O LUCE QUAE TUA LATES.

Glory to the Eternal One,Glory to the only Son,Glory to the Spirit be,Now and through eternity.Of the other writers of the Breviary only a few need detain us. Most of them are poets of the conventional sort, whose verse evidences the care taken with their education rather than their possession of any native genius, although Jean Commire (1625-1702) was of wide reputation in his day. Even of good Claude Santeul the best that can be said is that several of his hymns have passed for the composition of his brother, and that the two Trinity hymns (Ter sancte, ter potens DeusandO luce quae tua lates) and the three on Lazarus (Redditum luce, Domino vocante, Panditur saxo tumulus remoto, andIntrante Christo Bethanicam domum) deserve the honor. They make us regret the loss of these two manuscript volumes. An unfinished translation of one of these, left by Mr. Duffield, has been completed for us by Dr. A. R. Thompson. The asterisk marks the transition from the one translator to the other—O LUCE QUAE TUA LATES.O hidden by the very light,O ever-blessed Trinity,Thee we confess, and thee believe,With pious heart we long for thee!O Holy Father of the saints,O God of very God, the Son,O Bond of Love, the Holy Ghost,Who joinest all the Three in One!That God the Father might beholdHimself, *coeval was the Son;Also the Love that binds them both;So, God of God, the perfect One.Complete the Father in the Son,The Son, the Father in complete,And the full Spirit in them both;The Father, Son, and Paraclete.As is the Son, the Spirit is.Each as the Father, verily.The Three, One all transcendent Truth,One all transcendent Love, the Three.Father, and Son, and Holy GhostEternally, let all adore;Who liveth and who reigneth, God,Ages on ages, evermore!Next we have Nicolas le Tourneux (1640-1686), the severe Jansenist, whose preaching drew such crowds in Paris that the King asked the reason. “Sire,” replied Boileau, “your Majesty knows how people run after novelty; this is a preacher who preaches the Gospel. When he mounts the pulpit, he frightens you by his ugliness, so that you wish he would leave it; and when he begins to speak, you are afraid that he may.” It was hisAnnée Chrétiennewhich suggested theChristian Yearto John Keble. We have seen how he coached Jean Santeul both as to the matter of his hymns and the right spirit for a Christian poet. But the great preacher’s own hymns aresermoni propriores, “properer for a sermon,” to borrow Lamb’s mistranslation. Verse was a fetter to him, not a wing. His best are the Ascension hymn,Adeste, Coelitum chori, and that on the Baptist,Jussu tyranni pro fide. The former we give in the excellent translation of Rev. A. R. Thompson, D.D.:ADESTE COELITUM CHORI.Hither come, ye choirs immortal,Singing joyful canticles!Christ hath passed the grave’s dark portal,With the dead no more he dwells.All in vain doth malice stationWatchful guards the tomb before,All in vain the faithless nationSets the seal upon the door.Fruitless terror, from this prisonNone have stolen him away,But by his own strength arisen,Victor, ends he death’s dread fray.Prisoned, and the seal unbroken,He can leave at will the tomb,As at first—behold the token—He could leave the Virgin’s womb.When he on the tree hung dying,Raving men, who round him stood,“Come down from the cross,” were crying,“Then we own thee Son of God.”But, his Father’s will obeyingEven unto death, he dies;Priest and Victim, ’tis the slayingOf the world’s great Sacrifice.Nay, the cross was not forsaken;Dead, yet greater thing did he,By himself, his life retakenProved him Son of God to be.With thee dying, with thee rising,Grant, O Christ, that we may be,Earthly vanities despising,Choosing heaven all lovingly!Praise be to the Father given,To the Son, our Leader. HeCalleth us with him to heaven;Spirit, equal praise to thee!A man of very different powers is the Abbé Sebastian Besnault, of whom nothing is told us except that he was chaplain of the parish of St. Maurice in Sens, and died in 1726. The six hymns ascribed to him in the Paris Breviary are among the finest in that collection. Three are hymns on the Circumcision (Debilis cessent elementa legis;Felix dies, quam proprio; andNoxium Christus simul introivit); one is an Ascension hymn (Promissa, tellus, concipe gaudium), and two are Dedication hymns (Ecce sedes hic TonantisandUrbs beata, vera pacis), the latter being a recast of theUrbs beata Hierusalem. Quite justly does A. Gazier (in his thesisDe Santolii Victorini Sacris Hymnis, Paris, 1875) say that if Besnault equalled Jean Santeul in the volume of his hymns, he would not rank below him as a sacred poet, since he quite equals him in his Latinity and is his superior as a spiritual writer. We giveDr. A. R. Thompson’s version of his recast of theUrbs beata Hierusalem:URBS BEATA, VERA PACIS.Blessed city, vision trueOf sweet peace, Jerusalem,How majestic to the viewRise thy lofty walls, in themLiving stones in beauty stand,Polished, set, by God’s own hand.Every several gate of thineOf one pearl effulgent is,Golden fair thy wall doth shine,Blended lustrously with this,And thy wall doth rest aloneUpon Christ the Corner-stone.Thy sun is the martyred Lamb,God thy temple. Angels vieWith the saints, a joyful psalmEver lifting up on high,And the Holiest worshipping,Holy, Holy, Holy sing.Evermore stand open wide,Heavenly city, all thy gates.But, who would in thee abide,Who thy walls to enter waits,Must, that meed of life to win,Agonize to conquer sin.To the Father, to the Son,Endless adoration be!Spirit, binding both in One,Endless worship unto thee!Hallowed by thy chrism divine,We become thy living shrine.Along with Coffin should be named one of his friends, a young advocate named Combault, who possessed something of the spirit and energy of Jean Santeul. How far he contributed to the Breviary of 1736 I am unable to say, but a well-founded tradition designates him as the author of a splendid rhetorical hymn in commemoration of the Apostles Peter and Paul (Tandem laborumgloriosi Principes), which has been much admired. Combault died in 1785.The whole impression which this school of hymn-writers makes upon us is like that of the Greco-French architecture of our own age. Both reflect the critical and useful, but somewhat exclusive spirit of the Renaissance. Both are capable of fine effects, great structural beauty, and a certain grandeur not of the highest order. But a Greco-French church will not bear comparison with Notre Dame; and the hymns of Santeul and Coffin will hardly better endure a comparison with the Christian singers who wrote when Notre Dame was new.CHAPTER XXIX.THE UNKNOWN AND THE LESS KNOWN HYMN-WRITERS.[Fourth to Tenth Century.]The known is but a fragment broken from the unknown. This is eminently true as regards the authorship of the Latin hymns. When we have dealt as tenderly as the historical conscience will permit with the traditions which assign hymns to this and that author, we still find ourselves unable to affix any name to the great majority. And while it is true that the most part of the very great hymns are not left in this plight of anonymity, it is true that no small number of the best are on the record like Melchizedek—“without father or mother,” and many of them also “without beginning of years,” for we can determine only approximately the century of their origin. Nor is this at all surprising. Fame was neither the object nor the expectation of the writers of the Latin hymns of the early and Middle Ages. Their utmost expectation, probably, was to be valued a little by their brethren in their own and their sister monasteries as the author of a fine sequence or an appropriate hymn for a yearly festival. It was enough for that purpose that the report of their authorship passed from mouth to mouth in the choir, without any record made of it. The love of glory as a literary motive, came in, as Mr. Symonds reminds us, with the Renaissance, which borrowed it from the old pagans. Many a devout singer of the centuries before that practised the wisdom of à Kempis’s saying,Ama nesciri, “Love to be unknown.” They wrote not for gain in renown, but for use in the edification of their brethren and of the Church. And to live for use rather than gain is to live Christianly, for, as Swedenborg says, “The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom of uses.”This and the next chapter we shall give partly to some of these orphaned hymns, touching only on the greatest. And as we come down the centuries we shall speak also of the less notable hymn-writers,some of them not less notable as men or as Churchmen, but such as have made less of a mark in hymnology.At the outset we are met by two of the greatest of the sacred songs of the Church, which are none the less hymns although classed technically as canticles. Who wrote theGloria in Excelsisand theTe Deum laudamus? As everybody knows, the opening words of the former are the song of the angels who brought the good news to the shepherds—words which authenticate their heavenly origin by their simplicity, beauty, and force—“a master-song,” as Luther says, “which neither grew nor was made on earth, but came down from heaven.” But the much longer supplement, which evidently reflects the situation of the Church in the days of the Arian controversy, must either have originated in the fourth century and in the East, or must have been altered to adapt it to that time. The original still exists in Greek, but in three forms, which differ somewhat; and the Latin version is defective in that it follows a later form than that which is given in the so-calledApostolical Constitutions; and, of course, the English follows the Latin, except in the part taken from the Gospel, where “good will to men” takes the place of “to men of good will” (hominibus bonae voluntatis), the latter being the reading adopted by the English translators of 1611, but rejected by the revisers of 1883.[22]Who made the Latin version? An untrustworthy tradition ascribes it to Telesphorus, who was Bishop of Rome in 128-38. It is possible that he prescribed the chanting of the Scripture words in the Church service; but the whole hymn is of later date in Latin. There is much more likelihood that it was, according to a tradition recorded by Alcuin in the ninth century, the work of Hilary of Poitiers, the first Latin hymn-writer.TheTe Deum laudamushas some claims to be regarded as the greatest of Christian hymns. Like theGloria in Excelsisit belongs to that first period of Christian hymn-writing, when the Hebrew psalms still furnished the models for Christian poets, and the same free movement of rhythmical prose was all that was required or even tolerated. There is no mention of it in Churchliterature before the sixth century, when the monastic rules of both Caesarius of Arles (c.527) and of Benedict of Nursia (c.530) prescribe its use, and the Council of Toledo mentions it. As it uses the words of the Vulgate in verses 22-25 and 27 to the end, it cannot, as it now stands, be much more than a century older than this, as the date of the Vulgate is 382-404. Yet a tradition recorded by Abbot Abbo of Fleury in the ninth century, ascribes this hymn also to Hilary of Poitiers, who died fifteen years before Jerome put his hand to the work of revising the Latin Bible. Daniel thinks to reconcile the discrepancy by ascribing it to Hilary of Arles, who was born the year before Jerome had finished his work, and by regarding it as a translation from the Greek, as verses 22-26 certainly are. They are found in the Appendix to the Alexandrian manuscript of the Greek New Testament, where they follow theGloria in Excelsiswith the interruption only of an Amen. But is it not possible to regard the last eight verses as a separate hymn, made up, with the exception of the strong verse—26.Dignare, Domine, die isto sine peccato nos custodire—of verses from the Scriptures? These last verses have no internal connection with the first twenty-two, and they differ decidedly in style, form, and source. Those contain no Scripture quotations, except theTer-Sanctusin verses 5 and 6, which is not taken from the Vulgate version,[23]but apparently from the Itala. If, therefore, we consider those twenty-two verses as a hymn by themselves, this may have been the work of Hilary of Poitiers, and there is no necessity for assuming that it was not an original Latin hymn. This becomes more probable if we drop out verse 13, which interrupts the flow of the Christological thought, and evidently was interpolated to make the hymn complete from a Trinitarian pointof view. When theGloria in Excelsisand theTe Deumwere composed, it was the relation of the Son to the Father which occupied the mind of the Church. Both hymns are the expression of “the present truth” on that subject; the mention of the Holy Spirit in both is probably by interpolation at a later date.As the form, and in some places the meaning of theTe Deumis misrepresented in the current version, it may be worth while to reproduce the original in a more literal version:1.Thee as God we praise,Thee as Lord we own,2.Thee as eternal Father all the earth doth worship,3.Thee all the angels—To thee heaven and all its powers,4.To thee cherubim and seraphim with unceasing voice cry aloud,5.Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth,6.The heavens and the earth are full of the majesty of thy glory!7.Thee the glorious choir of the apostles,8.Thee the praiseworthy company of the prophets,9.Thee the white-robed army of the martyrs praiseth.10.Thee, through the circle of the lands, the Holy Church confesseth11.Father of unbounded majesty;12.Thy adorable, true and only Son.13 (14).Thou King of glory, O Christ,14 (15).Thou of the Father art the Son eternal.15 (16).Thou, to deliver us, tookest manhood,Thou didst not dread the Virgin’s womb.16 (17).Thou, since thou hast overcome the sting of death,Hast opened to believers the kingdom of heaven.17 (18).Thou, at the right hand of God, sittest in the glory of the Father;18 (19).As our judge thou art believed to be coming.19 (20)Thee therefore we beg,Assist thy servants whom thou hast redeemed with precious blood.20 (21).Cause us to be gifted, among thy saints, with eternal glory.Amen.There are no other unfathered hymns known to be of this century, and few less notable hymn-writers. To Jerome is ascribed a hymn,Te Bethlehem celebrat, which is not in any of the collections. His great contemporary, Augustine of Hippo, has had more than one fine hymn assigned to him, probably because his works have furnished the suggestion for so many. Notably Peter Damiani and Hildebert of Tours drew upon him. But the great theologian was not a poet, as we can see from his one essay inthat form, viz., his “psalm” against the Donatists, in which he gives a popular and metrical exposition of the parable of the net (Matt. 13:47-50). It is quite enough to prove that he did not write theAd perennis vitae fontem(Damiani), or theQuid, tyranne, quid minaris(Damiani), or theO gens beata coelitum, or even theDomine Jesu, noverim me, all of which have been given to him at times.To the fifth century—the century of Prudentius and Ennodius—we may ascribe the earlier in the large group of hymns classed as Ambrosian, which are the work of a series of writers who may be described as constituting a school. It is one of the hardest problems in Latin hymnology to distinguish between Ambrose’s own work and that of his imitators, and to arrange the hymns composed by the latter between the fifth and the eighth century in any chronological order. What can be said positively has been shown in Chapter V. The chief authorities on the subject are the early collectors, Clichtove, Cassander, and Thomasius. Of considerable importance is theMS.given by Francis Junius in the seventeenth century to the University of Oxford, and published in 1830 by Jacob Grimm. It contains a collection of twenty-six hymns by Ambrose and the Ambrosians, with a translation into old High German, probably made at St. Gall in the ninth century. But these do not exhaust the list. Others have been pointed out by Mone and other collectors, as proving their kinship to the school by their metrical form or their contents and style. Schletterer enumerates ninety hymns of the school, and of these he assigns fifteen to Ambrose himself.Closely related to the group, and yet not assigned to it, are several hymns to which a very early date is assigned by Mone at least. To this fifth century he gives theUnam duorum gloriam, which he also claims as of German origin, and describes as one of the oldest hymns of the German Church. It is in commemoration of two martyrs, to whose honor a church near Münster was dedicated, and is strictly classic in metre. Here also he assigns theChristi caterva clamitat, an Advent hymn of classic metre and primitive tone. He probably would agree with Wackernagel in selecting the same century for the hymn on Stephen, the protomartyr,Primatis aulae coelicae, in which he finds reminders of the style of Prudentius. Lastly, he assigns this date to the Paschal hymn,Telucis auctor personat, which became obsolete when its special reference to Easter as the time of the baptism of adult catechumens lost its significance. It was used in France and probably other countries.To the same fifth century belongs Paulinus, Bishop of Nola (353-431), who has many better claims to remembrance than his hymns. He was one of those men of whom their contemporaries cannot speak without enthusiasm, and as Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose are among his eulogists we may assume that the praise was not undeserved. He came of a noble Gallic stock; he inherited wealth and acquired from the teaching of the poet Ausonius all the culture of his time; he filled high office in Italy and Spain; he spent the last twenty-two years of his life in administering with a faithful laboriousness the affairs of a Campanian bishopric. He did not receive baptism until his thirty-fifth year, so that he may have been brought up a pagan, although the inference is not necessary. In 378 he was made Roman consul to fill an unexpired term (consul suffectus), and was sent into Campania at the end of the year. There he was so deeply impressed by a festival in honor of the martyr Vincent of Nola, that his affections were drawn strongly to the city. But soon after he married a Spanish wife and went to live first at Bordeaux and then at Barcelona. At the former in 389 he was received into the membership of the Church; at the latter he and his wife, after the death of their infant son, resolved to renounce the “secular” life and to give themselves to asceticism and charity. He was ordained to the priesthood in response to a general demand of the people during the Christmas festivities. He removed to Nola, where he and his wife lived in the service of the poor, in an age when the incursions of Goths and Vandals were producing frightful wretchedness. He seems to have held right views of the responsibility of property, and instead of divesting himself of it at once, he kept it to use for his brethren. Nor did he separate from his wife after the fashion of Ennodius and others of the age. They labored together to the end. About 409 he was elected Bishop of Nola, and occupied that see until his death. Among his gifts to his people was a new aqueduct to supply their town with pure water, an evidence of his breadth of mind and genuine humanity. When he died he was added to the list of the recognized saints, and few with better right.His literary achievement was not great, although everything hehas written has its interest. His epistles and poems are reflections of both his excellence and his faults. They show at once the good heart of the man and his proneness to superstition. But his contemporaries thought his poems wonderful, and even some of the moderns have re-echoed this estimate. Erasmus calls him “the Christian Cicero,” a title more frequently assigned to Lactantius. Caspar Barth, in hisAdversaria(1624), declines to rank any other Christian poet above him. His poems exhibit the decadence of Latin verse, in that quantity is often neglected and accent used to replace it. Only a few of them are hymns in any sense, and these are narrative or reflective rather than lyric. Bjorn gives two of them in his collection.This fifth century also brings us the first woman among the Christian singers. Elpis, identified by a somewhat doubtful tradition with Helpes, the first wife of the pagan philosopher Boethius, has left a florid hymn in honor of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which holds its place in modified form in the Roman Breviary, and is divided into two hymns. She employs accentuated verse, while the verses in Boethius’s classic work,De Consolatione Philosophiae, conform to the quantitative prosody of classic poetry. Another hymn on the same Apostles,Felix per omnes festum mundi cardines, is ascribed to her and also to Paulinus of Nola. The Breviary hymn,Miris modis repente liber, is a recast of part of it.There are several poems and chronicles which are ascribed to Prosper Tyro, whom some identify with Prosper of Aquitaine (403-65), the Gallic champion of strict Augustinian orthodoxy against the semi-Pelagian party in that province—John Cassian, Vincent of Lerins, etc. This is the more likely, as Prosper loved to “drop into poetry” even in his controversial treatises. George Cassander includes a hymn from Prosper Tyro’s works in his collection.Many of the finest of Ambrosian hymns, which have taken rank among the favorites of Western Christendom, as sharing the noble spirit and the torrent-like power of utterance of the great Bishop of Milan, are credited by the hymnologists to the sixth century—the age of Benedict of Nursia, Caesarius of Arles, Belisarius, and Gregory the Great. We give Mr. Duffield’s translation of two of the finest, regretting that he did not live to translate others which he had marked with that view in his Index:CHRISTE QUI LUX ET DIES.Christ who art the light and day,Drive the shades of night away,Thou, who art the Light of light,Make our pathway glad and bright.Now we pray thee, holy Lord,Keep us safely by thy word;Night and day at peace in theeMay our spirits rested be.Let no evil dream appear,Let no enemy draw near,Let us bow to thee alone,Thou who pitiest thine own!While in sleep we close our eyes,May our hearts forever riseUnto thee, whose mighty handKeeps thine own in every land.Look upon us, our Defence!Drive all lurking traitors hence,Rule thy children, O most Good,Who are purchased with thy blood.Be thou mindful of our state,In this body profligate;Guard our minds, and ever beNear us, Lord, as we to thee.TELLURIS INGENS CONDITOR.Thou mighty Maker of earth’s frame,Who gavest land and sea their name,Hast swept the waters to their bound,And fixed for aye the solid ground.That soon upspringing should be seenThe herb with blossoms gold and green,And fruit which ripely hangeth there,And grass to which the herds repair.Relieve the sorrows of the soul!Our wounded spirits make thou whole,That tears may sinful deeds allay,And cleanse all baser lusts away.Let us be swayed by thy decree,From many evils set us free;With goodness fill the waiting heart,And keep all fear of death apart!To the same sixth century belong some notable hymns which have not even a school to which to assign their paternity. The most famous of these is theAd coenam Agni providi,which has been twice rewritten in conformity with the laws of classic prosody, reappearing in the Roman Breviary as theAd regias Agni dapes, and in the Paris Breviary as theForti tegente brachio. In English there have been at least twelve versions since 1710. The great merit of the hymn is the vigorous and terse way in which the mystical correspondence of the Christian sacrament to the Jewish passover, and of our deliverance from the yoke of Satan to the Jewish deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, are worked out. As Daniel suggests, its first stanza refers to the old usage that the catechumens, who had received baptism just before Easter, partook of the other sacrament on the first Sunday after Easter (Dominicus in albis), wearing the white robes of their baptism (stolis albis candidi). Another notable but fatherless hymn of this age is theSanctorum meritis inclyta gaudiis—a beautiful commemoration of the martyrs whose sufferings were still so vividly remembered by the Church. Quite worthy of mention also is the Lenten hymn,Jam Christe, sol justitiae, which expresses the early Christian attitude toward God’s works, connecting the looked-for Easter with the renewal of the world by the spring—“Dies venit, dies tuaIn qua reflorent omnia.”The hymn for All Saints Day,Psallat plebis sexus omnis voce corde carmina, is notable not only for its own vigor, but as being one of the oldest in which the alliterative principle of the early Celtic and Teutonic verse is employed in Latin. It therefore comes from the North of Europe, with the chances in favor of Ireland.Of known but less important hymn-writers of the sixth century we have only two, Columba and Flavius. The former is the greatIrish missionary known to his countrymen as Columcille (the Dove, or the Dove of the Church), who livedA.D.521 to 597. He was one of the O’Donnells of Donegal, whose chiefs, something more than seventy years before his birth, had offered especial opposition to Patrick’s preaching. He studied in the great school founded at Clonard, on the upper waters of the Boyne, by Finnian, the first of those teachers who made the Ireland of this and the following centuries “the land of schools,” to which students flocked from Great Britain and even the Continent. Finnian sent him to Clonfad to obtain ordination as a bishop; but the bishop, who was ploughing in the field when he came, made a mistake and gave him ordination as a priest. And he never rose higher than this in hierarchical dignity. Not that it mattered much in the very elastic system of Church government Patrick had established in Ireland. The tribal or sept system was copied in the Church arrangement. At the head of each church sept stood acoarb, who might be a woman, and frequently was a priest or deacon. Under this jurisdiction the bishops took the same relative place that the bards held to the chiefs in the civil tribes. Sometimes there would be a dozen of these right reverend fathers in God in one small Irish town, all under the direction of a femalecoarb, miscalled an abbess by later authors, as the Church sept has been miscalled a monastery.As a penance for having been the cause of a faction fight or civil war—one hardly knows which to call it—over the ownership of a psalter, Columba banished