THE LIVING AGE. No. 940.— 7 June, 1862 CONTENTS. 1. Hymnology, QuarterlyJReview, 2. Sister Anna's Probation. Chaps. 3 and 4, . 3. Ten Days in Athens, .... 4. Commander Boggs and The Varuna, 5. A Model Bishop, 6. Biographies of Good Women, 7. The Cradle of Fine Writing, . 8. The People are The Power, .... Quarterly Review, 451 Once a Week, 472 Spectator, 483 Official, Examiner, 487 488 Spectator, 490 Saturday Review, 492 Transcript, 495 I Poetry. — The Dars when we wore Straps, 450. Our Defenders, 450. Mourner a-la- Mode, 486. No Hope or Help in hard Man, 486. The Varuna, 486. Valley of Mud, 491. Gravestone, 491. Melancholy, 491. The Drum, 496. Opening of the Interna- tional Exhibition, 496*. Ode to Melancholy, 496. Short Articles.— The Royal Sign Manual, 482. Tunnel through Mont Cenis, 482. Mr. Dickens' Readings, 482. Tennyson's Poems, 491. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON For ?ix Dollars a year, in a^ance, remitted directly to the Publisher*, the Livtno Agk will be punctually for- warded fret o/ postage. Complete seta of the First Series, in thirty-fix yo lma e a , and of the Second Srrie*. in twontv volume*, hand- somely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal nr -:.t. are for sale at two dollars a volume. Ant tOUna nay be had Separately, at two dollar*, hound, or a dollar arxl a half in number*. Ant ncmbee may be had for 13 rent? ; anl it la well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any Drokeu volumes they may have, aud thus greatly enhance their value. IN THE DAYS WHEN WE WORE STRAPS, 450 THE DAYS WHEN WE WORE STRAPS. In the days when we wore straps, Melbourne ruled the commonweal, Taking — we were then young chaps — Turns with Wellington and Peel ; Most of all our rising men Puling in their nurses' laps : Some were not in being then, In the days when we wore straps. Railways were a wonder new, In those days, beneath the sun ; Old stage-coaches, one or two, Did continue still to run. Telegraphic wires were not ; Several days had to elapse Ere our foreign news we got, In the days when we wore straps. Indian-rubber then was dear, Gutta-percha not yet known ; No rare thing was good strong beer, Brewed with malt and hops alone ; Beer of which the likeness flows From but few existing taps ; None did bitter ale compose In the days when we wore straps. Science had not yet to bear Brought the Sun's pictorial rays ; Photographs not any were Published in those other days. Every Christian's chin was shorn. Saving only Muntz, perhaps, Beards by none but Jews were worn In the days when we wore straps. Sides of ladies, robe and skirt Moderate of dimensions, clad, Filled no doorway, swept no dirt ; Petticoats had not gone mad. Hideous hoops revived we've seen, Hoops, to hinder their collapse ! Folly wore no Crinoline In the days when we wore straps. Then Retrenchment was the word ; Estimates afforded room For the censures, duly heard, Of unflinching Joseph Hume. Fleets and troops we durst reduce, In our armor leaving gaps ; Ironsides were not in use In the days when we wore straps. Peace, if Plenty did not reign, Britain's isles with safety blest ; Ireland only, and insane Chartists, troubled England's rest. Tranquil were the United States ; France to change her neighbors' maps Sought not at those distant dates, In the days when wo wore straps. Then, as we were wont to boast, Was the schoolmaster abroad, Whipping every witch and ghost Into nothing with his rod. Spirits, under tables heard, Through a " Medium," giving raps, Would have been thought too absurd In the days when we wore straps. Though fine things of every kind Were not, as at present, cheap, Folks of a contented mind Moderate means would better keep ; What they did not throw away, They could save, against mishaps ; With no Income-Tax to pay In the days when we wore straps. — Punch. OUR DEFENDERS. The following poem of Thomas Buchanan Read, was written for the Americans of Rome, and was first read to them in the ruins of Titus' Baths, as they were gathered to celebrate last Fourth of July. Our flag on the land, and our flag on the ocean, An Angel of Peace wheresoever it goes, — Nobly sustained by Columbia's devotion, The Angel of Death it shall be to our foes. True to our native sky, Still shall our eagle fly, Casting his sentinel glances afar — Though bearing the olive branch, Still in his talons standi, Grasping the bolts of the thunders of War ! Hark to the sound, there's a foe on our border, A foe striding on to the gulf of his doom ; Free men are rising, and marching in order, Leaving the plow and anvil and loom ! Rust dims the harvest sheen Of scythe and of sickle keen. The axe sleeps in peace by the tree it would mar, Veteran and youth are out, Swelling the battle shout, Grasping the bolts of the thunders of War ! Our brave mountain eagles swoop from their eyrie, Our lithe panthers leap from forest and plain, Out of the West flash the flames of the prairie, Out of the East roll the waves of tho main ! Down from their Northern shores, Loud as Niagara pours, They march and their tread wakes the earth with its jar, Under the Stripes and Stars, Each with the soul of Mars, Grasping tho bolts of tho thunders of War ! Spite of the sword or assassin's stiletto, While throbs a heart in tho breast of tho brave, The oak of the North or the Southern palmetto Shall shelter no foe except in his grave ! While tho (Jnll billow breaks, Echoing the Northern lakes, And ocean replies unto ocean afar, Yield wo no inch of land, While there's a patriot hand Grasping the bolts of the thunders of War ! — Pittsburg Chronicle. 1 HYMNOLOGY. From The Quarterly Review. merits in tha "history of our Church, -an a History ot our uuurcn, -angr has left scarcely one 'stgne .upturned \j?Q6ntT0- versy in its rl^HS^ ^ispfpHnf , j"dt ritual ; 1. Hymns and Hymn-books : a Letter, etc. By William John Blew. 1858. 2. The Voice of Christian Life in Song : or while every irregularity has been called in Hymns and Hymn- Writers of many Lands and Ages. London, 1858. 3. Select Metrical Hymns and Homilies of Ephraem Syrus: translated from the Original Syriac. By the Rev. Henry Burgess, Ph.D. ' London, 1858. 4. Thesaurus Hymnologicus, sive Llymno- i oni Canticorum, Scquentiarum circa annum M D usitatarum collectio am- plissima. H. A. Daniel, Ph.D. Lipsise, 1850-1856. 5. Hymni Latini, Medii JEvi. Franc. Jos. Mone. Friburgi Brisgovia?, 1853. 6. Hymni Ecclesice e Breviariis quibusdam Missalibus Gallicanis, Germanis, His- panis, Lusitanis, desumpti. J. M. Xeale. Oxford, 1851. 7. Hymnale secundumusum insignis ac prce- clarce Ecclesice Sarisburiensis ; acce- dunt Hy. Led. Eboracensis et Hereford. Oxford, 1851. 8. Sacred Latin Poetry. By Richard Chen- evix Trench, M.A. 1849. 9. Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences. Trans- lated from the Latin. By Rev. J. M. Xeale. London, 1851. 10. Hymns of the Eastern Church. Trans- lated from the Greek. Bv the Rev. J. M. Neale, D.D. London,' 1862. 11. Lyra Germanica : Hymns, etc. Trans- lated from the German by Catherine Winkworth. London, 1859. Wesleyan Hymnology. By W. P. Bur- gess, Weslevan Minister. London, 1846. A Selection of Psalms and Hymns for the Public Service of the Church. By the Rev. Charles Kemble. 1855. 14. The Church Psalter and Hymn-book. VI 13 question, and every order more or 1 forced, hymns have been left to run Mild. Their really great importance has been lost sight of amidst a clash of contention over matters of more engrossing interest. But Hymnology itself has not stood .still the while ; as indeed appears by the long array of works at the head of this paper, and a number of others bearing upon the various branches of the subject there represented, as well as by the now familiar use of this very word " Hymnology," for which a writer of thirty years ago felt constrained to apolo- gize. In fact, not only lias the study of hymns become a recognized subject of liter- ary research, but the hymns actually com- posed far exceed in number those of any equal period, except that which immediately followed the great Wesleyan movement just a century before. In the days of William of Orange and his immediate successors the religious energies of the people had been laid to sleep under the so-called orthodoxy of those in high places ; and when they were awakened by the cry of the Independent Calvinists and early Methodists, they found no channel for their devotions but the Prayer-book, which many of their leaders abhorred as a " form," and Tate and Brady's New Version, which they felt to be inadequate to satisfy the crav- ings of zealous religionists. The leaders could preach and could pray, but the peo- ple's demand was for something to sing ; so By the Rev. W. Mercer, and John many hymns, so many tunes, stirring, ele- Goss, Esq. 1858 15. Hymns Ancient and Modern, for use in the Services of the Church. London, 1860. vating, experimental. The supply was not slack : Isaac Watts, the schoolmaster's son at Southampton, taunted, it is said, by his father for his fastidious objections to the A GENERAL impression seems to prevail Xcw Version ( thei1 reall >' new), vindicated himself by writing off with great rapidity his own metrical Psalms and original Hymns. The example once set, and the demand increasing with the spread of the revival under the Wesleys, a deluge of hymns was poured out on the land. Charles that the Psalmody of our Church requires amendment and regulation." * With these words opened an article on our present sub- ject more than thirty years ago. The inter- val has been a time of unusual progress ; yet the observation might be repeated to- day with as much truth as ever. For while Wesle >' alone contributed six hundred ; Dr. the last quarter of a centurv has witnessed Doddridge, the two Battyes, Cennick, Hart, one of the most remarkable religious move- Steele » Toplady, and others, produced each LlglOUS * Quarterly Beview, July, 1828. a separate volume of their own ; and a mul- titude of less prolific writers swell the cho- 452 HYMNOLOGY, tus up to the early part of the present cen- place, the editor misapprehended the prin- tury. The very circumstance of Methodists hav- ing adopted hymns kept the Churchmen of those days more strictly to metrical psalms, and it was long before they raised their courage to throw overboard " Tate and Brady," with all the respectable Church-and- State associations attached to them, and ventured to spoil the Egyptians by using hymns from Bethesda. But by degrees the Wcsleyan and other like hymns gained a more acknowledged entrance into the Church, and indicated the possibility of some improve- 1 ment upon the metrical psalms. This was a great step, and for some years Church people were satisfied ; but such a feeling could not last ; for only so long as Church- men were content to ignore the order and rationale of their own Prayer-book could they be content to use a collection of hymns from which, more or less intentionally, all that harmonized with the spirit and arrange- ment of our services had been excluded. The Nonconformists, for the most part, had written the hymns to supplant the Prayer-book ; the Churchman attempted with the same hymns to illustrate it ; and the result was, that the more he came to understand and appreciate the latter, the more hopeless he found it to adhere to the former. But during the first quarter of the present century hymns of a character rather better suited to his purpose began to be written, as those by James Montgomery and Bishop Heber, whose hymns were the means of calling our attention to the subject at the time. But in both of them poetry too fre- quently was aimed at to the loss of simplic- ity ; and the spirit of the Prayer-book was not quite caught by either the layman or the bishop. Such or nearly such were the English hymns which presented themselves to the collector when Mr. Hall made the first dis- tinct attempt, under the auspices of the late Bishop of London, to compile a Church Hymn-book. His idea was that the hymns already in use might be arranged to accord with the weekly services of the Church, and, imperfect as his book was, an immense sale has proved that it went some way towards satisfying an acknowledged want. But it tati imperfect in two respects. In the first ciple of our weekly services : instead of seek- ing the leading point around which the Les- sons, Epistle, Gospel, and Collect of each Sunday and Holiday are grouped, and which they combine to enforce, and following out the narrative course of the Christian year as a whole, he merely looked out the contents of each Lesson, Epistle, and Gospel, inde- pendently one of another, or some