our hearts we fix; God save the King.”

In Bishop Brooks’ original of “O little town of Bethlehem,” so widely known and used, the fourth stanza is omitted:

“Where children, pure and happy, Pray to the Blessed Child; Where misery cries out to thee, Son of the Mother mild; Where charity stands watching, And faith holds wide the door, The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, And Christmas comes once more.”

The reasons are not far to seek: the double rhyme in the third line is so forced as to be awkward; the first two lines refer to Jesus in the third person, but the next two in the second; more important still, the stanza does not make a sufficient addition to the value of the hymn to warrant the added length.

The stanza,

“Thy body slain, sweet Jesus, thine, And bathed in its own blood, While all exposed to wrath divine, The glorious suff’rer stood,”

if retained, despite its medieval picture of our suffering Lord, would have added nothing to Watts’ noble hymn, “Alas! and did my Saviour bleed,” but rather would have hemmed the progress of its thought and feeling.

Few of the lovers of Robinson’s classic hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,” would have enjoyed singing and visualizing the omitted fourth stanza,

“O that day when freed from sinning, I shall see thy lovely face! _Richly clothed in blood-washed linen_, How I’ll sing thy sovereign grace!”

A stanza was omitted from a hymn by Isaac Watts by Dr. Worcester, and he was compelled by public sentiment to replace it in his next collection. Who was right—Dr. Worcester, or Watts and the church public?

“But while I bled and groaned and died, I ruined Satan’s Throne; High on my cross I hung and spy’d The monster tumbling down.”

What a travesty in this stanza of Christ’s words, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven”!

The omission of all the older hymns regarding “the state of the unpenitent dead” in our more recent hymnals is due to their usually rather lurid expressions, going beyond those of the Scriptures, to the reaction in the church at large against the rather mechanical and heartless emphasis of the painful doctrine—not only in hymns, but in sermons as well—and also to the realization that it is not a theme fitted for singing.

What modern congregation could sing Watts’ stanza formulating the doctrine,

“Up to the courts where angels dwell, It [the soul] mounts triumphant there; Or devils plunge it down to hell In infinite despair”?

When we come to the hymns constructed by selecting stanzas from long poems—e.g., by John Keble or by John Greenleaf Whittier—we reach marvels of skill in selection and co-ordination that have greatly enriched English hymnody.

_Reconstructing and Rewriting Faulty Hymns._

John Wesley inveighed against “hymn-cobblers,” but he was a most efficient and skillful “hymn-cobbler” himself. He deserves high commendation for his literary skill and taste in cutting the rough diamonds that passed through his editorial hands. A few instances will illustrate his success.

“Before Jehovah’s awful throne” is recognized as one of Watts’ noblest hymns of worship. But it is Wesley’s reconstruction that brought out its essential nobility.

Watts began it in rather mechanical fashion,

“Sing to the Lord with joyful voice, Let every land his name adore; The British Isles shall send the noise Across the ocean to the shore.”

Wesley omitted this stanza entirely. Beginning with the second stanza,

“With gladness bow before his throne, And let his presence raise your joys; Know that the Lord is God alone And formed our soul and framed our voice”

(which shows that Watts’ inspiration had begun to rise), Wesley transformed it into a majestic expression of pure worship:

“Before Jehovah’s awful throne, Ye nations, bow with sacred joy; Know that the Lord is God alone, He can create and he destroy.”

He was equally successful with Watts’ third stanza:

“Infinite power, without our aid, Figured our clay to human mould; And when our wandering feet had strayed, He brought us to his sacred fold.”

The first line is faulty: the accent of “infinite” is on the first syllable: Watts placed it on the second. The second line conveys no clear idea: how is clay “figured”? The third and fourth lines are bald and ordinary, lacking in poetic grace. See how deftly Wesley took Watts’ material and gave it grace and dignity:

“His sovereign power, without our aid, Made us of clay and formed us men; And when like wand’ring sheep we strayed, He brought us to his fold again.”

Transforming Watts’ fourth stanza in like manner, he added a majestic fifth stanza of his own:

“Wide as the world is thy command, Vast as eternity thy love; Firm as a rock thy truth shall stand When rolling years shall cease to move,”

completing one of the noblest hymns in the language.

Another hymn of Isaac Watts was enriched by passing through the hands of John Wesley. Besides correcting minor infelicities and curtailing its impracticable length, he rewrote the third stanza of the very popular hymn, “Come, ye that love the Lord,” transforming Watts’

“The God that rules on high And thunders when he please, That rides upon the stormy sky And manages the seas,”

into

“The God that rules on high, That all the earth surveys, That rides upon the stormy sky And calms the roaring seas.”

He might have gone further and obviated the break of the sentence occurring between the third and fourth stanzas. Some hymnal editors meet the difficulty by omitting both.

Rev. Martin Madan wrote no hymns; his only claim to immortality rests on his emendations of the hymns of greater men. But he well deserves to be remembered for some of his happy improvements of important hymns. His revision of Watts’ hymn “He dies! the Heavenly Lover dies!” has already been referred to.

Madan very fortunately changed Charles Wesley’s

“Hark how all the welkin rings, Glory to the King of Kings,”

into the much more poetical lines:

“Hark! the herald angels sing, ‘Glory to the newborn King.’”

_Minor Felicitous Changes._

No small improvement in our hymns consists of the change of individual phrases because of misplaced accents, unfortunate consonantal combinations, inept metaphors, and phrases that are secular in spirit and associations.