himself from Ireland and took up his abode at Iona (or Hy), from which centre he preached the Gospel to the Scots (i.e., Irish) and Picts (i.e., Welsh) of the Highlands and the Western Islands. The former had conquered this region in the fifth century and were yet to give their name to the whole country, although up toA.D.1198 there is no instance of Scotus meaning Scotchman rather than Irishman. But while Christianity had penetrated even the wilds of Donegal in Ireland, these Irish of Scotland and their Cymric subjects still were pagans. So as Patrick was Scotland’s gift to Ireland, Columcille was Ireland’s to Scotland. He was the type of those persuasive and successful missionaries which the Church of Patrick sent through Great Britain and to the Continent. He used the power of song very freely in his missionary labors, confounding the Druids andattracting the people by the grave, sweet melody of the Church’s chants. Like Whitefield and Summerfield, he had a wonderful, because pure voice and could sing so as to be heard a mile away. He, too, was a poet of no mean merit. The sorrows of his voluntary exile from the land of his birth—the land which exercises such a weird fascination over her children that all other lands are to her what prose is to poetry or water to wine—seem to have wakened in him the gift of song. Less beautiful than these patriotic elegies is the abecedarian hymn on the spiritual history of our world,Altus prositor, vetustus dierum, et ingenitus, which is given in the Appendix to theLyra Sacra Hibernica(Belfast, 1879) and in the second part of Dr. J. H. Todd’sLiber Hymnorum. It is written in a very rude Latinity, and is intended for instruction and edification rather than lyric expression. But it is an interesting monument of the faith of the great missionary, as it brings us nearer him than does the wonderful biography by Abbot Adamnan, his seventh successor at Iona. It was first printed in 1657 by the Irish scholar Colgan, and with it two other and shorter hymns (In Te, Christe, credentiumandNoli, Pater, indulgere), which also may be Columcille’s.Flavius was Bishop of Chalons in the year 580, and has left one hymn,Tellus et aeth’ra jubilent, which Daniel calls an excellent poem (carmen eximium). Its theme is our Lord’s washing the feet of the Apostles, and for this reason it was commonly sung after meals in some monasteries.Of the seventh century, the century of Heraclius and Mahomet, there is not one great hymn-writer known as such, but there are some great hymns. The greatest is theUrbs beata Hirusalem, dicta pacis visio, of which theAngulare fundamentumis a part, and which is of the seventh or eighth century. Daniel, however, with the support of Schlosser, regards this hymn as not certainly older than the tenth century, and has Neale’s support in asserting that the last two verses are a later addition to give it suitableness for singing at a dedication of a church.[24]The earliest mention of its use in the tenth century is in the church of Poitiers at the annual blessing of the font on Easter Sunday, which tends to confirmthe supposition that two verses have been added. He thinks it of Spanish origin, as the metrical form is one usual in the Mozarabic Breviary. In later days it underwent three revisions. In the old Paris Breviary of 1527 it becomes theUrbs Jerusalem beata; in the new Breviary of 1736 it becomes theUrbs beata, vera pacis visiounder the hands of Abbé Besnault (ob.1726). In the Roman Breviary of 1631 it is theCoelestis Urbs Jerusalem, the form, as usual, best known to modern readers and translators, but not the best worth knowing. Along with theUrbs beatawe may place theGloriosa Jerusalem, probably of Spanish origin, and of the same century as well as similar in contents, but unequal in beauty and poetic worth.Next in worth is the abecedarian judgment hymn,Apparabet repentina dies magna Domini, which Neale speaks of as containing the germ of theDies Irae. It is little more than a rehearsal in a trochaic metre of our Lord’s prediction of the Day of Judgment. It follows the Scripture text much more closely than does Thomas of Celano. Bede mentions it in the next century. Mrs. Charles has translated it.To this seventh century or the next Mone refers theSalvator mundi, Domine, which is most probably an Anglo-Saxon hymn, although of the Ambrosian school. It reappears in the AnglicanOrariumof 1560 and thePreces Privataeof 1564, and is said to have been familiar to Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Ken through its use at Wykeham’s school in Winchester. It, along with theTe lucis ante terminum, also sung at Winchester, may have suggested both Bishop Ken’s “Glory to thee, my God, this night,” and Browne’s “The night is come, like to the day,” given in hisReligio Medici. To the seventh century we also may refer theQuicunque vultesse salvus, a hymn better known as the Athanasian Creed.Besides these there are two groups of hymns whose temporal limits do not lie within the seventh century on either side, but which may be as well discussed here as anywhere. The first are the early Spanish hymn-writers. We know by name three of the seventh century. The first is Isidore, Archbishop of Seville (570-636), the scholar of encyclopaedic range, who did so much to adapt the learning of the Romans to the wants of the Gothic community in Spain. To him are ascribed, somewhat doubtfully, threeballad-hymns in honor of as many martyrs and two abecedarian poems on repentance. More certainly authentic are three or four ascribed to his contemporary Eugenius, who was Archbishop of Toledo from 646 to 657. He has left us thirty-two Latin poems in classic metres, none of which, strictly speaking, are hymns, but hisRex Deus immensehas found its way into the collections. In his day he worked hard to improve the singing and other services of the Church. Lastly, there is the Spanish magistrate Cyxilla, who built a church in honor of the martyr Thyrsus of Toledo, and wrote a hymn for the dedication, though some say he got Isidore to do it for him. Daniel (I., 190) gives it in full from the Mozarabic[25]Breviary. But far more important are the anonymous hymns of that Breviary, which constituted the hymnary of the old Spanish Church at the date of the conquest of the country by the Saracens (711-14), and which through the temporary prostration of the Church’s energy was preserved from additions and alterations. The collection therefore is interesting as containing nothing of later date than the eighth century, and probably very little that is later than the seventh. Besides a large number of hymns traceable to other authors, from Hilary to Gregory—most of them from Ambrose and his school—there are forty-eight hymns peculiar to this ancient Breviary. Of these the best known are theAlleluia piis edite laudibus, theCunctorum rex omnipotens, theJesu defensor omnium, theO Dei perenne Verbumof Bishop Arturus Serranus of Toledo, theSacer octavarum dies, theSacrata Christi tempora, and theSurgentes ad Te, Domine. It is well known that the hymns of Ambrose and his school enjoyed great repute in Spain. These unnamed writers evidently have studied at his feet, their mode of dealing with the great themes of Christian praise having much in common with his. The country, however, which gave Seneca, Lucan, and Quinctilian to Latin literature was underno necessity merely to imitate an Italian model; and we find these Spanish poets departing widely from Ambrose’s school as regards the form of their verse. The four-lined stanza, with four iambic feet (u -) in each line—a line used by the tragedian Seneca before it was adopted by the Christian poets—is the form of verse employed almost exclusively by the Ambrosian school. The Mozarabic writers also use it (Convexa solis orbita), but they also employ as a substitute a trochaic verse of eleven syllables (Lucis auctor clemens, lumen immensum) and more complex choriambic forms (Alleluia piis edite laudibus, etc.). But their hymns, as a whole, lack pith and force; not one of them has earned a place by itself in the affections of Latin Christendom.The second national group is that of the early Irish writers of Latin hymns. There are not so many of these, and still fewer names have been preserved. But they deserve notice as monuments of that aggressive Church whose missionary labors rendered such grand service in the Christianization of Western Europe. Of Caelius Sedulius there is enough said in the chapter devoted to him and his acrostic hymn. Of Columcille and theAltus Deus prositorwe have spoken above. The next name which meets us is that of Ladkenus or Lathacan, an Irishman of the seventh century, to whom is ascribed a hymn of the class called in IrishLuireach(orlorica), meaning a shield. There are two hymns of this class ascribed to Patrick and to Columcille. The former, best known by James Clarence Mangan’s version,“At Tara to-day, in this awful hour,I call on the holy Trinity!”is probably not the work of the Apostle of Ireland; but as it, like that of Columcille, is in Irish, it need not detain us here. The latter begins,“Alone am I upon the mountain,O King of heaven, prosper my way,And then nothing need I fear,More than if guarded by six thousand.”That of Lathacan, while possessing the same general character, as aiming at a Christian substitute for the Druidical charms of the pagans, is on a lower level both religiously and poetically. No less than eleven of its twenty-three quatrains are occupied withthe enumeration of the parts of the human body, which are placed under divine protection, and these may be not without interest to the students of the history of physiological knowledge.Many of the early Irish hymns are in the national language, which was at that time the vehicle of a vigorous native poetry. Of those in Latin the most beautiful is the Communion hymn,“Sancti venite,Christi corpus sumite,”which both Daniel and Neale praise for its noble simplicity. An old Irish legend, to which we need not pin our faith, represents Patrick and his nephew Sechnall as hearing the angels sing it first, during the offertory before the communion, and adds, “So from that time to the present that hymn is chanted in Erinn when the body of Christ is received.” Singing at the communion was not unusual in the early Church, and Gregory of Tours has preserved an antiphon used at that sacrament which closely resembles the Irish hymn. But it is now disused.The hymn is found in the Bangor Antiphonary, an old Irish manuscript of the seventh century, first published by Muratori in hisAnecdota(1697-98). From Bangor it had been carried to Bobbio, the famous monastery founded on Italian soil by the Irish missionary Columbanus after he had been driven out of Burgundy by the reigning powers. From Bobbio it made its way to the Ambrosian Library at Milan, where Muratori found it. It is one of the most interesting monuments of the early Irish Church, and its hymns are given or indicated by Daniel in his fourth volume. The first is a series of quintains, each for one of the canonical hours. Then theHymnum dicat turba fratrum, which already Beda described ashymnus ille pulcherrimus, is found in a mutilated form in the Antiphonary, and ascribed to Hilary. It is a terse rehearsal of the facts of our Lord’s birth, life, passion, and resurrection. Daniel suggests that it is one of the primitive hymns of the martyr-ages of the Church to which Pliny refers, and brought into Latin from the original Greek by some scholarly Briton or Irish man. Then a hymn in commemoration of the Apostles (Precamur Patrem), of which also Daniel thinks that Irish scholarship may have rendered from the Greek. Then a morning hymn based on the Constantinopolitan creed (Spiritus divinae lucis gloriae); andanother in honor of the martyrs (Sacratissimi Martyres summi Dei); theLoricaof Lathacan; and two hymns in honor of St. Patrick, one by Sechnall and the other by Fiacc. Daniel gives only the former, which is an abecedary hymn. Both are full of the marvellous—an element not wanting even in the contemporary documents of Patrick’s life, and quite abundant in those of later date.Besides these there are four other hymns which Mone has shown to be of Irish authorship. The first is theJesus refulsit omnium, which has been ascribed to Hilary, but is shown not to be his not only by the rhyme, but by the alliteration which marks it as originating in the North of Europe. It is found in manuscripts, German and English, of the eleventh century; but Mone ascribes it to an Irish author both because of the strophe employed and because of the mixture of Greek words with the Latin, the Irish being the best Greek scholars of the West, and being not disinclined to show off their erudition in this way. Another is an abecedary hymn,Ad coeli clara non sum dignus sidera, famous as having been supposed by some stupid critic to be the lost evening hymn which Hilary sent from the East to his daughter along with theLucis largitor splendide. It probably is as old as the sixth or seventh century, both the structure of the verse and the allusions to pagan beliefs and Christian heresies indicating that antiquity. The use of alliteration and other peculiarities indicate an Irish author, but probably a monk of Bobbio, as the accentuated Sapphic verse was in use in that country. Here are seven of its most characteristic stanzas:

Glory to the Eternal One,Glory to the only Son,Glory to the Spirit be,Now and through eternity.

Glory to the Eternal One,

Glory to the only Son,

Glory to the Spirit be,

Now and through eternity.

Of the other writers of the Breviary only a few need detain us. Most of them are poets of the conventional sort, whose verse evidences the care taken with their education rather than their possession of any native genius, although Jean Commire (1625-1702) was of wide reputation in his day. Even of good Claude Santeul the best that can be said is that several of his hymns have passed for the composition of his brother, and that the two Trinity hymns (Ter sancte, ter potens DeusandO luce quae tua lates) and the three on Lazarus (Redditum luce, Domino vocante, Panditur saxo tumulus remoto, andIntrante Christo Bethanicam domum) deserve the honor. They make us regret the loss of these two manuscript volumes. An unfinished translation of one of these, left by Mr. Duffield, has been completed for us by Dr. A. R. Thompson. The asterisk marks the transition from the one translator to the other—

O hidden by the very light,O ever-blessed Trinity,Thee we confess, and thee believe,With pious heart we long for thee!

O hidden by the very light,

O ever-blessed Trinity,

Thee we confess, and thee believe,

With pious heart we long for thee!

O Holy Father of the saints,O God of very God, the Son,O Bond of Love, the Holy Ghost,Who joinest all the Three in One!

O Holy Father of the saints,

O God of very God, the Son,

O Bond of Love, the Holy Ghost,

Who joinest all the Three in One!

That God the Father might beholdHimself, *coeval was the Son;Also the Love that binds them both;So, God of God, the perfect One.

That God the Father might behold

Himself, *coeval was the Son;

Also the Love that binds them both;

So, God of God, the perfect One.

Complete the Father in the Son,The Son, the Father in complete,And the full Spirit in them both;The Father, Son, and Paraclete.

Complete the Father in the Son,

The Son, the Father in complete,

And the full Spirit in them both;

The Father, Son, and Paraclete.

As is the Son, the Spirit is.Each as the Father, verily.The Three, One all transcendent Truth,One all transcendent Love, the Three.

As is the Son, the Spirit is.

Each as the Father, verily.

The Three, One all transcendent Truth,

One all transcendent Love, the Three.

Father, and Son, and Holy GhostEternally, let all adore;Who liveth and who reigneth, God,Ages on ages, evermore!

Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost

Eternally, let all adore;

Who liveth and who reigneth, God,

Ages on ages, evermore!