striking text in each, and set against it the hymn most nearly touching upon it. This was his mistake, the other was his misfortune. The Methodist hymns, which formed the staple of his materials, and most of the modern hymns, were not written for our services, and it could hardly be expected that they would fall in with them very well. The la- bor and ingenuity by which Mr. Hall dis- covered any special connection between the hymns and the services must have been very great ; to us to discover it now, when pointed out, requires not a little pains. Seeing the blemishes of this first experi- ment, and the vain attempts at improvement which followed it, the venerable Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, following up a suggestion in our former article, under- took the preparation of a Hymn-book. The error in principle, to which we have alluded, was here avoided ; but practically, from hav- ing few new sources to draw from, the im- provement is less marked than could be wished, and the barbarous curtailing of good hymns (for want;, we suppose, of courage to break boldly enough through the old Pro- crustean system of " three verses and the 1 Gloria Patri,' " which the prolixity and pointlessness of Tate and Brady had entailed upon us) is very disappointing. However large the circulation of these two books, they left many persons unsatisfied. What the Society had failed to do well was taken up by numberless individuals, some to do better, many worse ; and there cannot be less than two hundred hymnals now in use, all pub- lished within the last thirty years. So far up to the present time. Most hap- pily and most wisely, the subject has been left hitherto to individuals to work out. The field has been left open, and an induce- ment thereby offered to all to work freely and do their best. We have thus obtained a large number of hymns of an improved tone, and showing a more intimate acquaint- ance with the subject generally. A very I slight comparison of what we have and what we know now with the resources and knowl- edge of thirty years ago will satisfy us that, in spite of all the disadvantages of the pres- ent system, much good has come of it. If it has left much to be done — perhaps much to be undone — yet it has done not a little al- ready ; as may be seen by the great improve- ment manifested in the interesting collection of " Hymns Ancient and Modern " which stands last upon our list. Numberless hymns have been thus elicited, original and translated, which would never have seen the light under other circumstances ; they have been sifted through the various tastes of compilers, and tested farther by being sub- mitted to popular use. Some have fully es- tablished their popularity, some have been as clearly rejected. But a multiplicity of collections quite overwhelming — consequent confusion and corruption of hymns — a breach of uniformity more vexatious now than ever, because of the easy intercourse between dif- ferent localities — charges of heterodoxy — appeals to the bishops — suppression of hymns — platform tirades and newspaper con- troversies — all together cry aloud for some " amendment and regulation." Complaints against many of the existing Hymn-books are but too well founded. We should rather eschew the responsibility of disturbing the confidence of congregations by pointing out, without being able to rem- edy, the graver errors of doctrine in the books put into their hands ; but offences most glaring against taste, reverence, con- sistency, and even grammar, abound to an incredible extent. In the first place, it is scarcely too much to say that most compil- ers have started without any clear conception of what is a hymn. It is an error as old as the days of St. Augustine, who has laid down a definition of a hymn which, if ap- plied to many of our books, would leave be- hind a very small residuum. A hymn, he tells us, must be " praise — the praise of God — and this in the form of song." That hymns should be addressed to God one would not expect to find doubted ; yet practically this rule has been set aside, not only by those whose doctrine and custom sanction invocations of saints, but by others who have been led to do so bv mere love of HYMNOLOGY. 453 poetry. Bishop Heber frequently fell into this snare, as in his " Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid ; Star of the East the horizon adorning, Guide where our Infant Redeemer is laid." How surprising it is that Pope's cele- brated apostrophe to his soul, " Vital spark of heavenly flame ! " etc. and Toplady's, " Deathless Principle ! arise ! " etc. should ever be admitted as appropriate to the worship of God, grand though they be as poetry. And this brings us to the third point in the definition ; namely, that a hymn must be in the form of song ; for song is not poetry. Addison's well-known paraphrase " The spacious firmament on high, "With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their Great Original proclaim," etc., etc. if it is poetry, is certainly not song, yet has been brought by old associations into many Hymn-books. Happy would it be both for writer and reader if these were the only offences against which we have to protest. It is a painful thing to speak reproachfully of labors of love, when they are spoilt and tend to spoil by errors of taste and judgment ; yet the hidden wound is the most dangerous, and to be cured must be uncovered ; and our pro- posed amendment of hymns ought not to be marred by passing over the faults of well- intentioned but ill-judging compilers. The following breaches of good taste and reverence must be truly lamentable in their effects on the undisciplined mind, and as truly repulsive to persons of education : — "The world, with Sin and Satan, In vain our march opposes ; By thee we shall break through them all, And sing the song of i\ fasts." My God, till I received thy stroke. J low like a beast icas I ! " " Lord, break these bars that thus confine, The>c chains that ;jad me 10 ; Say to thai ugly jailer, Sin, ' Loose him and let him go.' " And these, let it be observed, are from no obsolete collections, but from hymnals ic 454 use in churches, and advertised within the last twelvemonth. Another common fault of hymnals of a certain class is one which is inconsistent in Englishmen, whose national boast has ever been manliness, and inexcusable in Church- men possessed of a Bible and Prayer-book, the language and tone of which are une- qualled in noble simplicity. To deny a place to healthy sentiment, would be to re- ject a gift of the Almighty ; but surely the following puerilities and prettyisms are un- bearable : — " The Infancy of Jesus. " Dear little One ! how sweet thou art ! Thine eyes how bright they shine ! So bright they almost seem to speak When Mary's look meets thine ! " Jesns ! dear Babe ; those tiny hands That play with Mary's hair The weight of all the mighty worlds This very moment bear." " The Trice Shepherd. '* I was wandering and weary When my Saviour came unto me; For the ways of sin grew dreary, And the world had ceased to woo me; And I thought I heard him say, A^ he came along the way, silly souls, come near mc ! My sheep should never fear me ! I am the Shepherd True. ***** He took me on his shoulder, And tenderly he kissed mc ; And hade my love he holder, And said how he had missed me. And I thought," etc., etc. The following words put into the mouth of the Saviour, yet to be rehearsed by the people, are from a hymn on the text, " She is not dead, but slecpeth : " — " ' Refreshed hv still waters, in green pastures fed, The day is gone by ; 1 am making thy bed.' " In keeping with these, but not with a duly reverent approach to God, are such epithets profusely applied to Christ as " sweet" and " dear," which no man would use in suppli- cation to an equal of like nature with him- self; and the free use of the word Jehovah, " the incommunicable name," for which the Hebrews and ;'ll Christian translators after them ever substituted " Lord." The many lesser offences in English hymns must have often tried the patience, and disturbed the devotion, of worshippers; but their name is HYMNOLOGY. for sale Legion, and they set at defiance every rule in turn of grammar, rhyme, metre, and good sense. Here are two short extracts, the would-be pathos of which is most pro- voking : — " Nay, I cannot let thee go Till a blessing thou bestow ; Do not turn away thy face, Mine's an urgent pressing case." — Neicton. " Behold a stranger at the door ! He gently knocks ; has knocked before ; Has waited long ; is waiting still : You use no other friend so ill." The manifest inconsistency of setting a congregation to sing hymns of a purely and personally experimental character has been most strangely overlooked. The earlier hymn-books teem with examples of this public self-anatomy, e.g. : — " What sinners value, I resign." " How long the time since Christ began To call in vain on me ! Deaf to his warning voice I ran Through paths of vanity." Or Newton's : — " 'Tis a point I long to know ; Oft it causes anxious thought ; Do I love the Lord or no ? Am I his, or am I not ? " Can this be a legacy left us by the high- pew system, wdien men, curtained in oak and red baize, may have thought they came to church for their private orisons ? We leave to divines the errors of doctrine which have crept in unawares from all sides with the subtle flow of the metre, — the pill of heresy silvered with rhyme. It is a-sad truth, that every one who was dissatisfied with the obvious teaching of the Prayer-book and Ar- ticles has sought a vent for his opinions in a hymn-book. The Calvinist has Calviuized, and the sympathizer with Home has Roman- ized, the services of his Church by his hymns; and although good theologians would no more think of grounding an argu- ment on a hymn than on an impassioned sermon, yet the unwary may easily imbibe false notions from either. We leave to the working parish-priest the duty of guarding against fine writing to the detriment of that plainness of speech so essential to the poor, yet so unaccounta- bly forgotten by those would-be specially popular writers the Methodists, who think HYMNOLOGY. 455 nothing of using " ineffable," " omnipo- tent," " beauteous," " timorous," and the like, instead of their common synonyms, and indulge freely in such stilted phrases as " Infinite grace ! Almighty charms ! Stand in amaze, ye rolling skies," etc. and often, in consequence, come down sud- denly to a bathos all the worse by contrast, " Shout, O earth, in rapturous song, Let your strains be sweet and strong." " At siirn of him yon Seraphs bright Exalting clap their wings." We leave to the church musician the innumerable cases of false accentuation, merely stating from experience that many- lines convey a different sense, when accented musically, from that which the author, who only read his lines, intended ; many are left with no sense at all. It will be a pleasure to us and the reader to pass from this fault-finding, to discover, if possible, the causes on one side, and the remedy on the other. The primary cause we take to be this : We have started to pro- vide hymns without what military men would call " a basis of operations ; " and this not because we have it not, but because we have overlooked it. We have compiled hymnals ad nauseam upon all sorts of plans, while we had in our hands a framework ask- ing to be furnished, and offering a principle for our guidance in which all agree. We went on as if a hymn-book was to be an in- dependent service-book, instead of being a complement to the Prayer-book ; and thus it happens that our hymns, in their tone, their style, their character, and their spirit, jar sadly with our prayers and lessons, whereas they ought to form with them an integral part of one well-harmonized whole. Take, for example, a hymn — one in itself unobjectionable — from the Hymn-book of the Christian Knowledge Society. Let us suppose ourselves in one of our old parish churches, the very type of liturgical wor- ship, consistency, reverence, and solemnity, on the Sunday after Ascension, where the Morning Prayer, Litany, and Communion Service are said, it may be chorally or not, so it be done in the spirit of our Church's worship. All is in keeping until after the third collect, when Hymn 60 is given out ; instantly we must shake off the sense of sup- 1 plication with which we joined in the prayers, and make ready for " Salvation ! Oh, the joyful sound ! 