In Cowper’s “Jesus, where’er thy people meet,” the second line had the word “inhabitest,” difficult to sing; it was changed to “Dost dwell with those.”

In Bishop Ken’s “Evening Hymn” some bad cases of wrong accents have been corrected. “Under thy own almighty wings” now is “Beneath the shadow of thy wings,” and “Triumphing rise at the last day” is become “Rise glorious at the judgment day.”

Isaac Watts’ theory that hymns should eschew poetic grace was carried too far—into euphonic slovenliness. In “Welcome, sweet day of rest” he wrote “One day amidst the place,” ignoring the fact that “amidst” is not singable. “One day in such a place” is much more suave. In “Joy to the world! The Lord is come!” he wrote in the first line of stanza three “let sins and sorrows grow”; the excessive sibilation has been removed by using singular nouns.

In Charles Wesley’s very useful hymn, “Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim,” “The praises of Jesus” is substituted for “Our Jesus’ praises,” distributing the hissing s’s more musically. The second and third stanzas are wisely omitted; few congregations could sing, with the solemnity the rest of the hymn calls for, such lines as

“When devils engage, the billows arise, And horribly rage and threaten the skies.”

Charles Wesley in his hymn, “Jesus, let thy pitying eye,” had a very realistic vision of the crucifixion and wrote “My Saviour _gasped_, ‘Forgive!’” which for singing purposes was well emended to “prayed.” How did it escape the eagle eye of his brother John? Or did the influence of the Moravians, who were fond of these physical touches in writing of the crucifixion, affect both the Wesleys?

The “Protestant Te Deum,” “All hail the power of Jesus’ name,” has fared well—or ill, according to the point of view—at the hands of “hymn-tinkers.” Revisers have omitted

“Let highborn seraphs tune the lyre And, as they tune it, fall Before His face who tunes their choir, And crown him Lord of all.”

They have transformed the stanza,

“Let every tribe and every tongue That bound creation’s call Now shout in universal song The crowned Lord of all,”

into the nobler stanza,

“Let every kindred, every tribe On this terrestrial ball, To him all majesty ascribe, And crown him Lord of all.”

Omitting one or two more stanzas, Dr. John Rippon has added a last stanza that puts a fitting climax to the whole hymn:

“Oh, that, with yonder sacred throng, We at his feet may fall! We’ll join the everlasting song, And crown him Lord of all.”

Edward Mote began his widely-used hymn, “My hope is built on nothing less,” with a “stumble on the threshold,” writing “Nor earth nor hell my soul shall move,” a very unintelligent plunging _in medias res_. Was it Bradbury, who wrote the popular and effective tune that gave the hymn wings, that had the happy impulse to combine parts of the first and second stanzas, using the first two lines of the second stanza and the last two of the first? This gave an arresting first line and eliminated a line impossible to put on the lips of a general congregation, “Midst all the hell I feel within.”

The very familiar and useful hymn of George Heath, “My soul, be on thy guard,” is a notable example of the value of a competent editor’s emendations. In stanza three Heath wrote,

“Ne’er think the vict’ry won, Nor _once at ease sit down_; _Thy arduous work_ will not be done Till thou _hast got thy_ crown.”

Again in the fourth stanza he wrote,

“Fight on, my soul, till death. God will thy work applaud, Reveal his love at thy last breath, And take to his abode.”

The improvement in both stanzas, as found in our hymnals, is obvious at a glance.

Even so finished a poet as the distinguished historian Milman disfigured his noble Palm Sunday hymn, “Ride on, ride on in majesty,” by such a line as “Thine humble beast pursues its road,” which Murray changed to the graceful and appealing line, “Saviour meek, pursue thy road.”

Space is wanting to exhaust the various changes in hymns that are amply justified if their most effective use is to be secured. It is sufficient to say that changes of text must increase the perspicuity, precision, propriety, and force of the hymn. Single phrases may wisely be modified if a change corrects a wrong accent, makes a line more euphonious, adds to its vividness, expressiveness, or vigor, increases its dignity, clarifies the sense, or better adapts it to public use.

_Chapter V_ THE CONTENT OF THE HYMN

The hymn is not an independent entity, sufficient unto itself, whose whole purpose is to be beautiful and to give pleasure to those responsive to its charm. The hymn has a definite message, is big with purpose.

It is related to its writer in satisfying the urge for expression of ideas that will give him power over the thoughts and feelings of others, or of emotions that demand to be voiced forth in the mystic expressiveness of rhythm and rhyme.

It is related to God as the original source of its impulse and as the recipient of its response in love and praise.

It is related to the church in the aid it affords to its collective life and to the reader or singer whose spirituality is to be inspired, developed, and expressed.

It is the content expressing these several relations and purposes that separates the hymn from purely literary ideals and criticisms.

I. ITS RELATION TO GOD

_Thanksgiving._

The first impulse is a recognition of the blessings and privileges that God bestows upon his creatures in general and upon the writer and the singer in particular. There is consciousness of self in this expression of gratitude. The soul still has its feet upon the ground.

There is nothing unworthy in this recognition of self as the recipient of God’s favor, for the soul honors God in its realization of its dependence on him and in its clear vision of the source of its blessedness. Indeed, God asks it as his due.

_Prayer for Future Blessing._

The cynic who declares that gratitude is usually tinctured with the hope of favors to come may not properly represent the soul as it gives thanks to God, but there is a kinship between thanksgiving and prayer that makes it easy and logical to pass from the one to the other. The memory of benefits received inevitably suggests needs yet to be supplied.