Next we have Nicolas le Tourneux (1640-1686), the severe Jansenist, whose preaching drew such crowds in Paris that the King asked the reason. “Sire,” replied Boileau, “your Majesty knows how people run after novelty; this is a preacher who preaches the Gospel. When he mounts the pulpit, he frightens you by his ugliness, so that you wish he would leave it; and when he begins to speak, you are afraid that he may.” It was hisAnnée Chrétiennewhich suggested theChristian Yearto John Keble. We have seen how he coached Jean Santeul both as to the matter of his hymns and the right spirit for a Christian poet. But the great preacher’s own hymns aresermoni propriores, “properer for a sermon,” to borrow Lamb’s mistranslation. Verse was a fetter to him, not a wing. His best are the Ascension hymn,Adeste, Coelitum chori, and that on the Baptist,Jussu tyranni pro fide. The former we give in the excellent translation of Rev. A. R. Thompson, D.D.:

Hither come, ye choirs immortal,Singing joyful canticles!Christ hath passed the grave’s dark portal,With the dead no more he dwells.

Hither come, ye choirs immortal,

Singing joyful canticles!

Christ hath passed the grave’s dark portal,

With the dead no more he dwells.

All in vain doth malice stationWatchful guards the tomb before,All in vain the faithless nationSets the seal upon the door.

All in vain doth malice station

Watchful guards the tomb before,

All in vain the faithless nation

Sets the seal upon the door.

Fruitless terror, from this prisonNone have stolen him away,But by his own strength arisen,Victor, ends he death’s dread fray.

Fruitless terror, from this prison

None have stolen him away,

But by his own strength arisen,

Victor, ends he death’s dread fray.

Prisoned, and the seal unbroken,He can leave at will the tomb,As at first—behold the token—He could leave the Virgin’s womb.

Prisoned, and the seal unbroken,

He can leave at will the tomb,

As at first—behold the token—

He could leave the Virgin’s womb.

When he on the tree hung dying,Raving men, who round him stood,“Come down from the cross,” were crying,“Then we own thee Son of God.”

When he on the tree hung dying,

Raving men, who round him stood,

“Come down from the cross,” were crying,

“Then we own thee Son of God.”

But, his Father’s will obeyingEven unto death, he dies;Priest and Victim, ’tis the slayingOf the world’s great Sacrifice.

But, his Father’s will obeying

Even unto death, he dies;

Priest and Victim, ’tis the slaying

Of the world’s great Sacrifice.

Nay, the cross was not forsaken;Dead, yet greater thing did he,By himself, his life retakenProved him Son of God to be.

Nay, the cross was not forsaken;

Dead, yet greater thing did he,

By himself, his life retaken

Proved him Son of God to be.

With thee dying, with thee rising,Grant, O Christ, that we may be,Earthly vanities despising,Choosing heaven all lovingly!

With thee dying, with thee rising,

Grant, O Christ, that we may be,

Earthly vanities despising,

Choosing heaven all lovingly!

Praise be to the Father given,To the Son, our Leader. HeCalleth us with him to heaven;Spirit, equal praise to thee!

Praise be to the Father given,

To the Son, our Leader. He

Calleth us with him to heaven;

Spirit, equal praise to thee!

A man of very different powers is the Abbé Sebastian Besnault, of whom nothing is told us except that he was chaplain of the parish of St. Maurice in Sens, and died in 1726. The six hymns ascribed to him in the Paris Breviary are among the finest in that collection. Three are hymns on the Circumcision (Debilis cessent elementa legis;Felix dies, quam proprio; andNoxium Christus simul introivit); one is an Ascension hymn (Promissa, tellus, concipe gaudium), and two are Dedication hymns (Ecce sedes hic TonantisandUrbs beata, vera pacis), the latter being a recast of theUrbs beata Hierusalem. Quite justly does A. Gazier (in his thesisDe Santolii Victorini Sacris Hymnis, Paris, 1875) say that if Besnault equalled Jean Santeul in the volume of his hymns, he would not rank below him as a sacred poet, since he quite equals him in his Latinity and is his superior as a spiritual writer. We giveDr. A. R. Thompson’s version of his recast of theUrbs beata Hierusalem:

Blessed city, vision trueOf sweet peace, Jerusalem,How majestic to the viewRise thy lofty walls, in themLiving stones in beauty stand,Polished, set, by God’s own hand.

Blessed city, vision true

Of sweet peace, Jerusalem,

How majestic to the view

Rise thy lofty walls, in them

Living stones in beauty stand,

Polished, set, by God’s own hand.

Every several gate of thineOf one pearl effulgent is,Golden fair thy wall doth shine,Blended lustrously with this,And thy wall doth rest aloneUpon Christ the Corner-stone.

Every several gate of thine

Of one pearl effulgent is,

Golden fair thy wall doth shine,

Blended lustrously with this,

And thy wall doth rest alone

Upon Christ the Corner-stone.

Thy sun is the martyred Lamb,God thy temple. Angels vieWith the saints, a joyful psalmEver lifting up on high,And the Holiest worshipping,Holy, Holy, Holy sing.

Thy sun is the martyred Lamb,

God thy temple. Angels vie

With the saints, a joyful psalm

Ever lifting up on high,

And the Holiest worshipping,

Holy, Holy, Holy sing.

Evermore stand open wide,Heavenly city, all thy gates.But, who would in thee abide,Who thy walls to enter waits,Must, that meed of life to win,Agonize to conquer sin.

Evermore stand open wide,

Heavenly city, all thy gates.

But, who would in thee abide,

Who thy walls to enter waits,

Must, that meed of life to win,

Agonize to conquer sin.

To the Father, to the Son,Endless adoration be!Spirit, binding both in One,Endless worship unto thee!Hallowed by thy chrism divine,We become thy living shrine.

To the Father, to the Son,

Endless adoration be!

Spirit, binding both in One,

Endless worship unto thee!

Hallowed by thy chrism divine,

We become thy living shrine.

Along with Coffin should be named one of his friends, a young advocate named Combault, who possessed something of the spirit and energy of Jean Santeul. How far he contributed to the Breviary of 1736 I am unable to say, but a well-founded tradition designates him as the author of a splendid rhetorical hymn in commemoration of the Apostles Peter and Paul (Tandem laborumgloriosi Principes), which has been much admired. Combault died in 1785.

The whole impression which this school of hymn-writers makes upon us is like that of the Greco-French architecture of our own age. Both reflect the critical and useful, but somewhat exclusive spirit of the Renaissance. Both are capable of fine effects, great structural beauty, and a certain grandeur not of the highest order. But a Greco-French church will not bear comparison with Notre Dame; and the hymns of Santeul and Coffin will hardly better endure a comparison with the Christian singers who wrote when Notre Dame was new.

The known is but a fragment broken from the unknown. This is eminently true as regards the authorship of the Latin hymns. When we have dealt as tenderly as the historical conscience will permit with the traditions which assign hymns to this and that author, we still find ourselves unable to affix any name to the great majority. And while it is true that the most part of the very great hymns are not left in this plight of anonymity, it is true that no small number of the best are on the record like Melchizedek—“without father or mother,” and many of them also “without beginning of years,” for we can determine only approximately the century of their origin. Nor is this at all surprising. Fame was neither the object nor the expectation of the writers of the Latin hymns of the early and Middle Ages. Their utmost expectation, probably, was to be valued a little by their brethren in their own and their sister monasteries as the author of a fine sequence or an appropriate hymn for a yearly festival. It was enough for that purpose that the report of their authorship passed from mouth to mouth in the choir, without any record made of it. The love of glory as a literary motive, came in, as Mr. Symonds reminds us, with the Renaissance, which borrowed it from the old pagans. Many a devout singer of the centuries before that practised the wisdom of à Kempis’s saying,Ama nesciri, “Love to be unknown.” They wrote not for gain in renown, but for use in the edification of their brethren and of the Church. And to live for use rather than gain is to live Christianly, for, as Swedenborg says, “The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom of uses.”

This and the next chapter we shall give partly to some of these orphaned hymns, touching only on the greatest. And as we come down the centuries we shall speak also of the less notable hymn-writers,some of them not less notable as men or as Churchmen, but such as have made less of a mark in hymnology.

At the outset we are met by two of the greatest of the sacred songs of the Church, which are none the less hymns although classed technically as canticles. Who wrote theGloria in Excelsisand theTe Deum laudamus? As everybody knows, the opening words of the former are the song of the angels who brought the good news to the shepherds—words which authenticate their heavenly origin by their simplicity, beauty, and force—“a master-song,” as Luther says, “which neither grew nor was made on earth, but came down from heaven.” But the much longer supplement, which evidently reflects the situation of the Church in the days of the Arian controversy, must either have originated in the fourth century and in the East, or must have been altered to adapt it to that time. The original still exists in Greek, but in three forms, which differ somewhat; and the Latin version is defective in that it follows a later form than that which is given in the so-calledApostolical Constitutions; and, of course, the English follows the Latin, except in the part taken from the Gospel, where “good will to men” takes the place of “to men of good will” (hominibus bonae voluntatis), the latter being the reading adopted by the English translators of 1611, but rejected by the revisers of 1883.[22]

Who made the Latin version? An untrustworthy tradition ascribes it to Telesphorus, who was Bishop of Rome in 128-38. It is possible that he prescribed the chanting of the Scripture words in the Church service; but the whole hymn is of later date in Latin. There is much more likelihood that it was, according to a tradition recorded by Alcuin in the ninth century, the work of Hilary of Poitiers, the first Latin hymn-writer.