'Tis pleasure to our ears, Asovciviirn halm for every wound, A cordial for our fears." * # * * * " Salvation ! Let the echo fly The spacious earth around ! While all the armies of the sky Conspire to raise the sound." And then, with equal promptitude, we must subside from this apostrophe (all well in its place) into a state of mind fitted for the j solemn invocations of the Litany. Cases of this kind are common enough, if not quite so bad ; and we leave it to the compilers who provide, and the clergy who select, the hymns, to decide who is most to blame. We would earnestly urge on both that every hymn to be telling must be well placed ; that '■ it must bear a relation, not only to the whole service of the day, but to that particular part which precedes or follows it. It may seem to some that ail these restric- , tions would result in the production of a book of which it might be said (as one com- piler complacently says of his own) that any recommendations it may possess are chiefly negative (!) ; that so much concession to the prejudices of the many users would elimi- nate all that is striking and forcible. It may be asked in reply, Is this the case with our Prayer-book ? Yet was not that sub- jected to the most rigorous revision, and does it offend in any one of the above points ? This, however, admits of no doubt, that there is much which is as it ought not to be in our present hymn-books ; and the feeling is beginning to gain ground, that, if we go much longer without change for the better, we shall grow worse. A remedy has already been proposed, and it is this which has given rise to these observations. A motion was brought before the Convocation of Canter- bury in the early part of last year by the Archdeacon of Coventry (and carried in the lower house, though afterwards thrown out by the bishops) urging the formation of a Committee who should prepare the draft of a hymn-book with select paraphrases of the of 1' 1ms, and with the Canticles pointed for chanting, "which, if approved by Convocation, may be submitted to Her 456 HYMNOLOGY Majesty, with an humble prayer that she •would authorize its use in such congrega- tions as may be disposed to accept it." * Passing over all minor questions as to the source and application of authority, we take the motion as broadly suggesting the per- missive, but not enforced, use of a hymn- book bearing the " imprimatur " of the Church of England. We are at a loss to discover whether this is meant to withdraw de facto the present assumed liberty of using others, and to throw back all who are not " disposed to accept " this upon the Old and Xcw Versions, which hitherto alone rejoice in a royal license. There is no doubt at first sight something like hardship in such a use of the high hand of authority — such an arbitrary " Overthrow, Crushing and pounding to dust the crowd be- low ; " not only making of their books " But a mashed heap, a hotchpotch of the slain ; " but freely selecting, revising, and re-arrang- ing the scattered materials to construct an- other, and setting at naught all respect for their sole proprietorship in their own labors. Their zeal, however, in the good cause, shown in their past exertions, may fairly be taken as an earnest of their public spirit, and a ground for supposing them ready to adopt the sentiment of Whitgift's last words, prefixed by Bishop Mant to his own labors in this cause — " Pro Ecclesia Dei, pro Ec- clesia Dei." But there are other objections which have been raised to any authoritative interference in this matter ; and there are good old prejudices, too, in favor of Tate and Brady, or the accustomed Hymn-book, which must be removed by some outweighing rea- sons in favor of the proposed step. Habit is second nature ; and we have been so long left to ourselves, that what Mr. Blew calls " the patent defect of an authorized hymn- book " is not patent to the generality of peo- ple. Yet if purity of doctrine is important; if the motto of our Church, " that we all speak (he same things" is to be retained ; if the religious tone of the people is to be con- sidered, a very cursory glance at existing collections will satisfy us that some " regu- lation " is greatly needed. And it would be * The same proposition has since been sub- mitted to the Convocation of York. but consistent that we, who have a pre- scribed book of prayers, should also have some restriction upon our hymns. Again : the Prayer-book is itself imperfect without its complement of hymns or anthems ; for, to pass by the plain recognition of such sing- ing in the Rubric, we may fairly test the perfection of anything by a comparison with its professed model, especially when to that model it stands in the relation of an off- spring. Now it is well known that the pre- Reformation Prayer-books, after the pattern of which ours was framed, had their regular arrangement of metrical hymns throughout. And it was by no means the intention of the Reformers to deprive us of these, at once the most popular and least corrupt parts of the old services. Cranmer himself tried his hand upon the " Salve festa dies," but gave it up in despair, writing to the king, " that, as his English verses wanted the grace and faculty which he could wish they had," he craved of " his majesty that he would cause some other to do them in more pleasant English and verse." It would further be difficult to discover a reason for our differing in this point from almost every national Church. Eastern and Western, Greek and Russian, Roman and Reformed, are richly provided by the constituted authorities, and why not the Anglican ? One of our own off- shoots, the Church in America, put forth her selection seventy years ago, and that in Scotland recently. To those who think it an insuperable evil to shut out forever, or at least for a long time, the inspirations of a future Ken, a Cowper, a Wesley, or a Keble, it may be answered that the same argument would have prevented the fixing of all prayers ; and that hymns of real merit here- after composed may be at some future time adopted by competent authority. To those again among the clergy who would say, with the late Mr. Newland, " If I am not to be trusted in the selection of hymns, neither am I to be trusted in composing sermons," we should say that not only does this also prove too much, for it is equally applicable to prayers ; but there is a great difference between that which is spoken to the people as the expression of the preacher's thoughts, and that which is put into the mouths of the congregation to be rehearsed as the words of the Church in worship of which they are a part. HYMNOLOGY. 457 and Germany, in search of such apparently homely things as hymns. 1. The Hebrew hymns lay first claim to our notice, not only by right of their su- preme antiquity, but as being enshrined in Bu\ assuming this question settled in the affirmative, and a committee of divines, poets, musicians, and ritualists appointed to this woik, they have a task before them that no one can estimate until he has sounded the depth and width of the subject himself. : the Sacred Volume. They fall naturally into Hymns hive a history, a philosophy, and a literature of their own. Hymnology has its roots in the beginnings of history, its three classes : 1. The occasional pieces, scat- tered up and down the books of the Old Testament ; 2. The authorized collection of branches are co-extensive with Christen- the Jews themselves, known as the Psalms dom, and it requires a special study which has never yet been bestowed upon it. It is of David, gathered together, probably out of a vast number, of which the rest, being a subject of no little importance to the pur- rejected as uninspired, have been lost ; and ity and — may we add? — the popularity of religion. Yet it is far from being a merely popular, transient, and superficial matter : the well-known saying of the politician, " Let me make a people's ballads, and let who will make their laws," has its counter- part in religion ; for all leaders of religious movements, from Arius to Wesley, have borne witness to the fact that hymns are more powerful in fixing religious dogmas, and guiding religious feeling, in the minds 3. The hymns of the New Testament, — the Magnificat, the Nunc dimittis, and the Bene- dictus. Of the first class Dr. Neale gives a cata- logue in his " Commentary " (Diss. I.) of more than seventy, as they are found ar- ranged in the Mozarabic Breviary to be used as Canticles. The best known are the two Songs of Moses (Exodus 15 : 1-19 ; Deut. 32: 1-12), the Song of Deborah (Judges, 5), of Balaam (Numbers 23), of of the people than any other mode of teach- Hannah (1 Samuel 2 : 1-10), and of Job ing. What is powerful for good may be, and often has been, more powerful for ill; and it is not always that which is positively evil, but frequently that which is negatively and poorly good, that works most harm. It (19: 25-27). With the exception of the last, which is sung by the priest in our Burial Service, the Church of England has not adopted any of these ; and very few are sufficiently general in their allusions to be is well then that we should keep in mind fitted, without a somewhat strained inter- the necessity of a more extended view of hymnology in those who undertake the pro- pretation, to our times and circumstances. Some one or two, however, have been suc- posed task than has yet been generally taken cessfully rendered in English metre, as, for of it. instance, Isaiah's Hymn (52 : 7, 8), by Dr. A considerable number of the hymns al- j Watts, in his ready in use in the English language owe their origin, more or less directly, in the various degrees of " translation," " para- " How beauteous are their feet Who stand on Zion's Hill ! " As regards the Psalms and New Testa- phrase," and " imitation," to the inspirations ' ment Hymns, we are saved further trouble ; of other ages and other lands ; but hitherto we have gone only as chance gleaners, and our gatherings have been scanty, and par- tially chosen ; it is time we went as a Church and a nation, and boldly laid claim to our right, as members of the great brotherhood, to a full participation in the common store. for our Church has already appropriated and recast in our own tongue the whole of these glorious outpourings of the prophet-poets of the old dispensation, and, so to say, put the mark of Christianity upon them by the addition of the " Gloria Patri Filio," etc., at the end of each : the Psalter is recited It will, therefore, be worth while to take a throughout by us every month, and the Can- rapid general survey of the hymnology of tides daily in turn. With this, then, we foreign churches; and we hope our readers should have omitted further notice of Jewish will not be startled when they are told that hymnology ; but that we fancy we hear some they are to be carried off to Jerusalem and of our readers ask, perhaps with some indig- Antioch, and brought home gradually by '■ nation, whether we have forgotten the met- Corinth and Milan, through France, Spain, rical versions of the Psalms. We have not 458 HYMNOLOGY, forgotten them — we never shall: we know that every notion of metrical singing in England was for two centuries founded upon and limited by " Sternhold and Hopkins," or " Tate and Brady ; " but surely, the days of the " versions " are numbered. Have we not already in our most beautiful Prayer- book translation all the sublimity, poetry, devotional pathos, and innate music of the Psalter, fully preserved in its original form, and that form not only the best suited to its spirit, but in its rhythmical cadence and fit- ness for musical recitation unequalled by the smoothest metre? The world is indebted to our own Bishop Lowth for the discovery that the Psalms (and we may add the Can- ticles) are written in a most complete sys- tem of rhythmical arrangement, guided not by sound but by sense — thought answering to thought, and sentence to sentence, in- stead of line to line, and ending to ending. The 96th Psalm and the Magnificat have been pointed out as good examples, espe- cially the 7th and 8th verses of the latter, which are cases of antithetical parallelism : He hath put down from their scat = And hath exalted. The mighty = The humble and meek. The hungry = The rich. He hath filled with good = He hath sent empty things away. Most happily for us, this character of the originals has been admirably retained in our Authorized Versions, both in the Bible and Prayer-book ; and one cannot help feeling the fitness of their parallel structure for the antiphonal chanting of our choirs ; and, with- out doubt, these were written for some like method of singing (see 1 Samuel 18 : 7) ; but this very fitness for the one makes them unfit for the other method ; for how improb- able, and indeed