In its relation to God the hymn may well be a vehicle for the prayer that envisages the spiritual lack that God alone can supply, and vitalizes the recognition with a desirous urgency that must characterize true prayer.

Here again we find not only divine authority, but encouragement and assurance. Whether the hymn is an individual or a collective prayer matters not. The individual need is also a need common to all petitioners, and the prayer by a congregation is still the individual prayer of its units, only intensified objectively toward God and subjectively toward the singers by its mass expression. This intensification is multiplied not arithmetically but geometrically.

_Adoration._

The hymn of adoration lifts the soul into a higher plane, into a contemplation of the glory and majesty of the infinite perfections of its God in which self is forgotten and a consciousness of the infinitude of divine beauty, nobility, and spiritual elevation remains to thrill the soul. It rises on wings of selfless delight and rejoicing in God into a very ecstasy that only song can express.

Whether the soul stands on some high peak of earth and surveys the billowing world that stretches far and wide with its beetling cliffs and rocky headlands, its forests and fields, its meadows and orchards, filled with the overwhelming mystery of life and force obeying implicitly the laws formulated only in inherent nature; or gazes into the great vault of the sky, with the silent majesty of circling stars and developing universes, it will find the anonymous hymn of more than a century ago voicing its deepest awe, its noblest joy:

“Praise the Lord! ye heavens adore him, Praise him, angels in the height; Sun and moon rejoice before him, Praise him, all ye stars of light.”

When the soul on some mountaintop of inner experience and vision glimpses something of the sublimity of the divine character, its justice, its truth, its purity, its invincible power and will guided by infinite knowledge and wisdom, its boundless mercy and forgiving grace flowing from the eternal Source of its all-embracing love, again it can adopt as its very own the solemn notes of Tersteegen, echoed in English by John Wesley:

“Lo! God is here; let us adore And own how dreadful is this place; Let all within us feel his power, And humbly bow before his face.”

This is the highest office of the hymn and should be made its largest use; in no other way can the minds and hearts of Christian worshipers be filled and thrilled with a consciousness of an indwelling God as by hymns of praise, fully comprehended and sung with unflawed sincerity.

_The Hymn of Communion._

Beyond the hymn of exultant praise is the hymn of communion with God, where the soul expresses its joy, not simply in the objective glories of the divine nature, but in actual communion, companionship, and conscious unity with God in desire, ideals, and purposes. The soul thinks the thoughts of God, delights in what God approves, walks in his ways with spontaneous gladness, and lives in absolute harmony with his will, not mechanically under a stress of duty, but by urge of the deepest depths of the soul. Objective praise may pull out all the stops of the soul’s enthusiasm and the high imaginings of the spirit, but the hymn of communion may express itself in tenderness and sweetness, in upwelling love and quiet affection. It often is a personal rather than a collective hymn.

II. RELATION TO THE SINGER

_The Hymn of Emotion._

Given a definite emotion based on realization of some religious truth, man will urgently call for some expression of it, directly by speaking or writing, or by means of some provided method.[1] Christians are stimulated by being impressed by the experiences of others. There is a blessed contagion in these expressions of the profound experiences of the saints of God as found in the hymnbooks of all our churches. One feels the accelerated spiritual heartbeat as one reads (or, better yet, sings) Watts’ emotional cry as he stands before the cross of Christ:

“When I survey the wondrous cross On which the Prince of glory died, My richest gain I count but loss And pour contempt on all my pride.”

Who can fail to follow him in his final consecration,

“Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all”?

Medley’s hymn, “Oh, could I speak the matchless worth,” in not a single phrase directly addresses the Deity. It is a purely subjective expression of delight in the Lord Jesus Christ; and yet how impressive, how delightful, how eminently worthy of the feelings of any great congregation, is this hymn of Christian joy.

The hymn of emotion, therefore, supplies the soul’s demand, for it satisfies the instinct for expression. It clarifies the intellectual basis of the emotion and in so doing intensifies it. The collective singing and mass expression of a common emotion intensify it still further and fit it more fully to affect the will and the character, and so give permanence to the influence of the truth underlying the feeling. Where at the beginning the truth is but dimly perceived and passively accepted, the resulting shallow feeling will be deepened. In this way the hymn becomes a very generator of desirable religious emotion.

_The Hymn of Inspiration._

It follows that the hymn may be a means of stimulating interest and enthusiasm in connection with a topic or proposed course of action, and may become the hymn of inspiration. Any line of thought or method of presentation appealing to any emotion or impulse that creates courage, hopefulness, confidence, assurance of success, will be pertinent and desirable. The intenser element of direct exhortation may be added, making a hortative hymn of one of mere inspiration.

_The Hymn of Personal Experience._

The hymn of personal experience differs from that of emotional expression in being more subjective, more analytical of the effect produced on the mind by the apprehension of the religious truth. The latter is based on the realization of some objective truth or doctrine, while the hymn of personal experience emphasizes the inner experience in prayer, in specific exercise of faith, in a reaction of the soul to some accomplished task, or to a season of communion with God. The hymn of the blind poet, George Matheson, which has been so widely used,

“O Love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul on Thee,”

is distinctly a hymn of Christian experience; while Isaac Watts gives poignant expression to the emotions of the Christian, as he contemplates the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, borne to atone for his sins,

“Alas! and did my Saviour bleed? And did my Sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head For sinners such as I!”

The hymn of personal experience has been rather heatedly objected to by critics like Bishop Wordsworth. In some cases these “I and My” hymns have been rewritten to meet the objection.

These critics who find their own “ego” offended by the apparent emphasis of the hymn writer’s “ego” forget some rather important factors in the situation.