TheTe Deum laudamushas some claims to be regarded as the greatest of Christian hymns. Like theGloria in Excelsisit belongs to that first period of Christian hymn-writing, when the Hebrew psalms still furnished the models for Christian poets, and the same free movement of rhythmical prose was all that was required or even tolerated. There is no mention of it in Churchliterature before the sixth century, when the monastic rules of both Caesarius of Arles (c.527) and of Benedict of Nursia (c.530) prescribe its use, and the Council of Toledo mentions it. As it uses the words of the Vulgate in verses 22-25 and 27 to the end, it cannot, as it now stands, be much more than a century older than this, as the date of the Vulgate is 382-404. Yet a tradition recorded by Abbot Abbo of Fleury in the ninth century, ascribes this hymn also to Hilary of Poitiers, who died fifteen years before Jerome put his hand to the work of revising the Latin Bible. Daniel thinks to reconcile the discrepancy by ascribing it to Hilary of Arles, who was born the year before Jerome had finished his work, and by regarding it as a translation from the Greek, as verses 22-26 certainly are. They are found in the Appendix to the Alexandrian manuscript of the Greek New Testament, where they follow theGloria in Excelsiswith the interruption only of an Amen. But is it not possible to regard the last eight verses as a separate hymn, made up, with the exception of the strong verse—

26.Dignare, Domine, die isto sine peccato nos custodire—

of verses from the Scriptures? These last verses have no internal connection with the first twenty-two, and they differ decidedly in style, form, and source. Those contain no Scripture quotations, except theTer-Sanctusin verses 5 and 6, which is not taken from the Vulgate version,[23]but apparently from the Itala. If, therefore, we consider those twenty-two verses as a hymn by themselves, this may have been the work of Hilary of Poitiers, and there is no necessity for assuming that it was not an original Latin hymn. This becomes more probable if we drop out verse 13, which interrupts the flow of the Christological thought, and evidently was interpolated to make the hymn complete from a Trinitarian pointof view. When theGloria in Excelsisand theTe Deumwere composed, it was the relation of the Son to the Father which occupied the mind of the Church. Both hymns are the expression of “the present truth” on that subject; the mention of the Holy Spirit in both is probably by interpolation at a later date.

As the form, and in some places the meaning of theTe Deumis misrepresented in the current version, it may be worth while to reproduce the original in a more literal version:

1.Thee as God we praise,Thee as Lord we own,

1.Thee as God we praise,

Thee as Lord we own,

2.Thee as eternal Father all the earth doth worship,

3.Thee all the angels—To thee heaven and all its powers,

3.Thee all the angels—

To thee heaven and all its powers,

4.To thee cherubim and seraphim with unceasing voice cry aloud,

5.Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth,

6.The heavens and the earth are full of the majesty of thy glory!

7.Thee the glorious choir of the apostles,

8.Thee the praiseworthy company of the prophets,

9.Thee the white-robed army of the martyrs praiseth.

10.Thee, through the circle of the lands, the Holy Church confesseth

11.Father of unbounded majesty;

12.Thy adorable, true and only Son.

13 (14).Thou King of glory, O Christ,

14 (15).Thou of the Father art the Son eternal.

15 (16).Thou, to deliver us, tookest manhood,Thou didst not dread the Virgin’s womb.

15 (16).Thou, to deliver us, tookest manhood,

Thou didst not dread the Virgin’s womb.

16 (17).Thou, since thou hast overcome the sting of death,Hast opened to believers the kingdom of heaven.

16 (17).Thou, since thou hast overcome the sting of death,

Hast opened to believers the kingdom of heaven.

17 (18).Thou, at the right hand of God, sittest in the glory of the Father;

18 (19).As our judge thou art believed to be coming.

19 (20)Thee therefore we beg,Assist thy servants whom thou hast redeemed with precious blood.

19 (20)Thee therefore we beg,

Assist thy servants whom thou hast redeemed with precious blood.

20 (21).Cause us to be gifted, among thy saints, with eternal glory.

Amen.

There are no other unfathered hymns known to be of this century, and few less notable hymn-writers. To Jerome is ascribed a hymn,Te Bethlehem celebrat, which is not in any of the collections. His great contemporary, Augustine of Hippo, has had more than one fine hymn assigned to him, probably because his works have furnished the suggestion for so many. Notably Peter Damiani and Hildebert of Tours drew upon him. But the great theologian was not a poet, as we can see from his one essay inthat form, viz., his “psalm” against the Donatists, in which he gives a popular and metrical exposition of the parable of the net (Matt. 13:47-50). It is quite enough to prove that he did not write theAd perennis vitae fontem(Damiani), or theQuid, tyranne, quid minaris(Damiani), or theO gens beata coelitum, or even theDomine Jesu, noverim me, all of which have been given to him at times.

To the fifth century—the century of Prudentius and Ennodius—we may ascribe the earlier in the large group of hymns classed as Ambrosian, which are the work of a series of writers who may be described as constituting a school. It is one of the hardest problems in Latin hymnology to distinguish between Ambrose’s own work and that of his imitators, and to arrange the hymns composed by the latter between the fifth and the eighth century in any chronological order. What can be said positively has been shown in Chapter V. The chief authorities on the subject are the early collectors, Clichtove, Cassander, and Thomasius. Of considerable importance is theMS.given by Francis Junius in the seventeenth century to the University of Oxford, and published in 1830 by Jacob Grimm. It contains a collection of twenty-six hymns by Ambrose and the Ambrosians, with a translation into old High German, probably made at St. Gall in the ninth century. But these do not exhaust the list. Others have been pointed out by Mone and other collectors, as proving their kinship to the school by their metrical form or their contents and style. Schletterer enumerates ninety hymns of the school, and of these he assigns fifteen to Ambrose himself.

Closely related to the group, and yet not assigned to it, are several hymns to which a very early date is assigned by Mone at least. To this fifth century he gives theUnam duorum gloriam, which he also claims as of German origin, and describes as one of the oldest hymns of the German Church. It is in commemoration of two martyrs, to whose honor a church near Münster was dedicated, and is strictly classic in metre. Here also he assigns theChristi caterva clamitat, an Advent hymn of classic metre and primitive tone. He probably would agree with Wackernagel in selecting the same century for the hymn on Stephen, the protomartyr,Primatis aulae coelicae, in which he finds reminders of the style of Prudentius. Lastly, he assigns this date to the Paschal hymn,Telucis auctor personat, which became obsolete when its special reference to Easter as the time of the baptism of adult catechumens lost its significance. It was used in France and probably other countries.

To the same fifth century belongs Paulinus, Bishop of Nola (353-431), who has many better claims to remembrance than his hymns. He was one of those men of whom their contemporaries cannot speak without enthusiasm, and as Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose are among his eulogists we may assume that the praise was not undeserved. He came of a noble Gallic stock; he inherited wealth and acquired from the teaching of the poet Ausonius all the culture of his time; he filled high office in Italy and Spain; he spent the last twenty-two years of his life in administering with a faithful laboriousness the affairs of a Campanian bishopric. He did not receive baptism until his thirty-fifth year, so that he may have been brought up a pagan, although the inference is not necessary. In 378 he was made Roman consul to fill an unexpired term (consul suffectus), and was sent into Campania at the end of the year. There he was so deeply impressed by a festival in honor of the martyr Vincent of Nola, that his affections were drawn strongly to the city. But soon after he married a Spanish wife and went to live first at Bordeaux and then at Barcelona. At the former in 389 he was received into the membership of the Church; at the latter he and his wife, after the death of their infant son, resolved to renounce the “secular” life and to give themselves to asceticism and charity. He was ordained to the priesthood in response to a general demand of the people during the Christmas festivities. He removed to Nola, where he and his wife lived in the service of the poor, in an age when the incursions of Goths and Vandals were producing frightful wretchedness. He seems to have held right views of the responsibility of property, and instead of divesting himself of it at once, he kept it to use for his brethren. Nor did he separate from his wife after the fashion of Ennodius and others of the age. They labored together to the end. About 409 he was elected Bishop of Nola, and occupied that see until his death. Among his gifts to his people was a new aqueduct to supply their town with pure water, an evidence of his breadth of mind and genuine humanity. When he died he was added to the list of the recognized saints, and few with better right.

His literary achievement was not great, although everything hehas written has its interest. His epistles and poems are reflections of both his excellence and his faults. They show at once the good heart of the man and his proneness to superstition. But his contemporaries thought his poems wonderful, and even some of the moderns have re-echoed this estimate. Erasmus calls him “the Christian Cicero,” a title more frequently assigned to Lactantius. Caspar Barth, in hisAdversaria(1624), declines to rank any other Christian poet above him. His poems exhibit the decadence of Latin verse, in that quantity is often neglected and accent used to replace it. Only a few of them are hymns in any sense, and these are narrative or reflective rather than lyric. Bjorn gives two of them in his collection.