impossible, it must be, as the learned and judicious Archdeacon Evans observes, that a rhythmical structure of par- allel thoughts should co-exist with a metri- cal structure of words ! Let any one, for instance, seek — it will be in vain — for any marked parallelism in Tate and Brady's met- rical V We readily allow that here and there a happy paraphrase, whether from the Old and New Versions, or from the many others that have appeared at different times, might claim a place as an independent hymn, including of course the " Old Hundredth ; " But we must confess that we see little reason to dwell longer upon the metrical Psa'ms as a source for supplying any considerable por- tion of such a collection as we need and still less as having any claim to stand as a dis- tinct branch of our hymnology, is contem- ' plated in the motion of Archdeaccn Sandford : mentioned above. It is, no doubt, their scriptural origin that has led hitherto to this distinction ; but this sane reasoning | would include all the Scotch and other par- aphrases of passages of Scripture, such as ' Morrison's " The race that long in darkness sat; " the hymn " Thou God, all honor, glory, power," from the Revelations ; and ! " While shepherds watched their flocks by night." Indeed, the fact that the Psalms form part of the Holy Scriptures ought to make us all the more unwilling to subject them to the dilution which is unavoidable in rendering them into metre. But we cannot dismiss the metrical Psalms without calling them to account for the ob- jectionable supremacy which the organ has established for itself over the choir and ccn- ! gregation : we are convinced that if the words of our old metrical Psalmody had been at all worthy of their subject, they would have coerced the music to adapt itself accordingly ; and we should have been spared the incon- gruity of the poorest and most prosaic, as well as the most bombastic lines of psalms and hymns being made a conveyance for such tunes as Cambridge New, Devizes, Ports- mouth, etc. ; if indeed such tunes would ever have come into existence. Who could endure to hear and sing hymns, the meaning and force of which he really felt — set, as they frequently have been, to mel- odies from the opera, and even worse, or massacred by the repetition of the end of each stanza, no matter whether or not the grammar and sense were consistent with it ? — not to mention the memorable cases of — " — My poor pol — — My poor pol — —My poor polluted heart ; " and — —Our Great Sal— — Our Great Salvation comes ! " HYMNOLOGY. In leaving the Hebrew Psalms and Hymns we make a great stride, passing from Jewish to Christian hymnology, or, to speak more accurately, from hymns in which Christian- ity is latent under prophecy and figure to those in which it appears as a present fact. From the very earliest date, after the day of Pentecost, we find the Church using cer- tain anthems, mostly, as we might expect, taken from Scripture, and forming, together with the Canticles, a link between apostolic and post-apostolic times ; being partly in- spired, partly uninspired compositions. They include the Tersanctus or Triumphal Hymn — " Holy, Holy, Holy," from Isaiah (6 : 3); the Benedicite, or Song of the Three Children, from Daniel (3 ; see Ps. 148); and the Angelic Hymn, " Glory to God in the highest," from St. Luke (2), with and without the additions, as in our Communion Service, which was originally, and in the Greek Church is now, used as an ordinary morning hymn : to these may be added an evening hymn * corresponding to this last, and vari- ous forms of the " Gloria Patri." All, but one, of these have been adopted, we believe, universally throughout Christendom, and are to be found in all the languages of its public worship. But for the treasures of post- apostolic hymnology we must carry our search into the various collections indigenous to each branch of the Church ; and start- ing as we did from the Holy City, we find ourselves first in that country the metropo- litical honors of which she now shared with Antioch, and whose language had been al- ready long adopted by her own people in the place of their native Hebrew. 2. Syria is rich in hymns ; but they are as yet little known in the West, and we are scarce able to do more than draw attention to their existence. The metrical writings of the father of Syriac sacred poetry, St. Ephracm, are accessible in some measure tc English readers through the translations of Dr. Burgess and Mr. Morris ; and a selec- tion from the Service-books of various dio- ceses are given with Latin renderings by Daniel in his " Thesaurus." The veil is, therefore, as yet only partially drawn from them ; yet as it discloses many hymns of ex- *"Lyra Apostolica," p. 79, ed. 185G; and BinghuuVs " Origines," xiii. 11, 5. 459 cecding beauty, it would be at the risk of much loss that we should neglect them. Moreover, we cannot forget that this lan- 1 guage has, in all matters of religion, a prime \ claim to our attention as the language of the chosen people at the time of our Lord's ap- I pearing, and consequently that in which he ! spake as never man spake. " Ilac lingua," 1 says Bishop Beveridge in summing up its claims to our study, " 6o$okoyia Angelica modulata (utpote pastoribus intellecta) : hac ; promissio Spiritus ct vitse eternte facta ; hac omnes Christi conciones prrcdicata? ; hac I Sacramenta instituta ; hac verba Servatoris ' nostri de cruce prolata ; Verbo, haec Ipsi Christo vernacula. Quis non edisceret ? " It is a remarkable fact in the history of , Christian hymnology, that in more than one case the first incitement to hymn-writing among the orthodox is said to have pro- ceeded from the heretical communities which had separated from them. It was so in Syria. A certain Bardesanes of Edessa, founder of a school of Gnostics at the end of the second century, seeking a popular means of spreading his heresy, hit upon the experiment of hymns, of which he wrote near two hundred. His son Harmonius, a learned musician, followed vigorously his father's leading, and by the middle of the fourth century the pernicious effects upon the orthodoxy of the people had become so : manifest that Ephraem, a monk and deacon of Edessa, upon the maxim that " fas est et 1 ab hoste doceri," not only begun to write ] orthodox hymns to counteract the influence ' of his opponents, but, turning their own \ weapons upon them, he set them to the ; tunes of Harmonius ; and so successful I was he that his hymns hold their place to ! this day, while those of his adversary are not. " The Syrians," says Asseman (quoted by Dr. Burgess), "attribute to Ephraem alone twelve thousand songs ; the Copts ' fourteen thousand." So much for quantity. Of their quality it may be said that, tried by the standard of Greeks, Latins, or any other ' that we know, they will not be found want- ing. Dr. Burgess only knows of two hymns extant of a date previous to Ephraem ; namely, two by Simeon Bishop of Scleuciain 2 ( JG ; but those who followed him, Balonus . his disciple, Isaac Magnus at the close of the 1 fourth century, and Jacob Bishop of Sarog ; in 519, all are voluminous metrical writers, 460 HYMNOLOGY, either of hymns or homilies ; for these Eastern teachers poured forth their very ser- mons in verse, after the manner of their in- spired predecessors of the same country, the prophets of Judah and Israel. Of this we have a noble example, now within reach of English readers through Dr. Burgess' trans- lation, the "Repentance of Nineveh." The originals, though not these translations, are metrical. The following is an Easter Hymn of St. Ephraem : — " Blessed be the Messiah, Who hath given us a hope, That the dead shall live ; And hath assured our race, That when it hath suffered dissolution, It shall be renewed. "Listen, mortal men, To the mystery of the Resurrection ; Which was once concealed ; Behold it is now proclaimed abroad In this latter age In the Holy Church. " For Jesus then became A sojourner with Death For the space of three days, And set at liberty his captives, And laid waste his encampment, And returned [the spoils] to our race. " For before that time Death by this was made arrogant, And boasted himself of it : — ' Behold priests and kings Lie bound by me In the midst of my prisons.' " A mighty war Came without warning Against the tyrant Death ; And, as a robber, The shouts [of the foe] overtook him, And humbled his glory. " The dead perceived A sweet savor of life In tho midst of Hades ; And they began to spread the glad tidings Among one another, That their hope was accomplished. " From the beginning [of the world] Deatli had dominion Over mortal men : Until there arose The Mighty One And abolished his pride. <* His voice then came, Like heavy thunder, Among mortal men ; And he proclaimed the glad tidings, That they were set at liberty Froiii their bondage." — Burgess' Syriac Ilymns, p. 77. There is a decided Orientalism about them, some of them having also a tendency to fall into the antithetic parallelism of the ancient Hebrews, which might interfere with their being transferred into Western metre. Some of the beautiful sentiments and figurative expressions of the Syriac hymnographers have, however, tempted us to try a metrical imitation of a baptismal hymn from the Office used at Jerusalem : — " Glad sight ! the Holy Church Spreads forth her wings of love, To welcome to her breast a child, Begotten from above. " Begotten at the font By God the Spirit's power, A gentle lamb from Satan snatched In childhood's helpless hour. " E'en now around the font, Unseen by mortal eye, Britrht ministering angels watch The wondrous mystery. " There to receive their charge In readiness they stand, And long to guide its feeble steps To their own happy land. " And all the host of heaven Rejoice before the Lord, To see one child of fallen man A child of God restored. " How true o'er Jordan's stream The Baptist's words proclaim — 'Behold, One greater shall baptize With spirit and with flame ! ' " Once by the stream discerned Were Gideon's chosen band ; Now by the font Christ marks his own, Within his courts to stand. "Praise him who made ; — praise him Who did redeem our race ; Praise him who us doth sanctify With pure baptismal grace. Amen." — Dan. iii. 226. Following the westward course of Chris- tianity, we shall find that hymnology, like a wave of the sea swelling up in its wake, rolled successively through each country from Judaea to the Ultima Thule of Britain, rising to its height in each only when it was ebbing away in the last, and then falling again to culminate in the next. We have seen that in Syria its golden age was about the fourth century, and perhaps rather later, Ephraem himself living till about 380. 3. Contemporary with him flourished the HVMNOLOGV. 461 earliest Greek hymn-writer, St. Gregory Nazianzen ; but he by no means represents the highest attainments of Greek hymnology, which did not approach its zenith till the days of Andrew Archbishop of Crete (712) ; St. John Damascene, facile princeps (about 750) ; his contemporary, St. Cosmas Bishop of Maiuma ; and St. Theodore of the Stu- dium (about 800). The magnificent canons, or long hymns, of these writers are the glory of the Eastern Church. Their compositions, together with those of other more volumi- nous writers of their own and the later and waning times of Greek Church poetry, take up nine-tenths of the contents of the sixteen large double-columned quarto volumes of Service-books almost wholly to themselves. But this immense field of research is as yet, like the last, but recently explored ; and all we can do is to point it out with a few ob- servations culled from the writings of the learned Dr. Neale, the chief English author- ity on the subject. Their structure has been well designated " harmonious prose." They are by our standard prodigiously long ; a hymn (or " canon ") consisting of eight odes, and each of these, again, of many " troparia " or stanzas, from three to above twenty. Their character varies from the most exalted tri- umphal songs to the most prayerful and pen- itential aspirations. Take, for example, the first verse of an ode which has found its way already into an English hymn-book from a Christmas canon of St. Cosmas : — " Christ is born ! tell forth his fame ! Christ from heaven ! Ins love proclaim ! Christ on earth ! exalt his name ! Sing to the Lord, O world, with exultation ; Break forth in glad thanksgiving every nation, For lie hath triumphed gloriously ! " etc. Or this, the celebrated " Hymn of Victory," sung immediately after midnight on Easter morning, during the symbolical ceremony of lighting of tapers : — "'Tis the day of Resurrection ! Earth, tell it all ahroad ! The Passover of gladness ! The Passover of God ! From death to life eternal, From earth unto the sky ! Our Christ hath brought us over, With hymns of victory ! " Our hearts he pure from evil, That we may see aright The Lord in rays eternal Of Resurrection-light ; And listening to his accents, May hear so calm and plain, His own ' All hail ! ' and hearing, May raise the victor strain. " Now let the heavens he joyful ; Let earth her song hegin ; Let the round world keep triumph, And all that is therein ! Invisible or visible, Their notes let all things blend ; For Christ the Lord hath risen, Our joy that hath no end." — St. John of Damascus. Or again, this of St. Andrew of Crete : — " Christian ! dost thou see them On the holy ground, How the troops of Midian Prowl and prowl around ? Christian ! up and smite them, Counting gain but loss ; Smite them by the merit Of the Holy Cross ! " Christian ! dost thou feel them, How they work within ; Striving, tempting, luring, Goading into sin ? Christian ! never tremble ! Never be downcast ! Smite them by the virtue Of the Lenten Fast ! " Christian ! dost thou hear them, How they speak thee fair ? 