1. It would have been rather presumptuous on the part of the writer to speak for the collective “We” and “Us” who presumably were to sing his verses.

2. As a spontaneous expression of personal experience, the hymn had to be individualistic. Not often, if ever, are particular religious experiences common to a body of believers at a given moment.

3. The high peaks of religious experience which are most valuable as furnishing ideals and stimulus to the members of a singing congregation can be reached only by individuals, not by a mass of people. To restrict the expression of religious experience to that common to all Christians, would be to omit the most inspiring and helpful hymns, and keep our song service at a dead level of inferior value.

4. It must not be forgotten that it is not the congregation that sings; it is its individual units! The congregation is an abstraction, a merely mental conception. The singing of each member is fundamentally as purely individual as if he were absolutely alone! Hence the “I and My” hymn is entirely fitting. Each sings what is, or ought to be, his own individual experience. Indeed, he makes his best contribution to the collective effect if he is intensely individualistic in his singing.

5. In all ages this individualistic participation in mass singing has been natural and spontaneous. The children of Israel sang an individualistic “I and My” hymn in rejoicing over the army of Pharaoh. The psalms are largely “I and My” hymns of praise, of prayer, and of confession. David sings, “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.”

It is too much to expect that every singer shall apprehend the full import of the words he sings; to accuse him of insincerity and hypocrisy if he fails to rise to their level, or if he takes them on his lips thoughtlessly, is uncharitable. In most cases the fault lies with the leader of the service who does not bring out the meaning and does not prepare the minds and hearts of the singers for the hymn about to be sung.

It is, therefore, not a question of the first person singular, but of the kind of personal experience that finds a voice. Is it artificial or genuine? Is it morbid or wholesome? Is it depressing or stimulating to the spiritual life? Is it an experience to which all have attained or may attain, in terms all can accept, or is it morbid, fanatical, extravagant?

No congregation should be expected to sing offhand with Faber,

“I love Thee so, I know not how My transports to control,”

or

“Oh, dearest Jesus, I have grown Childish with love of thee.”

There are other limits that need to be considered. A hymn may properly be the vehicle for a confession of sin or of spiritual unworthiness; but it should not take exaggerated forms of expression that only a few could honestly adopt. The same is somewhat true of hymns of consecration. Some hymns are title deeds to gifts to Jesus Christ so comprehensive that few could sincerely subscribe to them. All these hymns, though they may have been spontaneous outbursts from the hearts of the writers, will seem unreal and forced to the singer, and will only aggravate the mechanical unreality and the unwitting insincerity that vitiate the average service of song.

_The Hymn of Meditation._

The hymn of meditation is less emotional than that of personal experience or feeling. It is quiet in rhetorical style and gentle in mood. Its purpose is not didactic, although it often superficially seems to be so. It is occupied with doctrinal truth only in an inferential way. It contemplates all religious truth, whether doctrinal or ethical, in an objective, impersonal way and notes its implications and corollaries. It is, therefore, emotionally negative, blending with the other elements of the service rather than controlling them.

Perhaps as typical an instance as can be cited is Bishop Bickersteth’s

“Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The blood of Jesus whispers peace within.”

Charles Wesley’s meditation on the Christian’s duties, “A charge to keep I have,” is another hymn of this class. Faber’s “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy” (“Was there ever kinder shepherd”) is also in the meditative mood.

_The Hymn of Exhortation._

At first blush it may seem a little absurd that the members of a congregation should sing at each other such a hymn as “Stand up, stand up for Jesus” or “Work, for the night is coming.” But this is an artificial and not a genuine objection. The instinct of the human race is toward the singing of just such hortatory songs as these. The Marseillaise Hymn, which was one of the strongest influences leading to the French Revolution, is simply an exhortation, but it swept the French people off their feet and helped prepare the way for the great transformation of the social structure of the nation. The Church has gone on producing and singing these hortatory hymns throughout all generations from the time of David until now, because the impulse is native to the human heart.

_The Didactic Hymn._

The hymn may be used to teach truth as well as to express emotion. If we are to accept Paul’s statements regarding the use of song in the churches in his early day, the didactic hymn is the oldest form of the Christian hymn. “Teaching and admonishing one another” is his phrase in Colossians 3:16. Indeed, we can go back to Moses for authority for it, for the ninetieth Psalm is largely didactic. In the Psalms we find more instruction than worship. There is really no reason why an assembly should not sing truth, as well as recite it, as it does in the Apostles’ or in the Nicene Creed.

The didactic value of the hymn is too great that we should refuse its help in laying a foundation of doctrine in the hearts of the people of God. Never was it more necessary than now. It is significant of John Wesley’s appreciation of its didactic value that in his announcement of his hymnal of 1780, _The Large Hymn Book_, he refers to his grouping of the hymns under subjects, making the hymnal “a little body of experimental and practical divinity.”

Many of our most frequently used hymns are unfeignedly didactic. Bishop Wordsworth’s “O day of rest and gladness” is a resume of the arguments for the validity of the Christian Sabbath. “The Church’s one foundation” is one of a series of hymns by Samuel J. Stone expounding the Apostles’ Creed. Heber’s hymn, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty” is suffused with poetical feeling, but is none the less a didactic hymn emphasizing the doctrine of the Trinity.

At the same time, this religious truth must have a poetic element. It is the great value of a hymn as a teaching method that it puts heart and feeling into the doctrine it expresses, and so gives it reality and appeal. Despite Dr. Austin Phelps’ rejection of Montgomery’s “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire” as “without the wings of song,” the Church at large has been singing it for a century. Even if the last stanza were omitted, it would still be a good hymn, because the doctrine of prayer is clothed in such beautiful and inspiring language that it is eminently fitted for the expression of a congregation in song.