This fifth century also brings us the first woman among the Christian singers. Elpis, identified by a somewhat doubtful tradition with Helpes, the first wife of the pagan philosopher Boethius, has left a florid hymn in honor of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which holds its place in modified form in the Roman Breviary, and is divided into two hymns. She employs accentuated verse, while the verses in Boethius’s classic work,De Consolatione Philosophiae, conform to the quantitative prosody of classic poetry. Another hymn on the same Apostles,Felix per omnes festum mundi cardines, is ascribed to her and also to Paulinus of Nola. The Breviary hymn,Miris modis repente liber, is a recast of part of it.

There are several poems and chronicles which are ascribed to Prosper Tyro, whom some identify with Prosper of Aquitaine (403-65), the Gallic champion of strict Augustinian orthodoxy against the semi-Pelagian party in that province—John Cassian, Vincent of Lerins, etc. This is the more likely, as Prosper loved to “drop into poetry” even in his controversial treatises. George Cassander includes a hymn from Prosper Tyro’s works in his collection.

Many of the finest of Ambrosian hymns, which have taken rank among the favorites of Western Christendom, as sharing the noble spirit and the torrent-like power of utterance of the great Bishop of Milan, are credited by the hymnologists to the sixth century—the age of Benedict of Nursia, Caesarius of Arles, Belisarius, and Gregory the Great. We give Mr. Duffield’s translation of two of the finest, regretting that he did not live to translate others which he had marked with that view in his Index:

Christ who art the light and day,Drive the shades of night away,Thou, who art the Light of light,Make our pathway glad and bright.

Christ who art the light and day,

Drive the shades of night away,

Thou, who art the Light of light,

Make our pathway glad and bright.

Now we pray thee, holy Lord,Keep us safely by thy word;Night and day at peace in theeMay our spirits rested be.

Now we pray thee, holy Lord,

Keep us safely by thy word;

Night and day at peace in thee

May our spirits rested be.

Let no evil dream appear,Let no enemy draw near,Let us bow to thee alone,Thou who pitiest thine own!

Let no evil dream appear,

Let no enemy draw near,

Let us bow to thee alone,

Thou who pitiest thine own!

While in sleep we close our eyes,May our hearts forever riseUnto thee, whose mighty handKeeps thine own in every land.

While in sleep we close our eyes,

May our hearts forever rise

Unto thee, whose mighty hand

Keeps thine own in every land.

Look upon us, our Defence!Drive all lurking traitors hence,Rule thy children, O most Good,Who are purchased with thy blood.

Look upon us, our Defence!

Drive all lurking traitors hence,

Rule thy children, O most Good,

Who are purchased with thy blood.

Be thou mindful of our state,In this body profligate;Guard our minds, and ever beNear us, Lord, as we to thee.

Be thou mindful of our state,

In this body profligate;

Guard our minds, and ever be

Near us, Lord, as we to thee.

Thou mighty Maker of earth’s frame,Who gavest land and sea their name,Hast swept the waters to their bound,And fixed for aye the solid ground.

Thou mighty Maker of earth’s frame,

Who gavest land and sea their name,

Hast swept the waters to their bound,

And fixed for aye the solid ground.

That soon upspringing should be seenThe herb with blossoms gold and green,And fruit which ripely hangeth there,And grass to which the herds repair.

That soon upspringing should be seen

The herb with blossoms gold and green,

And fruit which ripely hangeth there,

And grass to which the herds repair.

Relieve the sorrows of the soul!Our wounded spirits make thou whole,That tears may sinful deeds allay,And cleanse all baser lusts away.

Relieve the sorrows of the soul!

Our wounded spirits make thou whole,

That tears may sinful deeds allay,

And cleanse all baser lusts away.

Let us be swayed by thy decree,From many evils set us free;With goodness fill the waiting heart,And keep all fear of death apart!

Let us be swayed by thy decree,

From many evils set us free;

With goodness fill the waiting heart,

And keep all fear of death apart!

To the same sixth century belong some notable hymns which have not even a school to which to assign their paternity. The most famous of these is the

which has been twice rewritten in conformity with the laws of classic prosody, reappearing in the Roman Breviary as theAd regias Agni dapes, and in the Paris Breviary as theForti tegente brachio. In English there have been at least twelve versions since 1710. The great merit of the hymn is the vigorous and terse way in which the mystical correspondence of the Christian sacrament to the Jewish passover, and of our deliverance from the yoke of Satan to the Jewish deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, are worked out. As Daniel suggests, its first stanza refers to the old usage that the catechumens, who had received baptism just before Easter, partook of the other sacrament on the first Sunday after Easter (Dominicus in albis), wearing the white robes of their baptism (stolis albis candidi). Another notable but fatherless hymn of this age is theSanctorum meritis inclyta gaudiis—a beautiful commemoration of the martyrs whose sufferings were still so vividly remembered by the Church. Quite worthy of mention also is the Lenten hymn,Jam Christe, sol justitiae, which expresses the early Christian attitude toward God’s works, connecting the looked-for Easter with the renewal of the world by the spring—

“Dies venit, dies tuaIn qua reflorent omnia.”

“Dies venit, dies tua

In qua reflorent omnia.”

The hymn for All Saints Day,Psallat plebis sexus omnis voce corde carmina, is notable not only for its own vigor, but as being one of the oldest in which the alliterative principle of the early Celtic and Teutonic verse is employed in Latin. It therefore comes from the North of Europe, with the chances in favor of Ireland.

Of known but less important hymn-writers of the sixth century we have only two, Columba and Flavius. The former is the greatIrish missionary known to his countrymen as Columcille (the Dove, or the Dove of the Church), who livedA.D.521 to 597. He was one of the O’Donnells of Donegal, whose chiefs, something more than seventy years before his birth, had offered especial opposition to Patrick’s preaching. He studied in the great school founded at Clonard, on the upper waters of the Boyne, by Finnian, the first of those teachers who made the Ireland of this and the following centuries “the land of schools,” to which students flocked from Great Britain and even the Continent. Finnian sent him to Clonfad to obtain ordination as a bishop; but the bishop, who was ploughing in the field when he came, made a mistake and gave him ordination as a priest. And he never rose higher than this in hierarchical dignity. Not that it mattered much in the very elastic system of Church government Patrick had established in Ireland. The tribal or sept system was copied in the Church arrangement. At the head of each church sept stood acoarb, who might be a woman, and frequently was a priest or deacon. Under this jurisdiction the bishops took the same relative place that the bards held to the chiefs in the civil tribes. Sometimes there would be a dozen of these right reverend fathers in God in one small Irish town, all under the direction of a femalecoarb, miscalled an abbess by later authors, as the Church sept has been miscalled a monastery.

As a penance for having been the cause of a faction fight or civil war—one hardly knows which to call it—over the ownership of a psalter, Columba banished himself from Ireland and took up his abode at Iona (or Hy), from which centre he preached the Gospel to the Scots (i.e., Irish) and Picts (i.e., Welsh) of the Highlands and the Western Islands. The former had conquered this region in the fifth century and were yet to give their name to the whole country, although up toA.D.1198 there is no instance of Scotus meaning Scotchman rather than Irishman. But while Christianity had penetrated even the wilds of Donegal in Ireland, these Irish of Scotland and their Cymric subjects still were pagans. So as Patrick was Scotland’s gift to Ireland, Columcille was Ireland’s to Scotland. He was the type of those persuasive and successful missionaries which the Church of Patrick sent through Great Britain and to the Continent. He used the power of song very freely in his missionary labors, confounding the Druids andattracting the people by the grave, sweet melody of the Church’s chants. Like Whitefield and Summerfield, he had a wonderful, because pure voice and could sing so as to be heard a mile away. He, too, was a poet of no mean merit. The sorrows of his voluntary exile from the land of his birth—the land which exercises such a weird fascination over her children that all other lands are to her what prose is to poetry or water to wine—seem to have wakened in him the gift of song. Less beautiful than these patriotic elegies is the abecedarian hymn on the spiritual history of our world,Altus prositor, vetustus dierum, et ingenitus, which is given in the Appendix to theLyra Sacra Hibernica(Belfast, 1879) and in the second part of Dr. J. H. Todd’sLiber Hymnorum. It is written in a very rude Latinity, and is intended for instruction and edification rather than lyric expression. But it is an interesting monument of the faith of the great missionary, as it brings us nearer him than does the wonderful biography by Abbot Adamnan, his seventh successor at Iona. It was first printed in 1657 by the Irish scholar Colgan, and with it two other and shorter hymns (In Te, Christe, credentiumandNoli, Pater, indulgere), which also may be Columcille’s.

Flavius was Bishop of Chalons in the year 580, and has left one hymn,Tellus et aeth’ra jubilent, which Daniel calls an excellent poem (carmen eximium). Its theme is our Lord’s washing the feet of the Apostles, and for this reason it was commonly sung after meals in some monasteries.