1 Always fast and vigil ? — Always watch and prayer ? ' Christian ! answer boldly * While I breathe I pray : ' Peace shall follow battle, Night shall end in day," etc. The following holds a middle place in its tone, but is an excellent example of the an- tithetical style of many ancient hymns. The translation is cast in the prose form of the original, and is from Dr. Neale's " Commen- tary on the Psalms : " — " They cry to Him for strength, — and from Ilim that was wounded to the death, and weak with mortal weakness on the cross, they obtain might. " They cry to Him for wisdom, — and from Him that condescended to the ignorance of childhood they receive counsel that cannot fail. "They cry unto Ilim for riches, — and from Him that had not where to lay His head, that was born in the poor inn-manger, and buried in a given grave, they receive the pearl of great price. " They cry to Him for joy, — and from the man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, they receive the pleasures that are on His right hand for evermore." 462 HYMNOLOGY. This is a " Kathisma" (sitting), or inter- calated piece, such as occurs in long canons, when the people are allowed to sit. We cannot leave the Greek hymns without in- troducing our readers to the " King of Can- ons," as it is called, the Great Mid-Lent Canon of St. Andrew of Crete. But, as available in verse, they had to burst through the barriers of the old classic Latin prosody, and find some metre in which such indispen- sable Christian words as " Ecclesia," and many Latin words hitherto confined to prose, might be used to the glory of God ; but it was not till the days of Venantius there are no less than three hundred stanzas, ! Fortunatus (08O), our own venerable Bede, it is impossible to do more than give a few from the first Ode : — " Whence shall my tears begin 1 What first-fruits shall I bear Of earnest sorrow for my sin ? Or how my woe declare? thou ! the* Merciful and Gracious One, Forgive the foul transgressions I have done. " With Adam I have vied, Yea ! passed him, in my fall ; And I am naked now, by pride And lust made bare of all — Of thee, God ! and that celestial band, And all the glory of the Promised Land. " No earthly Eve beguiled My body into sin : A spiritual temptress smiled, Concupiscence within. Unbridled passion grasped the unhallowed sweet : Most bitter — ever bitter — was the meat. " If Adam's righteous doom, Because he dared transgress Thy one decree, lost Eden's bloom And Eden's loveliness, What recompense, O Lord ! must I expect, Who all my life thy quickening laws neg- lect," etc. If we might venture, upon a very short acquaintance, to name the characteristics of these canons, we should say richness and repose, and a continuous thread of Holy Scripture, especially types, woven into them. But we must move again westward, for with St. Joseph of the Studium (830), the most prolific of all, the " Watts of Greece," as he has been called, the full tide of hymnologi- cal power was going down-, in the East, while in the Latin Church it was fast rising to its future magnificence. 4. While Cosmas and his brethren were chanting with ease in the language from which the Church had from the first accepted and other still greater masters of the eighth and ninth -centuries, that the new wine of Christianity, having " burst the old bottles," says Dean Trench, " was gathered into nobler chalices, vessels more fit to con- tain it," than the artificial measures of quan- tity and feet. After the invention of what may be called Church metres (ruled by ac- cent) and the introduction of rhymes, the flood of sacred Latin poetry mounted stead- ily to its height, lifting up with it, for the ad- miration of all ages, the names of St. Peter Damian, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and his uncanonized namesake Bernard the monk of Clugny, Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Adam of St. Vic- tor, and the works of many more, whose names are lost to us ; for it is a curious fact that, whereas in the East the names of the authors have been almost universally pre- served with their hymns in the Service- books, the Western hymns whose authors are known are the exception. The wonder- ful sequence attributed to Thomas of Celano, " Dies irse, dies ilia," " the most sublime " — we give the epithets accorded by Dr. Neale — the " Stabat Mater Dolorosa " (attributed to Jacopone), the " most pathetic," and that " most lovely " poem of the Clugniac monk, so marvellously sustained through three thousand lines of rhymed dactylic hexame- ters, e. g. " Hie breve vivitur, hie breve plangitur, hie breve fletur, Non breve vivere, non breve plangere, retri- buetur," — are all so well known through the transla- tions respectively of Dr. Irons, Mr. Cas- wall, and Mr. Neale, that we need only* mark down, for those who are not " Latin- ers," the first lines of each to remind them her vocabulary, the first fathers of Latin hymnography, St. Ambrose, S. Hilary, Pru- j of these old-established favorites : — dentius, and St. Gregory, had been strug- gling with the difficulty of composing in a language upon which these Greek words had to be grafted de novo. To make such words I " Day of wrath, day of mourning." " By the cross her station keeping, Stood the mournful mother weeping.' And "Brief life is here our portion." " To thee, O dear country." " Jerusalem the golden." All the last three being from different por- tions of the monk's poem. The hymn of King Robert the Pious, of France, -which seems to be considered by Dean Trench to contest the palm of loveli- ness with the last, is less known, and de- serves full notice : — " Come, thou Holy Spirit ! come ; And, from thine eternal home, Shed the ray of light divine ; Come, thou Father of the poor ! Come, thou Source of all our store ! Come, within our bosom shine. " Thou of Comforters the best ! Thou the soul's most welcome Guest ! Sweet Refreshment here below ! In our labor rest most sweet, Grateful shadow from the heat, Solace in the midst of woe ! " O most blessed Light Divine ! Shine within these hearts of thine, And our inmost being fill. If thou take thy grace away, Nothing pure in man will stay, All our good is turned to ill. " Heal our wounds ; our strength renew ; On our dryness pour thy new ; Wash the stains of guilt away : Bend the stubborn heart and will, Melt the frozen, warm the chill, Guide the steps that go astray. " On the faithful, who adore And confess thee, evermore In thy sevenfold gifts descend ; Give them virtue's sure reward, Give them thy salvation, Lord, Give them joys that never end. Amen." — Hymns Ancient and Modern. Of hymns and sequences together the Latin Churches have an immense store. Not only have the Roman Breviary, Missal, etc., their full complement of them, but the nu- merous peculiar " uses " of different dioceses in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Eng- land, afford a large additional number — some of very great beauty. It is not so much our object to introduce the reader to the poetry of these hymns, as to suggest an inquiry into their fitness for our English services. For this purpose the plain, simple Christian songs of unpolished versifiers, deeply imbued with religious feel- ing, serve often far better than really beauti- HYMNOLOGY. 4Go i ful poetry ; and it has been truly said by J John Newton that there is that in hymns which comes more readily from the verse- writer than the poet. It is necessary to bear this in mind in judging of the few hymns that follow. The chief value of the Latin hymns, as a source whence we may supply our need, con- sists in the narrative hymns, a class in which we are singularly deficient. " We cannot estimate fully the effect of the narrative hymns in keeping up a knowledge of the facts of Christianity among the people through the middle ages." * Happy would it be for England if this "knowledge of the facts " was not still sadly lacking among her poor, and among others too who have not the plea of poverty to excuse their ignorance. But it is so, in spite of national schools and Government grants ; and good men have in consequence hailed with delight the transla- tion and adoption of the narrative hymns of old, hoping to combine with the grateful praising of God for his dealings with man a more intimate knowledge and appreciation of those* dealings in the worshippers. The following verses from the " Pange Lingua Gloriosi " of Venantius Fortunatus, as they appear in some of our modern hymn- books, are a good specimen of a narrative hymn, the original being placed in the "first class" by Dr. Neale : — " Sing, my tongue, the Saviour's glory ; Tell his triumph far and wide ; Tell aloud the wondrous story Of his body cruciiied ; How upon the cross a victim Vanquishing in death he died. " Eating of the tree forbidden Man had fallen by Satan's snare, When our pitying Creator Did this second tree prepare, Destined many ages later That first evil to repair. " So when now at length the fulness Of the time foretold drew nigh, Then the Son, the world's Creator, Left his Father's throne on high, From a Virgin's womb appearing, Clothed in our mortality. "Thus did Christ to perfect manhood In our mortal flesh attain, Then of his free choice he goeth To a death of hitter pain ; He, tin' Lamb upon the altar Of the cross, lor us i-. ilain. * " Christian Life in Song." 464 HYMNOLOGY, "Lo ! with gall his thirst he quenches ; See the thorns upon his brow ; Nails his hands and feet are rending, See his side is open now ! Whence, to cleanse the whole creation, Streams of blood and water flow. " Blessing, honor everlasting, To the immortal Deity ; To the Father, Son, and Spirit Equal praises ever be ; Glory through the earth and heaven To the blessed Trinity. Amen." The next, from the Paris Breviary, is a beautiful Christmas hymn, narrating the scene at Bethlehem : — "Jam desinant suspiria." " God from on high hath heard : Let sighs and sorrow cease ; Lo ! from the opening heaven descends To man the Promised Peace. " Hark, through the silent night Angelic voices swell ; Their joyful songs proclaim that ' God Is born on earth to dwell. " See how the shepherd-band Speed on with eager feet ! Come to the hallowed cave with them The holy Babe to greet. • "But oh ! what sight appears Within that lowly door ! A manger, stall, a*nd swaddling-clothes, A Child and Mother poor ! " Art thou the Christ ? the Son ? The Father's Image bright ? And see we him whose arm upholds Earth and the starry height ? " Yea ! faith can pierce the cloud Which veils thy glory now ; We hail thee God, before whose throne The angels prostrate bow. "A silent teacher, Lord, Thou bidd'st us not refuse To bear what flesh would have us shun, To shun what flesh would choose. " Our swelling pride to cure With that pure love of thine, Oh, be thou born within our hearts, Most holy Child Divine ! Amen." — Hymns Ancient and Modern. Not even the most stirring experimental hymn could be more, if so much, to edifica- tion, or more expressive of thankful praise, than these touching renderings of the Bible story. Let us give one more example ; not a nar- rative, but a meditative hymn, from the com- mencement of the long poem of St. Bernard, " Jesu, dulcis memoria," of which Dean Trench observes that it is, " of all his poems, the most eminently characteristic of its au- thor ; " it is found as a hymn in the Sarum Breviary, " On