_The Doctrinal Hymn._

The doctrinal hymn is simply a limited form of the didactic hymn in that it is devoted to the promulgation of the leading Christian doctrines, while the general didactic hymn may be used to inculcate any truth or duty, whether of a fundamental character or not.

The use of the hymn to teach the doctrines of the Church has numerous advantages. It is clear and succinct, not obscuring the truth with philosophical or metaphysical subtleties. It is dogmatic and not argumentative. It has the mnemonic advantage of rhythm and rhyme and is easily remembered. It has the inspiration of collective singing. Above all it is vivid and poetical, emotionalizing and vitalizing what in the philosopher’s hands becomes abstract and dry.

America’s most distinguished hymnologist clearly differentiates the doctrinal theologian and the doctrinal hymn writer: “The theologian and the hymn writer traverse day by day the same country, the Kingdom of our Lord. They walk the same paths; they see the same objects; but in their methods of observation and in their reports of what they see, they differ. So far as theology is a science, the theologian deals simply with the topography of the country: he explores, he measures, he expounds. So far as hymn-writing is an art, the writer deals not with topography, but with the landscape: he sees, he feels, he sings. The difference in method is made inevitable by the variance of temperament of the two men, the diversity of gifts. But both methods are as valid as inevitable. Neither man is sufficient in himself as an observer or a reporter. It is the topography and the landscape together that make the country what it is. It is didactics and poetry together that can approach the reality of the spiritual Kingdom.”[2]

It follows that the doctrinal hymn is not simply reluctantly admissible, it is actually peremptorily necessary if the doctrines of the Christian faith are to be impressed upon each rising generation. This function of the hymn is all the more important because of the decline of doctrinal preaching. It is the “substance of doctrine” the hymns supply rather than the rigid philosophical shell which the creeds and the catechism offer. It is this shell that is “dry,” not the realities it too often hides.

_The Homiletical Hymn._

The homiletical hymn is a homily, as its name implies—a sermonette. The term refers to its form, not to its content, for that is usually doctrinal and always didactic. It is sermonic because it proceeds from point to point, leading the way to a practical application. This form of hymn makes up the great body of the older hymnody, because it was written by sermonizers who applied homiletical methods to their hymns.

Take Doddridge’s hymn, “Ye servants of the Lord”: the first stanza makes the general appeal for service; the second emphasizes the need of readiness for that service; the third, attention to the Lord’s commands; the fourth exclaims over the joy and the reward of service; the fifth, the honors that Christ shall heap on his servant. That makes a fine outline for a sermon!

The homiletical hymn was often dry because the sermon was dry. They were both too frequently “proses” in a sense different from the medieval use of the word.

_The Hymn of Propaganda._

The hymn of propaganda calls for consideration. It is a didactic hymn, of course, but its purpose is not to express the fundamental doctrines of the faith, but to urge some subordinate article of it out of all proportion to its intrinsic importance, or to win adherents for some new religious ideas. There are hymns of Perfectionism, of Holiness, of Unity, of Premillenialism, of Second Adventism, of Christian Science, of phases of Theosophy, that fall within this category.

The spiritual value of some of these is not to be underrated, but each hymn must be judged on its own merits. The danger of exaggeration is the chief point calling for circumspection. Hymns of propaganda criticizing or antagonizing the Christian Church must be rejected.

_Hymns of the Social Gospel._

A few years ago, when the sociological aspect of Christianity won wide attention, it was seriously proposed to rewrite the whole hymnbook and inject the “Social Gospel.” A few desirable hymns on Brotherhood were written which fill out a previously somewhat neglected rubric. Brotherhood is not a discovery of the twentieth century, but has been an integral part of Christianity from the beginning and was never so fully exemplified as at that period.

In so far as the “Social Gospel” is simply the application of the gospel of Christ to old wrongs that yet need to be righted, like slavery, and war, and alcoholism, or to new social complexes in our modern economic life where there is injustice, or where there is need of help for body, mind, or soul, hymns may prove desirable helps. They will, however, be written spontaneously, not as propaganda, and will be used freely in so far as there is practical and emotional justification for them. The onward progress of the Kingdom in these unfinished tasks will most likely depend on the stimulation of the great motives that have given victory in the past. It is the appeal to these motives that gives vitality to such a hymn as “Where cross the crowded ways of life,” by Frank Mason North.

_Special Hymns._

It is a little difficult to supply hymns for subordinate topics which do not stir the spiritual pulses, and hence the poorest hymns in our hymnbooks are found in these divisions. The doctrines of Human Depravity, Regeneration, Sanctification, the State of the Impenitent Dead, do not lend themselves to attractive hymnic expression.

These hymns have no wings; they are unemotional and without appeal to the imagination. Yet the selectors of hymns who have a purely homiletical point of view demand that a hymnal shall supply appropriate lyrics to fit subjects and occasions that have no lyrical possibilities. If the demands of symmetrical completeness in a hymnal, or of close fitness of theme in a service, must be met, then one must be content with prosaic verses lacking in poetic charm or emotional inspiration.