Of the seventh century, the century of Heraclius and Mahomet, there is not one great hymn-writer known as such, but there are some great hymns. The greatest is theUrbs beata Hirusalem, dicta pacis visio, of which theAngulare fundamentumis a part, and which is of the seventh or eighth century. Daniel, however, with the support of Schlosser, regards this hymn as not certainly older than the tenth century, and has Neale’s support in asserting that the last two verses are a later addition to give it suitableness for singing at a dedication of a church.[24]The earliest mention of its use in the tenth century is in the church of Poitiers at the annual blessing of the font on Easter Sunday, which tends to confirmthe supposition that two verses have been added. He thinks it of Spanish origin, as the metrical form is one usual in the Mozarabic Breviary. In later days it underwent three revisions. In the old Paris Breviary of 1527 it becomes theUrbs Jerusalem beata; in the new Breviary of 1736 it becomes theUrbs beata, vera pacis visiounder the hands of Abbé Besnault (ob.1726). In the Roman Breviary of 1631 it is theCoelestis Urbs Jerusalem, the form, as usual, best known to modern readers and translators, but not the best worth knowing. Along with theUrbs beatawe may place theGloriosa Jerusalem, probably of Spanish origin, and of the same century as well as similar in contents, but unequal in beauty and poetic worth.

Next in worth is the abecedarian judgment hymn,Apparabet repentina dies magna Domini, which Neale speaks of as containing the germ of theDies Irae. It is little more than a rehearsal in a trochaic metre of our Lord’s prediction of the Day of Judgment. It follows the Scripture text much more closely than does Thomas of Celano. Bede mentions it in the next century. Mrs. Charles has translated it.

To this seventh century or the next Mone refers theSalvator mundi, Domine, which is most probably an Anglo-Saxon hymn, although of the Ambrosian school. It reappears in the AnglicanOrariumof 1560 and thePreces Privataeof 1564, and is said to have been familiar to Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Ken through its use at Wykeham’s school in Winchester. It, along with theTe lucis ante terminum, also sung at Winchester, may have suggested both Bishop Ken’s “Glory to thee, my God, this night,” and Browne’s “The night is come, like to the day,” given in hisReligio Medici. To the seventh century we also may refer theQuicunque vultesse salvus, a hymn better known as the Athanasian Creed.

Besides these there are two groups of hymns whose temporal limits do not lie within the seventh century on either side, but which may be as well discussed here as anywhere. The first are the early Spanish hymn-writers. We know by name three of the seventh century. The first is Isidore, Archbishop of Seville (570-636), the scholar of encyclopaedic range, who did so much to adapt the learning of the Romans to the wants of the Gothic community in Spain. To him are ascribed, somewhat doubtfully, threeballad-hymns in honor of as many martyrs and two abecedarian poems on repentance. More certainly authentic are three or four ascribed to his contemporary Eugenius, who was Archbishop of Toledo from 646 to 657. He has left us thirty-two Latin poems in classic metres, none of which, strictly speaking, are hymns, but hisRex Deus immensehas found its way into the collections. In his day he worked hard to improve the singing and other services of the Church. Lastly, there is the Spanish magistrate Cyxilla, who built a church in honor of the martyr Thyrsus of Toledo, and wrote a hymn for the dedication, though some say he got Isidore to do it for him. Daniel (I., 190) gives it in full from the Mozarabic[25]Breviary. But far more important are the anonymous hymns of that Breviary, which constituted the hymnary of the old Spanish Church at the date of the conquest of the country by the Saracens (711-14), and which through the temporary prostration of the Church’s energy was preserved from additions and alterations. The collection therefore is interesting as containing nothing of later date than the eighth century, and probably very little that is later than the seventh. Besides a large number of hymns traceable to other authors, from Hilary to Gregory—most of them from Ambrose and his school—there are forty-eight hymns peculiar to this ancient Breviary. Of these the best known are theAlleluia piis edite laudibus, theCunctorum rex omnipotens, theJesu defensor omnium, theO Dei perenne Verbumof Bishop Arturus Serranus of Toledo, theSacer octavarum dies, theSacrata Christi tempora, and theSurgentes ad Te, Domine. It is well known that the hymns of Ambrose and his school enjoyed great repute in Spain. These unnamed writers evidently have studied at his feet, their mode of dealing with the great themes of Christian praise having much in common with his. The country, however, which gave Seneca, Lucan, and Quinctilian to Latin literature was underno necessity merely to imitate an Italian model; and we find these Spanish poets departing widely from Ambrose’s school as regards the form of their verse. The four-lined stanza, with four iambic feet (u -) in each line—a line used by the tragedian Seneca before it was adopted by the Christian poets—is the form of verse employed almost exclusively by the Ambrosian school. The Mozarabic writers also use it (Convexa solis orbita), but they also employ as a substitute a trochaic verse of eleven syllables (Lucis auctor clemens, lumen immensum) and more complex choriambic forms (Alleluia piis edite laudibus, etc.). But their hymns, as a whole, lack pith and force; not one of them has earned a place by itself in the affections of Latin Christendom.

The second national group is that of the early Irish writers of Latin hymns. There are not so many of these, and still fewer names have been preserved. But they deserve notice as monuments of that aggressive Church whose missionary labors rendered such grand service in the Christianization of Western Europe. Of Caelius Sedulius there is enough said in the chapter devoted to him and his acrostic hymn. Of Columcille and theAltus Deus prositorwe have spoken above. The next name which meets us is that of Ladkenus or Lathacan, an Irishman of the seventh century, to whom is ascribed a hymn of the class called in IrishLuireach(orlorica), meaning a shield. There are two hymns of this class ascribed to Patrick and to Columcille. The former, best known by James Clarence Mangan’s version,

“At Tara to-day, in this awful hour,I call on the holy Trinity!”

“At Tara to-day, in this awful hour,

I call on the holy Trinity!”

is probably not the work of the Apostle of Ireland; but as it, like that of Columcille, is in Irish, it need not detain us here. The latter begins,

“Alone am I upon the mountain,O King of heaven, prosper my way,And then nothing need I fear,More than if guarded by six thousand.”

“Alone am I upon the mountain,

O King of heaven, prosper my way,

And then nothing need I fear,

More than if guarded by six thousand.”

That of Lathacan, while possessing the same general character, as aiming at a Christian substitute for the Druidical charms of the pagans, is on a lower level both religiously and poetically. No less than eleven of its twenty-three quatrains are occupied withthe enumeration of the parts of the human body, which are placed under divine protection, and these may be not without interest to the students of the history of physiological knowledge.

Many of the early Irish hymns are in the national language, which was at that time the vehicle of a vigorous native poetry. Of those in Latin the most beautiful is the Communion hymn,

“Sancti venite,Christi corpus sumite,”

“Sancti venite,

Christi corpus sumite,”

which both Daniel and Neale praise for its noble simplicity. An old Irish legend, to which we need not pin our faith, represents Patrick and his nephew Sechnall as hearing the angels sing it first, during the offertory before the communion, and adds, “So from that time to the present that hymn is chanted in Erinn when the body of Christ is received.” Singing at the communion was not unusual in the early Church, and Gregory of Tours has preserved an antiphon used at that sacrament which closely resembles the Irish hymn. But it is now disused.

The hymn is found in the Bangor Antiphonary, an old Irish manuscript of the seventh century, first published by Muratori in hisAnecdota(1697-98). From Bangor it had been carried to Bobbio, the famous monastery founded on Italian soil by the Irish missionary Columbanus after he had been driven out of Burgundy by the reigning powers. From Bobbio it made its way to the Ambrosian Library at Milan, where Muratori found it. It is one of the most interesting monuments of the early Irish Church, and its hymns are given or indicated by Daniel in his fourth volume. The first is a series of quintains, each for one of the canonical hours. Then theHymnum dicat turba fratrum, which already Beda described ashymnus ille pulcherrimus, is found in a mutilated form in the Antiphonary, and ascribed to Hilary. It is a terse rehearsal of the facts of our Lord’s birth, life, passion, and resurrection. Daniel suggests that it is one of the primitive hymns of the martyr-ages of the Church to which Pliny refers, and brought into Latin from the original Greek by some scholarly Briton or Irish man. Then a hymn in commemoration of the Apostles (Precamur Patrem), of which also Daniel thinks that Irish scholarship may have rendered from the Greek. Then a morning hymn based on the Constantinopolitan creed (Spiritus divinae lucis gloriae); andanother in honor of the martyrs (Sacratissimi Martyres summi Dei); theLoricaof Lathacan; and two hymns in honor of St. Patrick, one by Sechnall and the other by Fiacc. Daniel gives only the former, which is an abecedary hymn. Both are full of the marvellous—an element not wanting even in the contemporary documents of Patrick’s life, and quite abundant in those of later date.

Besides these there are four other hymns which Mone has shown to be of Irish authorship. The first is theJesus refulsit omnium, which has been ascribed to Hilary, but is shown not to be his not only by the rhyme, but by the alliteration which marks it as originating in the North of Europe. It is found in manuscripts, German and English, of the eleventh century; but Mone ascribes it to an Irish author both because of the strophe employed and because of the mixture of Greek words with the Latin, the Irish being the best Greek scholars of the West, and being not disinclined to show off their erudition in this way. Another is an abecedary hymn,Ad coeli clara non sum dignus sidera, famous as having been supposed by some stupid critic to be the lost evening hymn which Hilary sent from the East to his daughter along with theLucis largitor splendide. It probably is as old as the sixth or seventh century, both the structure of the verse and the allusions to pagan beliefs and Christian heresies indicating that antiquity. The use of alliteration and other peculiarities indicate an Irish author, but probably a monk of Bobbio, as the accentuated Sapphic verse was in use in that country. Here are seven of its most characteristic stanzas:

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