the Feast of the Name of Jesus : " — " Jesu ! the very thought of thee With sweetness fills the breast ; But sweeter far thy face to see, And in thy presence rest. " No voice can sing, no heart can frame, Nor can the memory find, A sweeter sound than Jesu's name, The Saviour of mankind. " O Hope of every contrite heart ! O Joy of all the meek ! To those who fall how kind thou art ! How good to those who seek ! "But what to those who find ? Ah ! this No tongue nor pen can show ; The love of Jesus, what it is, None but his loved ones know," etc., etc. — Hymns Ancient and Modern. The Latin hymns are, then, of that very character which is so rare in our English collections ; they include a greater variety of subjects and modes of handling them than those of other nations ; perhaps because their growth extended over a longer period — more than a thousand years — and over a larger area ; and because, as is probable, they were the work of a greater number of writers ; to them, too, belong the hymns which adorned the Old English Service-books, and in which our forefathers for many generations found a channel for their praises ; and hence, prob- ably, in them we find a greater harmony in tone and language with our present prayers, which owe their origin to the same books. Further, if our Church may be said to have pointed out any source from which her chil- dren should look for hymns, it is this ; for the only hymn in metre which bears her au- thority is the " Veni Creator " in the Ordi- nation Service. But our course now brings us to the de- cline of Latin sacred poetry, and we must be passing on to other peoples and lan- guages. One of the accompanying marks of corrup- tion in the Court and Church of Rome and its dependencies was a return in art and lit- erature — hymns not excepted — to the " slav- ish bondage of a revived paganism." * Not only did hymn-writers of the sixteenth cen- tury strive to write classical hymns, in imi- * Neale. tation of Horace and his contemporaries, but the Roman authorities, with Leo X. at their head, set to work to reform, " or rather," says one writer, " to deform," the old hymns upon the same artificial model : and in the next century the vain and worldly prince Pope Urban VIII. was so eaten up with his classical and poetical attainments, that, not content with carrying on the follies of his predecessors, he attempted to remodel, in Horatian metres, even the songs and apoph- thegms of the Bible, actually " forcing the song of praise of the aged Simeon into two Sapphic strophes ! " — llanke, vol. ii., p. 128. 5. From such doings one is glad to be able to turn at this period to the honest, hearty, and real, if not over-delicate, out- bursts of Luther's muse in Germany. Yet, after all, the transition is not very abrupt ; for, although Germany (as also England) in the sixteenth century threw off with the Pa- pal yoke the Roman Latin hymns, yet their leader, unlike the English reformers, applied himself at once to reproduce them in his na- tive tongue ; feeling, perhaps, that a musical nation must not be kept without musical ex- pression for their religious sentiments, and that the old familiar melodies would carry their affections into the scale of reformation better than any new compositions. And so gradual and partial was the transfer of the Latin hymns into German, that there remain to this day several translated hymns and carols retaining their refrain, and sometimes interspersed lines and words, in the original Latin, as, for example : — " In dulci jubilo Nun singet und seyd fro, Unsers Herzen wonne Ligt in prcesepio, Und leuchtet als die onne Matris ingremio. Alpha es et 0, Alpha es et 0," etc., etc. The consequence of this is seen in a com- parative scarcity of native German hymns written in the early period of the Reforma- tion. Luther himself, however, besides translating or imitating the Latin hymns, some of the Psalms, the Te Deum, Lord's Prayer, etc., wrote several original hymns. The most notable of his paraphrases is that of the 46th Psalm, a rough, bold piece, which, with its glorious chorale, * is still the na- * No. 381 in Mr. Mercer's book, where it is di- vorced from its proper words, of which a transla- tion is given in the " Lyra Germanics," i. 176. THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. 876 HYMNOLOGY. 465 j tional hymn of German Protestants. A se- quence of Notker (912), translated by Lu- ther, * has an interest for us, as being used in English in our Burial Service ; ajid we t must not omit all mention of his original and striking hymn for Easter, " Christ lag in ! Todesbaden." f From Luther till the seventeenth century ■ Paul Eber and Nicholas Hermann were the '• only memorable writers ; but then the pent-up 1 stream, agitated and driven onward by the storm of the Thirty Years' War, rose rapidly ! to an overwhelming flood, of which Miss Winkworth's two goodly volumes are but a few drops. The most celebrated hymnogra- phers of Germany are, during the seven- teenth century, Heermann, Rist, Paul Ger- hardt, Angelus, Joachim Neander ; and, in the eighteenth, Tersteegen and Franck. The translations of Miss Winkworth are now in every one's hands, and, together with 1 those of her precursors, Miss Cox and Mr. I Massie, have made German sacred poetry so j familiar to English people that it is almost ! superfluous to give at length any examples, J except by way of comparison with the Latin I and other foreign hymnology. The chief characteristic of the earlier German hymns ! is a certain energy of expression, the impress, ! probably, of the rough and turbulent times in which they were written : this is especially j marked in Luther and in Von Lowenstern, and others who bore the brunt of the relig- I ious wars. The following is said to be by Louisa Henrietta, Electress of Brandenburgh in 1635, and is a general favorite : — " Jesus lives ! no longer now Can thy terrors, Death, appall us ; Jesus lives ! by this we know Thou, O Grave, canst not enthrall us. Alleluia ! " Jesus lives ! henceforth is death But the gate of Life immortal ; This shall calm our trembling breath When we pass its gloomy portal. Alleluia ! " Jesus lives ! for us he died : Then, alone to Jesus living, Pure in heart may we abide, Glory to our Saviour giving. Alleluia ! " Jesus lives ! our hearts know well Naught from us his love shall sever: Life, nor death, nor powers of hell, Tear us from his keeping ever. Alleluia! * " Lyra Gcrrr.anica," i. 237. f Ibid., i. 87. 466 HYMNOLOGY. " Jesus lives ! to him the throne Over all the world is given : May we go where he is gone, Rest and reign with him in heaven. Alleluia ! " Praise the Father ; praise the Son, Who to us new life hath given ; Praise the Spirit, Three in One, All in earth, and all in heaven. Alleluia ! Amen." — Hymns Ancient and Modern. This hymn, too, which is said by Miss Winkworth to " hold the same place in Germany that the Hundredth Psalm does with us," takes one by storm with its buoy- ant joyfulness, and excites a strong desire to hear it sung to " its fine old tune : " * — " Now thank we all our God, With hearts and hands and voices, Who wondrous things have done, In whom his world rejoices ! Who from our mothers' arms Hath blessed us on our way With countless gifts of love, And still is ours to-day. " Oh ! may this bounteous God Through all our life be near us, With ever joyful hearts, And blessed peace to cheer us, And keep us in his grace, And guide us when perplexed, And free us from all ill, In this world and the next. " All praise and thanks to God, The Father, now be given, The Son, and him who reigns With them in highest heaven, The One Eternal God, Whom earth and heaven adore, For thus it was, is now, And shall be evermore. Amen." — Hymns Ancient and Modern. It is observable that, as the time ap- proaches when in any nation the sacred muse is to depart, a tendency to personal, meditative, subjective writing begins to show itself ; the truth of this with the Lat- ins is recorded incidentally by Mr. Neale, and Miss Winkworth bears witness to the same at the present day in Germany. It began there as far back as the close of the seventeenth century with Johann Franck and Angelus, and was a distinguishing mark of that inimitable writer Tersteegen ; this school is well represented in the second vol- ume of the " Lyra Germanica," from which the following by Angelus, is taken : — * Lyra Germanica," ii. preface, p. G. " Love, who formedst me to wear The image of thy Godhead here ; Who soughtest me with tender care Through all my wanderings wild and drear ; O Love, I give myself to thee, Thine ever, only thine to be." It would be an omission to pass unno- ticed a collection of German hymns, ema- nating from a body whose influence had so great a 'share in exciting the Wesleyan movement in England, and especially in moulding its hymnology, as the Moravians or Unitas Fratrum. It was while sailing to America in 1736 that Wesley first fell in with some members of this community ; two years afterwards he spent some time in Germany under the roof of their leader, Count Zinzendorf, himself a hymn-writer. Deeply impressed with Jheir piety, he was the means in return of introducing them into England. Mr. William Burgess traces twenty-four of John Wesley's translations to Moravian and other German sources. If any of our readers have a taste for the curi- ous, we can promise them a treat in an old book, published in 1754, by one of the so- called Bishops of the Moravians in England, entitled "A Collection of Hymns of the Children of God in all Ages." It includes, among many eccentricities, a versification of our XXXIX Articles ! Doubtless there is much to interest any one who should trace the subject of hymns through the Asiatic branches, springing from the Syriac ; and we know that the Greek hymnologists have their successors in Russia even to this day : witness the Canon by the late Archbishop of Odessa in his " Acathiston," translated in "Voices from the East." By far the richest treasures of Latin hymnology are found, not in the Homan Service-books, but in the outlying provincial and diocesan Breviaries, the Am- brosian (Milan), the Mozarabic (Old Span- j ish), the Gallican and German, as those of I Amiens, Noyon, Maintz, Liege, the Old 'English "Uses "of Salisbury, York, Here- ford, and very many more. The author of "Christian Life in Song" conducts his readers from Germany to her Lutheran off- shoot in Sweden, and there introduces them to the original of Gustavus Adolphus' battle- hymn, composed on the field of Liitzen — known better through its German transla- tion of Altenburg (unless, as is sometimes HYMNOLOGY. held, this is the original), and to us through the English of Miss Wink-worth — " Fear not, little flock, the foe ; " and to two hymns, not without considerable merit, one by Spegel, Archbishop of Upsala, 1714, the other by Franzen, Bishop of Iler- nosand, 1818. The author tells also of a "fresh stream of song" now flowing in Sweden " in a language which combines the homely strength of the German with the liquid music of the Italian." But to pro- ceed on our course. In the rise of English hymns we find a remarkable illustration of the difference of character between the German Reformation and our own. In Germany the whole move- ment came from the middle and lower classes, and was only afterwards taken up by secular princes, and not at all by the hierarchy : consequently, its leaders had to assume the guidance and furtherance of it as best they could, and to make way with weapons of their own making : and one of the most obvious means of grafting their doctrines on the masses was by giving them ready formulas in hymns. In our case, on the contrary, royal and political difficulties first blew into a flame the smouldering dis- content ; kings, therefore, and chancellors, archbishops and bishops, were its ruling agents : the people's grievances were con- sidered, but their support and their consent were not needed ; their feelings, therefore, were checked rather than roused, and very little was done for them at first beyond giv- ing them the prayers and lessons in English. This, instead of increasing, rather dimin- ished the popular element in public wor- ship, as it took away the Latin hymns and did not replace them by others. Why they were not translated Avith the prayers — whether because there were no poets (Stern- hold and Hopkins forgive us !), or because questions of doctrine and discipline en- grossed all attention, or whether hymns were thought of no consequence, we cannot tell. This, however, is clear, that, the old channels of devotional poetry being