_The Great Hymnic Themes._

There are certain doctrines, certain experiences, that appeal so strongly to Christian hearts that the impulse to write and sing about them far exceeds that growing out of less general, less striking themes. There may be a great difference in the favorite themes of different persons, under different circumstances, in different generations. The Latin medieval hymnists greatly stressed the suffering Christ; Watts sang of the majesty and glory of God and of his reign in the moral and spiritual world, and his hymns are found largely in the purely worshipful rubrics of our hymnals; Charles Wesley wrote in the midst of a great revival, and his hymns emphasize the plan of salvation and voice the personal experiences of the saved. In our own day the ideas of service, of public welfare, of works of philanthropy and mercy, and of social justice find expression.

The supreme theme, of course, is Christ. Whatever phases of Christian doctrine or experience may seem to absorb the mind of any generation, still the songs cluster about the person of Jesus Christ. As Dr. Austin Phelps eloquently insists, “here the rapture of holy song culminates on earth, as it does in heaven. Here every grace of religious character, and every experience of a devout life, has found freedom to express itself in hymns of worship. Where can another such body of sacred poetry be found in any language, as that which comprises the Christology of the songs of the Church?”

This hymnody is all the more appealing in that it sings a living and not a dead Christ, a present personality, near and dear, and not merely a historical character. The singer does not strain his power of thought and elevation of expression to hymn adequately the perfections of an infinite God, but spontaneously rejoices in a Friend who “sticketh closer than a brother”!

_Chapter VI_ THE GOSPEL HYMN

If this were a purely scholastic and literary treatise on the hymnody of the Church, the subject of this chapter might be ignored; but this discussion purports to be practical, and the Gospel hymn is too large a factor in the life and work of our churches to be thus brushed aside. It is a conservative estimate to say that four out of five churches in our land make use of these hymns to a greater or less extent. They even elbow their way into the most exclusive hymnals issued by ecclesiastical authorities. Collections of them are found not only in rural or village communities, but in urban churches as well. Great denominational publishing houses issue them by the hundred thousand. They are heard in the great ecclesiastical gatherings and conventions of the land. Great evangelistic movements depend on them for inspiration and for aggressive energy.

Yet the Gospel hymn has been treated as a convenient “punching bag” for the literary and musical idealist. One respects the antagonistic attitude of the high liturgist to whom the form is so significant, or of the literary or scholarly man whose susceptibilities are outraged by the acknowledged shortcomings and banalities of many of these popular religious lyrics. Nonetheless, one is astonished that persons of high intelligence, in their devotion to exclusively literary and musical standards, should be blind to the great spiritual value of the better specimens of this indiscriminately condemned class of hymns, and to the extraordinary effectiveness and the immense results in aggressive religious work which this people’s hymnody has demonstrated.

This is really only the recrudescence of an ancient feud between the conception of the hymn as exclusively worshipful and belonging to the liturgical service, and as the free lyrical expression of the religious life of the people adapted to all phases of Christian life—individual, domestic, and social, as well as ecclesiastical. As the church life of the early Christians began to crystallize, the former improvisations were discouraged. In time, the service of song was taken from the laity in the interest of greater dignity and churchliness. The Arian controversy with its hymnic outburst freed the wings of popular religious song, only for them to be restrained again by the rigid formalism organized and enforced by Gregory the Great.

The Waldenses, the Hussites, the Lollards, each group had its own popular hymnody. In the general breaking of bonds in the Reformation, the popular hymns of Huss and Luther and their associates, and the metrical psalms of Marot and Sternhold set to popular secular melodies, were the first manifestations of the new freedom.

The same outcry was heard against the hymns of Watts, and a little later against those of the Wesleys, not only in Great Britain, but in New England as well. In the latter the outcry was heard against the “camp-meeting ditties” of the aggressive Methodists as they spread into the West.

Even now, in Germany there is frequent protest against the use in church service of the simpler “folk” hymns, like “Harre des Herrn” (Wait on the Lord), “Ich will streben” (I will strive), and “Sei getreu bis in den Tod” (Be faithful unto death), because they are more recent in origin and have not the severe dignity of the older hymns and chorals.

And so the feud between the devout formalism of the liturgical spirit and the free attitude of aggressive spirituality has gone on from century to century and from land to land, and will continue to do so “until He come.”

_Lack of Discrimination._

There is an utter lack of discrimination shown in the opposition to Gospel hymns.

It is no more true that all Gospel and Sunday-school hymns are crude, illiterate, and undignified than is the anti-foreign Chinese’s charge that all Americans are liars and thieves. Many of the Gospel hymns were written by devout, cultured people of high intelligence. Fanny Crosby has had wide recognition, and there have been many others of equal ability, but lacking her adventitious appeal for sympathy. There are many Gospel hymns which deserve the harshest denunciations that have been expressed. In a people’s hymnody that was inevitable; but there are others so fine that the line of essential values between the Gospel and the standard hymn is difficult to trace. Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings’ _Spiritual Songs_ was practically a people’s Gospel songbook, used for the same purposes and in the same relative spirit, and largely made up of new materials in text and music just like a modern Gospel songbook, being even issued in parts. Among its new hymns were Palmer’s “My faith looks up to Thee” and Smith’s “The morning light is breaking,” now recognized as leading standard hymns. The same is true of Gilmore’s “He leadeth me, O blessed thought!” and Kate Hankey’s “I love to tell the story” and Mrs. Hawks’ “I need Thee every hour.” Mrs. Gates’ “I will sing you a song of that beautiful land,” E. E. Hewitt’s “More about Jesus would I know,” Hopper’s “Jesus, Saviour, pilot me,” Stite’s “Simply trusting every day,” Walford’s “Sweet hour of prayer,” Hunter’s “In the Christian’s home in glory,” Bliss’ “Almost persuaded,” Spafford’s “It is well with my soul,” and Pres. Dr. J. E. Rankin’s “God be with you till we meet again” are none of them illiterate or undignified. Indeed, many of the writers of these despised hymns were college professors, clergymen of high standing, editors, women of education and culture and of profound spiritual life. Many Gospel song writers are far and away superior to the average of the hymnists of the eighteenth century—indeed, have written nothing so unpoetical and so distinctly offensive to good taste as some of the hymns published by Watts and Wesley, the hymnic giants of that age.