shut off with the Latin hymns, our forefathers were left stranded, if we may so say, on the dry land of prose ; and patiently they seem to have borne it. Cranmer gave up, and no one else undertook, the task of translating the old hymns ; and it was well left undone, if we may judge from the specimens of 467 translations made at the period, and found in the Primers of 1545 and 1559, from the latter of which the following Morning Hymn is taken : — " Ales diet nuntius. " The bird of day Messenger Crowcth, and showeth that light is near. (Mirier the stirrer of the heart "Would we should to life convert. " Upon Jesus let us cry, Weeping, praying, soherly, Devout prayer ment [mixed] with weep Suft'ereth not our heart to sleep. " Christ shake off our heavy sleep, Break the bonds of night so deep, Our old sins cleanse and scour, Life and grace into us pour. Amen." It appears, then, that even if unlicensed singing was used — and some think it was — during the reigns of Henry VIII. and Ed- ward VI., it was to a very trifling extent; and at any rate, those who might refuse to indulge their love of singing at the ex- pense of obedience were left without hymns till the reign of Elizabeth. And even then they obtained only a metrical version of the Psalms of David, by Sternhold, Hopkins, and others, which was published in 1.562, and received the permissive authorization of the Queen. The qualifications of Stern- hold for the task — which, considering his times, were not to be despised, including, as they did, a knowledge of the original Hebrew — are rather surprising in a Groom of the King's Bedchamber ; yet at the same time, or perhaps rather earlier, Clement Marot, holding a corresponding office in the court of Francis L, executed a similar work in French. After this first attempt to versify the Psalms, for a very long period all the ener- gies of England's sacred poets seem to have been expended upon a succession of new versions. Archbishop Matthew Park within ten years printed his, but it was never published. The versatile King James L* was found at his death to have versified the whole Psalter, and his son Charles pub- lished and authorized it for use : Sir Philip Sidney and his sister the Counters of Pem- broke — about 1580 j Francis Rouse* m Kill ; William Barton * in 1664 : Tate and Brady " in L686 ; Dr. Patrick in 1715 J Dr. Watts in 1719; id Blaekmore ■ in * r, with an uteris! have 1 o bj tome soil of author- ity •* allowed to be need in ennrchi 468 HYMNOLOGY. 1721 ; Archdeacon Churton (" the Cleve- land Psalter ") ; two anonymous translators — one in Oxford,* the other in Cambridge — and Mr. Cayley, among living writers, and others, to the number of thirty-two in all, have taken in hand the task — confessed by more than one of them at the outset to be impossible — of making an entire metrical Psalter. Besides these, the attempts, many of them very successful, to versify detached Psalms, are beyond number, f But to return, in search of original hymn- writers or translators of hymns ; one of Sternhold's coadjutors, John Mardley (others say Sternhold himself, " in a moment of un- usual inspiration "), wrote the well-known " Lamentation of a Sinner," generally printed with the Old and New Versions. The metrical Psalms, however, seem to have monopolized all the talent for hym- nography during Elizabeth's reign ; for in a Collection of Sacred Poetry of that time, published by the Parker Society, there are very few other pieces written for singing, and none of them calling for special notice. Bishop Cosin has given us in his Book of Devotions both translations of Latin hymns (very little better than those in the Primers) and original hymns, of which the following is a fair example : — " Who more can crave Than God for me hath done To free a slave That gave his only son ? Blest he that hour When he repaired my loss, I never will forget My Saviour's Cross, " Whose death revives My soul. Once was I dead, But now I'll raise Again my drooping head ; And singing say, And Baying sing forever, Blest he my Lord That did my soul deliver. Amen." During the early part of the reign of Charles I. lived and wrote George Wither, and that sweet singer of the Temple, Master George Herbert, whose whole life was mel- ody, and " who sung on earth," says his bi- ographer, " such hymns and anthems as the * Now known to be the author of the " Chris- tian Year." 1 Holland in his" Psalmists of Britain " gives " Records Biographical and Literary " of upwards of one hundred and fifty authors who rendered the whole or parts of the Book of Psalms into English verse. angels and he now sing in heaven." Still almost every hymn of this period is excluded from modern Hymn-books by the compli- cated metres which were then in vogue, or by language no longer current among us. One hymn only of Herbert's is, we believe, sung now, and that only in certain locali- ties, beyond which its use never has, and probably never will be, extended. It be- gins :-— " Throw away thy rod, Throw away thy wrath, O my God, Take the gentle path."— The Temple, 151. The nation was not yet weary of Stern- hold's Psalms, and there was therefore no demand for hymns, except as aids to private meditation, and of such we find plenty ; for sacred poetry flourished very especially in those times, and rather later, in the writ- ing of George Sandys, Browne, Crashaw, Giles Fletcher, and the great Milton ; and \ during the Protectorate, Bishop Jeremy Tay- lor in his retreat at Lord Carbery's, Henry Vaughan, Francis Quarles, and others, kept up the succession, but more as poets than as hymn-writers. Neither the supremacy of the Puritans, nor the return of the Stuarts, seems to have been favorable to the rise of Hymnology. In the first it received a direct blow from the general overthrow of the Church, and the introduction of Scotch paraphrases and John Knox's Psalms from over the Border ; and in the second it probably found too little en- couragement from the dissolute spirit of the times to enable it to recover from its de- pression. For so completely had the Puri- tans silenced Church music, and crushed it out, that at the Restoration it was found nec- essary to bring over a choir from Paris to conduct the services in the King's Chapel.* In 1668, John Austin, a bencher of Lincoln's Inn (whose brother William also had pub- lished his " Devotionis Austiniana)Flamina" in the last reign), published his well-known " Devotions after the way of Antient Of-; ficcs." They contain, besides prayers, a great number of " Psalms " of his own com- posing, after the model of those of David, in the same musical prose ; of which Dr. Orton says, that " such noble and sublime strains of devotion are not to be met with any- where else but in the Bible ; " and placed at * Ncwland, " Confirmation Lectures." intervals are also metrical hymns, mostly his own, * of great beauty and still greater fer- vor, such as might be expected from one so transported with the love of his Maker as to j welcome his approaching death with the re- peated exclamation, " Satiabor, Satiabor, cum apparebit gloria tua ; " and to meet it when it came with the cry, " Now, heartily for heaven through Jesus Christ." One hymn of this period which deserves more favor than compilers in general have con- ferred upon it is that of the celebrated Rich- ard Baxter : — " Lord, it is not for us to care Whether we live or die." The saintly Bishop Ken was the only other whose hymns, written in this century, have formed for themselves any position among us ; and of these, few are familiar with any besides his Morning and Evening Hymns, suggested, it is thought, by the memory of the " Jamlucis orto sidere " of St. Ambrose, which, as a Winchester boy, he had been accustomed to sing in the college, and to which his hymns certainly bear some affinity in character. For the first fifty years after the Revolu- ' tion the cold and worldly spirit which pre- vailed was calculated to stunt rather than assist the growth of original Church poetry. The old version of the Psalms, however, was beginning to loose its hold, and King "Wil- liam's chaplain and poet laureate, after a sharp struggle, obtained the mastery for their " Xew Version." But still the Church produced scarcely anything original ; the "Court" approved of "Tate and Brady," and the Church was content: with the ex- ception of Addison's well-known " When all thy mercies, O my God," nothing occurs to us as having appeared at this time. Not so with the Nonconformists : hitherto they had patiently shared with Church people the in- fliction, by prescription, of the old Psalms; but Tate and Brady had dispelled the charm ; and Isaac Watts, as we have already said, unfettered by any feelings of respect for court influence, struck the note of freedom at once with his Psalms and Hymn-, which Bishop Compton and Dr. Johnson could con- * He adopted Crasbaw's translation of 41 Lands Zion." This book was "reformed " (for ' i was a Romanist) by Lady Hopetonn. and was afterwards edited mor Hickc;, who added several hymns of his own. HYMNOLOGY. 4G9 descend to praise, but not to adopt. The prolific yield of hymns which followed this first opening, and increased tenfold with the AVesleyan revival, has been already spoken of in its bearing upon collections now in use in the Church ; but there are some features in the rise and character of these hymns worthy of further remark. The multitude not only of hymns but of writers was mar- vellous. Independent of the labors of those unwearied Sisyphi who persisted one after another in the impossible task of versifying the Psalter, the number of original writers who put into the treasury of sacred rhyme, some their mites, but more their shekels, if not " talents," from the time when the Wes- leys first moved, in 1739, to the time of their deaths, about fifty years afterwards, cannot be less, and is probably much more, than two 'hundred. Of course, the gold is scarce ; but there are some exceedingly fine contribu- J tions to be picked out ; and, considering the : very narrow range of thought, which Mr. Montgomery attributes to "a predilection i for certain views of the Gospel," their want of variety is not surprising. " The high call- ! ing of Methodism," writes one of their eu- \ logists, " is experimental religion. To depict 1 experimental religion was the high calling of the bard of Methodism" This title be- longs par excellence to Charles Wesley, but the above statement will apply to all their hvmn-writers. It was this personal and sub- jective side of the Gospel which they strove to bring into prominence by their hymns ; and this is curiously illustrated by Mr. Bur- gess, though unconsciously, in his " Wes- leyan Hymnology," where he expresses his gratitude to the writers, for that " he has often been instructed and admonished, re- proved and stimulated, comforted and ani- mated, while singing these songs of Zion.'' He measures a hymn by the same standard as he would a sermon, by its effects upon the feelings of the congregation ; he d< look for — so does not miss — the " Dei" of S. Augustine's canon ; it appears to he but a secondary part of the Methodist notion of a hymn, that it is a channel ofprttu One co: of this re- flective character in these hymns is that a large majority of them are written in the singular Dumber, a thing consistent enough witli this self-inspection by each person, but not with the united song of a congr 470 HYMNOLOGY. looking Godward ; it is a sure mark of the late date of a hymn, being a point in which the moderns " a moribus Ecclesiae antiqui- oris quam maxime abhorrent." * Even within the period of the Wesleyan movement this deteriorating tendency to personal hymns is visible ; for in the earlier publications of John and Charles, especially in the " Sacra- mental Hymns " (which, by the way, are so " high " in their doctrine that their follow- ers now repudiate them), the hymns are much more congregational. . In spite of these drawbacks English hym- nology owes much to Wesleyanism, and not a little to other denominations. To Dr. Watts we are indebted for that famous hymn, — the language of which unhappily is as open to criticism as its spirit is above it, — " When I survey the wondrous cross ; " and to another Calvinist, though a Church- man, Augustus Toplady, for " the most de- servedly popular hymn ; perhaps the very favorite— very beautiful it is." For such is Dr. Pusey's encomium, quoted by Mr. Pear- son, f upon the hymn — " Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let mo hide myself in thee/' etc. Dr. Doddridge, Cowper, and Newton, and other voluminous writers of different denom- inations, must not be forgotten, though their number is too great for us to notice them individually. From the Wesleyans themselves, as rep- resented in their " poetical Bible," as their collection has been called, compilers for the Church have drawn freely ; no church in England probably has not resounded with the hymn of the Welsh blacksmith, Thomas Olivers, and its popular, but questionable, tune — " Lo ! He comes with clouds descending." Olivers also wrote the fine lyric stanzas be- ginning, " The God of Abraham praise ; " and the origin of another hymn is traced to two brothers, also in a humble situation in life, the one an itinerant preacher, the other a porter, of whom the following story is told in reference to the composition of the hymn. The preacher desired the porter to carry him * " Ilvmni Ecclesiae," p. 243. It has been con- tested in favor of hymns in the first person that many of the Psalms of David are so written: this was satisfactorily answered by the writer of the Article in the Quarterly, July, 1828. t " Oxford Essays," 1868. a letter. " I can't go," he replied ; "lam writing a hymn." " You write a hymn, in- deed ! nonsense ! go with the letter, and I will finish the hymn." He went, and re- turned. The preacher had taken it up at the third verse, and his muse had forsaken him at the eighth. " Give me the pen," said the porter, and wrote off: — " They brought His chariot from above To bear Him to His throne, Clapped their triumphant wings, and cried, ' The glorious work is done.' " But we must proceed. In the beginning of the present century the impetus of the Meth- odist revival had expended itself ; there was a lull, and then another stirring of the wa- ters, but this time chiefly within the Church of England, by Bishop Heber, Dean Mil- man, Sir Robert Grant, Lyte, and Bishop Mant. , But to the last-named prelate we owe a change which has gone far to revolu- tionize our hymnology, though in a good direction. Here and there along the course we have been following since the Reforma- tion we might have found isolated attempts to translate some choice Latin hymn ; Crashaw, Drummond, Dryden, and Hickes had each contributed one or two ; but Bishop Mant went a step further, and, taking the Roman Breviary, translated, with few excep- tions, all that it contained. This leading was followed with such zeal by Mr. Williams (who did the same by the Paris Breviary), by Mr. Copeland, Mr. Chandler, Dr. Pusey, Mr. Caswall, Mr. Wackerbarth, Mr. Blew, Dr. Neale, and many more, that there have been produced almost as many Anglo-Latin as new and original English hymns during the last thirty years. And here several curious reflections arise. This resuscitation of the Latin hymns coin- cided in time with the remarkable Church movement at Oxford, identified with the " Tracts for the Times." As was the case with the Wesleyan revival in the last cen- tury, so with this Church revival, it gave an unusual impulse to hymnology, leading to the conclusion that there is a peculiar apti- tude in hymns on the one hand for giving expression to the religious feelings of the writer, and on the other for the propagation of those feelings among others. Again, the Oxford movement was to a great extent a counter-movement, not in the sense of an opposition, but a reaction, or rather re-ad- justment ; therefore, whereas the Wesleyans, who sought new paths for themselves, sought also new hymns of a new character, the Church party, who aimed at recovering the old paths that had been lost, were naturally led to take up the ancient hymns. The Wesleyan, again, with a predilection for the experimental side of Christianity, found the spiritual food most congenial to him in the ecstatic raptures of the Methodist hymns ; the Churchman, on the contrary, restoring, perhaps unconsciously, the balance, by lean- ing more to the objective expression of truth, welcomed the calm narrative songs of primi- tive and mediaeval times. It is not meant by this that the produc- tions of modern Church hymn-writers are exclusively translations ; far from it : the names of Keble, Neale, Moultrie, Monsell, Alford, Archer Gurney, J. H. Gurney, are of themselves sufficient to vindicate the claim of the Church in these days to origi- nality ; but this may be said truly, that the study of the ancient models has had a marked influence on these modern hymns. Our own space and our reader's patience would fail us if we attempted to push out now into the Atlantic, and follow our emi- grant hymn-writers in the New World, or even to dive into the recesses of the Scotch and Welsh glens ; yet there they are to be found. The late venerable Bishop Doane, of New Jersey ; the Rev. A. C. Coxe, of Baltimore ; and Mr. Bullock, of Nova Scotia, are all claimants on our gratitude, for their hymns are found in several of our collec- tions. From the Welsh Methodist, W. Williams, we have (a translation by him of his own Welsh original) the well-known missionary hymn, " O'er the gloomy hills of darkness," and " Shepherd of thine Israel, guide us." From Scotland we have Logan's " O God of Abraham, by whose hand," and several others ; and the Kirk is largely sup- plied with her vigorous paraphrases. Our travels are over. AVe have spied out, not, we think, the nakedness, but the rich- ness, of the lands. We have seen the works of the Anakim of sacred song ; we have brought home of the grapes and pomegran- ates, not as thieves, but as having a right in them. Cut off though we be geographically from the rest of mankind, and separated HYMNOLOGY. 471 Churches of the Old World, still, we repeat, we must never surrender our claim as true Catholics to the common store of Christen- dom. Like Tennyson's Ulysses, we return home to our Ithaca to feel " I am a part of all that I have met." But with special reference to the practical purpose with which we set out — what is the conclusion to be drawn from all r this as to the feasibility of some regulation and amend- ment of our present condition ? Assuming that it must be brought about by the prepa- ration of an approved and authorized hymn- book, there is little doubt that good as well as bad has come of past delay, if it is only that it has given us time and opportunity to look round us. But it is not less certain — as this hasty and superficial sketch will have shown — that our knowledge of the subject is yet far from ripe ; even the materials that now lie within reach are rough and unfit, without much more revision and re-arrange- ment, to be worked up satisfactorily. But let the English Church appreciate her position in this matter — a position such as no Church ever held before for undertaking this work ; let her lay the whole world un- der tribute ; let her rejoice in being able to take as she will of the soft utterances of Asia, and the deep teaching of the Greek odes, the terse diction and subdued fire of the Latins, and the bold energy of the Ger- mans, and to weld them together with the fervent raptures of those at home who have wandered from her fold, and the chastened devotion of her more dutiful children. It is a great work ; it is a great opportunity ; we cannot but long for its accomplishment ; yet we dread a failure. There is just so much already at hand as to tempt us into action ; there is just that amount of half-prepared- ness to make us act in haste, and repent at leisure. There is a proverb — and we would write it over this subject — u Wait a little, and make an end the sooner." It is unbe- coming the dignity and high character of our Church to be ever making and unmaking her formulas ; let her bishops and doctors then begin, if they will, at once, but with the determination to spare neither labor nor time, even if years pass away before they can with confidence lay before US a " llymna- rium" worthy of our history and our lan- guage; thoroughly consonant with the tone and teaching 01 OUT 1'rayer-book ; and such that the Church of our time may set to it her seal, and hand it down to p •<> future generations, and a last- too, as to external communion, from the | ing monument of the present. 472 SISTER ANNA'S PROBATION, CHAPTER III. There was as much excitement, and al- most as much demonstration and holiday- making about Anna's sacred espousals in the next October, as there had been about her sister's marriage in the last. At the Manor- house, and in the village, everybody was re- leased from work to go to Stoke, and see Mistress Anna and Mistress Emilia take the veil. Up to the very morning the seam- stresses were busy, under Dame Atherstone's direction, in preparing the entire bridal cos- tume ; and the cooks were preparing to feast the gentry in the hall, and the laborers and their families in the home-field. Eleanor and her husband arrived, with their infant and its nurse, in order that the little one might have the honor of being in the arms of its saintly aunt on the day of her conse- cration. Every vehicle, horse, mule, pillion was engaged; and those who could not ride were willing to trudge to Stoke, rather than miss the spectacle. As the family coach, full inside and out, appeared at each turn of the road, everybody made way ; and all heads were uncovered as the family passed. Little was said within the carriage. Eleanor was weeping, and her husband very grave. The Squire was already more moved than he had expected, and there were tears now and then on the Dame's face, though she declared herself the proudest and hap- piest of mothers. " You hear, Bet," said the Squire to his youngest daughter. " Will you be a nun by and by ? You see what it is to be a nun." " No, I wont," replied Bet, positively. " No, my love ; one in a family is enough," said her mother. Bet was well pleased to hear this ; but it rather surprised her. If to be a nun was to be sure of heaven, would it not be a bless- ing that all the daughters of every house should be nuns ? Then Hubert rode up to the window to tell what coaches and riders he saw approach- ing Stoke, and how the field-paths were full of country-people, all making for the con- vent. When they came within sight of the beach, they saw that the boats were drawn up on the sands, that the fishermen and their families might see the sight. The Bishop intended to honor his niece by his presence, and by himself examining her as to her fit- ness for her profession, lie had come over to his country house in the neighborhood of Stoke, and he was closeted with Anna first, and then with Emilia, before the rela- tives of each arrived. Elizabeth was not there. Anna had lost her only personal friend in that house : and the circumstance cast a gloom over the day, in spite of every effort to rejoice that Eliza- beth had escaped the dreariest fate on earth — that of the reluctant nun. She feared to think what her friend's fate would be under the evil repute of refusing to be the spouse of Christ. She attempted a word of appeal to her uncle, that he would secure merciful treatment for one who was too upright to take vows with half a heart ; but the Bishop coldly reminded her that her own affairs should engross her this day, and that he must judge for himself about dealing with persons of doubtful faith. Still, she ventured to petition her mother, and more hopefully, Eleanor. Eleanor was ready, in the softness of her heart, to promise more than she could be sure of performing ; but the Dame an- swered, as it was inevitable that she should, that in such matters the family, and every member of it, must be guided by the Bishop. The worst of it was that the Reverend Mother was present all the time. It was her duty ; nobody disputed that ; but it did seem hard that even the last embrace on earth should be witnessed by a spiritual su- perior. Meetings at stated times would be permitted ; but, if even father and brother were there, with a partition between; and never more could they exchange a word un- heard by the Reverend Mother. It was above all things necessary that there should not be room for the slightest suspicion of the slightest levity in any intercourse held by the spouse of Christ with the world. The Reverend Mother must know all that she did and said, and her confessor all that she thought. Yet her father whispered in her ear the question which the moment wrung from him. Was she quite certain of her voca- tion ? He had sometimes thought lately that it had been too much taken for granted. If she had any doubt, or wished for more time, he would carry her through — even now, at the last moment. And convents were not altogether so well thought of as they were ; people did say strange things about some of them. If his dear child would prefer another