There is an impulse to distinguish between Gospel hymns and Gospel songs, accepting the former and rejecting the latter; but that is playing with words. Good Gospel songs are to be baptized Gospel hymns and allowed to enter the golden gates of approved hymnody. Others draw the line at the end of the Moody and Sankey campaigns, closing the canon at that time and regarding all later Gospel songs as apocryphal! But the worst specimens that have appeared were issued before that date and many excellent ones have been written since. No such mechanical criteria can be applied. The acid test of actual usefulness must be employed with Gospel songs as it was to formal hymns. That many of the former have won a permanent place without the emendation needed by the latter shows how unjustified is the indiscriminate condemnation of this whole class of sacred lyrics.

_Wrong Assumptions of the Opposition._

In much of the discussion there seems to be an underlying assumption that there is an inherent antagonism between the standard and the Gospel hymn, that the latter is intended to displace the former. Nothing can be farther from the truth. It is true there is an occasional church where the standard hymns are neglected, but they are a negligible minority. The current Gospel song collections practically all supply a large department of standard hymns and their tunes, in many cases all that are in actual general use. The value of the standard hymn is recognized everywhere as having a most important place in the work of the church.

But its very dignity and strength occasion the limitations to its use, and beyond those limitations the Gospel hymn comes as a complementary help. The wise preacher does not use Gospel hymns in his formal, worshipful services, but finds them indispensable in popular evening services, where not awe and solemnity but spirit and aggressiveness, and appeal to the person of average or less culture, are needed. His prayer meeting and other subordinate meetings of groups need the individual feeling and intimacy with religious things supplied by the Gospel hymns.

In evangelistic meetings a few of the standards can express the high peaks of interest, but the Gospel songs lead up to those heights. The great revivals of the nineteenth and of the early decades of this century were distinctly characterized by the use of Gospel songs, many of them not even of the higher type.

_Unfairness in Comparisons Made._

While the worst specimens of Gospel hymns have usually been selected as the basis of attack, the very best of the standard hymns have been held up as the criterion of value; the utter unfairness of such comparison is evident enough. Gospel hymns should be judged by their best specimens when compared with standard hymns.

The inequity of such a comparison is made more flagrant by the fact that these standard hymns, only hundreds in number, which are justly appreciated and lauded, are the survivors of multiplied tens of thousands that were written through the generations. Of the more than seven hundred written by Isaac Watts, twenty-three appear in the recent _Presbyterian Hymnal_. Of the nearly seven thousand hymns of Charles Wesley, the new _Methodist Hymnal_, naturally biased in judgment by tradition, uses only fifty-five, while the _New Presbyterian Hymnal_ finds space for only eighteen. This tremendous mortality is not necessarily due to offensive weakness and faults, for hundreds served their day and generation most acceptably and well. In like manner the older Gospel hymns, which have had their day of usefulness are fading out of these collections, making way for new ones that express the feelings of the present generation more intimately. This is as it should be.

But when the detractor of current Gospel hymns finds some delectable bit of vulgarity or of literary clumsiness or of grammatical solecism, let him remember that Watts published lines like these:

“Tame heifers here their thirst allay And for the stream wild asses bray.”

“I’ll purge my family around And make the wicked flee”;

and that John Wesley allowed his brother to publish

“Idle men and boys are found Standing on the devil’s ground; He will give them work to do, He will pay their wages too.”

Remember also that William Cowper, the poet acclaimed by literary critics as the father of a new movement in poetical writing, issued such a stanza as this:

“Not such as hypocrites suppose Who with a graceless heart Taste not of Thee, but drink a dose Prepared by Satan’s art.”

If the great poets and hymn writers of that age wrote such lines, what must have been the character of the verses of the obscure scribblers and poetasters of their day!

Not only do the best of the standard hymns alone survive, but those survivors have been rewritten and amended by a half-century of editors and hymn revisers, their revisions being re-revised by succeeding critics, as we have seen in a previous chapter. Every line and phrase has been submitted again and again to the microscope of the literary critic, until we have a body of hymns established in every detail by the consensus of the best literary minds of the last century. This is no derogation of our accepted hymns, but a great advantage to them; but it must not be overlooked in making a fair comparison.

_Criteria for Evaluation._

Much of the criticism of the Gospel hymn is due to excessive emphasis on the literary and poetical aspects of the verses to which objection is made. But we have already insisted on the fact that these are not the final criteria of the value of hymns, although they are important factors not to be overlooked.

Speaking of a hymnal containing material of inferior literary quality, Dr. Austin Phelps, of Andover Seminary, who shared with his colleague in the faculty of that institution the honor of being the fathers of American hymnology, wisely remarks: “It is a shallow judgment either to approve or to condemn such a work in the spirit of a connoisseur in aesthetics. The very conditions of excellence in a body of popular psalmody must extend its limits out of the range of a purely Attic taste.”

The approval or rejection of a hymn, or of a body of hymns, is not a question of personal taste or liking, nor even of personal religious reactions, but a question of the needs of the people to be stimulated and helped, and the results of interest and spiritual impression secured among them by the hymns under consideration.

_Gospel Hymns and the Unsaved._

There is a distressing lack of understanding both of the real function of the hymn and of the needs of the body of Christians as a whole, and even a greater ignorance of the psychology of reaching the unsaved. If the body of our standard hymns fails to develop needed interest among a large element in our churches, how much less will it appeal to these outside the fold! If these intellectually and culturally less privileged masses in and out of the Church are to follow the Apostolic example and “sing with the understanding,” the songs must lie within the range of their understanding. Professor A. S. Hoyt, D.D., of Auburn Theological Seminary, sums up the situation very wisely: “A few of the modern revival hymns make quick appeal to the modern heart, are easily sung, and may be teachers of religious life. The majority of them are shallow in thought and without musical worth. But in all matters of education we must help men as we find them and patiently lift them to better things.”

_Gospel Hymns and the Demands of Worship._

Perhaps the most misleading assumption among those who reject the Gospel hymn is that the chief use of hymns is in worship. They will sing didactic hymns, hortative hymns, inspirational hymns, addressed solely to human ears and hearts in the stated church service and then cast out the Gospel hymn because it is not fitted for solemn worship. That attitude conceives the Divine Being as a literary connoisseur, or as a music critic who applies conventional academic criteria in accepting what his people bring him. Their slogan is that we must bring to God only our best, insisting that anything but our best is an insult to him, forgetting that we do not bring the hymn, but the spiritual results of the hymn in devotion and love and consecration, and that hymn which produces these in the given congregation is the best.

Moreover, the approach to God is not the sole function of effective hymns; it may instead be the approach to men. The best hymn in that department is the one that succeeds most fully in affecting the souls to be influenced. There, not the abstract values of the hymn count, but its psychological adaptation to the actual mental, moral, and spiritual condition of the minds and hearts to be helped, not overlooking even the physical factors essential to religious results.

Furthermore, there are lines of church activity which need the religious atmosphere and suggestiveness but are concerned with social and administrative work, with the temporalities of church life, for which many of these Gospel hymns are eminently fitted. There are campaigns, drives, and movements that need musical help such as many of the less subjectively pious Gospel hymns can give.

_Gospel Hymns in the Preparatory Service._

There are large and miscellaneous church gatherings where there is no preparation of mind to sing worthily and deeply religious hymns, and where it would be a sacrilege to ask the miscellaneous crowd to take upon their lips such a hymn as “O Love that wilt not let me go” or “Oh, worship the King, all-glorious above.” Better to sing the semi-religious and shallow “Brighten the corner where you are” until the crowd has been psychically organized.

_Gospel Hymns in the Laboratory._

When we come to organized campaigns to persuade unconverted persons, old and young, to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, the need of these informal, stimulating, emotional folk songs becomes immediately apparent. Awe, impressiveness, spiritual elevation of mind, such as are supposed to be produced by the standard hymns, are not the stimuli that create aggressiveness of mind among Christian workers, nor are they calculated to awaken a response among the unspiritual. It is proved as surely by actual laboratory experiment that Gospel songs produce the conditions needed for securing a religious revival as that hydrochloric acid and water poured over zinc clippings will produce hydrogen.

Lord Shaftesbury, the great English philanthropist and Christian worker, speaking in Ireland in the interest of evangelistic work there, said: “Therefore go on circulating the Scriptures. I should have been glad to have had also the circulation of some well-known hymns, because I have seen the effect produced by those of Moody and Sankey. If they would only return to this country, they would be astonished at seeing the influence exerted by those hymns which they sing.”

It is worthy of incidental note that the most of those to whom the Gospel hymn is anathema are not much in sympathy with any evangelistic methods; nay more, they seem to shrink from popular manifestations of religious life. They have sharpened the edge of their religious refinement until it will no longer cut.

_The Advantages of Gospel Hymns._

These Gospel hymns have several distinct advantages that should not be overlooked. They are simple, easily understood by everybody, quickly appropriated as his own expression by the most limited in education or culture. They are quite emotional, expressing feeling and creating it. They are spontaneous and free, with no labored subtlety or recondite allusion. They are usually more or less rhythmical and stimulating, physically as well as mentally. They are adaptable to various situations and states of feeling. Even more than standard hymns they express personal religious experiences, and are more direct in their hortative method. The chorus, if intelligently written, emphasizes the fundamental idea of the hymn in an unescapable way. As a tool for aggressive effort it has no substitute, and but one rival—earnest and spirit-filled preaching.

_Discrimination in the Use of Gospel Songs._

It should be said, however, that the inventory of its values mentioned above applies to only a comparatively small part of the Gospel songs offered to the public, just as the accepted standard hymns are a very small part of the formal hymns from which they have been gleaned. Usually its faults are aridity, vapidity, and shallowness. Yet in all these shortcomings, specimens of equal weakness and futility can be found in verses by accepted hymn writers.

The better Gospel songs are after all the sincere expression of a certain stage of culture of mind and soul. That stage may not be high nor admirable, but it must be allowed its spontaneous expression.

Every generation has had its own ephemeral hymnody and will continue to have it in spite of all the scolding critics. When our religious people stop writing and singing new songs and are satisfied to sing over and over again the songs of preceding ages, it will prove that the process of ossification has set in and that vital force is passing away. Better that literary unskillfulness and mediocre musical talent shall continue to write, better to have ephemeral, shallow, and unsatisfying songs written by the thousands, than that the impulse to express spontaneously the vital godliness within should be entirely lost.

THE SINGING CHURCH