Before undertaking the study of the hymn in its various aspects and relations, theoretical and practical, it should be very carefully defined. This is all the more necessary because the word “hymn” is used to cover so wide a sweep of religious poetry, and because our discussion is to be largely limited to its practical use in church work.
Dr. Austin Phelps’ test of a genuine hymn, “Genuineness of religious emotion, refinement of poetic taste, and fitness to musical cadence—these are essential to a faultless hymn, as the three chief graces to a faultless character,”[1]is a very clear and charming statement of some essentials of a hymn, which needed emphasis in his rather prosaic day, but does not include all the requisites of a useful hymn.
The narrow etymological definition of a hymn would confine it to sacred poems that, in at least some part of them, are directly addressed to some person of the Deity. St. Augustine limits the word “hymn” to “songs with praise to God—without praise they are not hymns. If they praise aught but God, they are not hymns.” Even now there are hymnologists who insist upon this limited conception. No less a writer than W. Garrett Horder, in his fresh and illuminatingThe Hymn Lover, insists that “the cardinal test of a hymn should be that it is in some one, if not thewhole of its parts, addressed to God.” This shuts out the use of sacred poetry in instruction, inspiration, exhortation, and special practical applications of hymns. Moreover, if the hymn is to be limited to worship, then the unconverted can never sing sincerely in the public service, and the ancient and medieval churches were justified in withdrawing the privilege of religious song from the general laity.
The hymn is simply a means to the supreme end of all religious effort. That form of the hymn, that method of its use, and that musical assistance, which realize most fully the immediate and ultimate ends in view under given circumstances can be approved and used. This practical basis of actual spiritual results must govern in formulating the conception of the Christian hymn, as well as in forms of worship and prayer, in preaching, or in church organization.
Since our discussion of the hymn has in view its contributing efficiently to concrete spiritual results, its definition must have a practical basis. Etymological, scholastic, traditional, abstractly idealistic considerations can have only minor weight.
The hymn may be viewed from too many angles to confine it to any one definition. Hence we must recognize different types of the hymn: (a) There is the poem regarding religious life and feeling that cannot be brought within the limitations of a musical setting, constituting theReading Hymn; (b) we have the formless, but elevated, expression of worship or religious truth that at best can only be chanted, which we may call the Canticle, in which may be included such hymns as the Te Deum, the Sanctus, and unmetrical psalms; these, together with poems that are expressions of emotion, yet are not fitted for mass singing but may be effectively set to music of a different order, may be recognized as Solo, or Choral, Hymns, such of The Stabat Mater, The Dies Irae, and Sunset and Evening Star.
There is left us the sacred poem of such a form and typethat it may be called theCongregationalorSinging Hymn, which is really the subject of the present practical discussion, and may be strictly defined as follows:
The Congregational Hymn is a poem expressing worship, praise, thanksgiving, and prayer on the Godward side; personal spiritual experience, emotion, and inspiration on the human side; and instruction on the religious side. It must be adapted to mass thinking and expression, in a form fitted to be sung by a Christian congregation, and calculated to express and stimulate or create religious feeling and purpose.
The initiating force of all poetry must be emotion of some kind. That emotion may be mere earnestness, it may be satire, it may be satisfaction in contemplation of beautiful scenes, or satisfaction in ideas and memories, or displeasure at impressions painful or abhorrent. Few of us realize how unfailing is the flow of emotion in our minds responding to the world about us and in us.
To view life and the world through the eye of reason is valuable, of course; but if that vision lacks the support of the eye of emotion, it brings only a silhouette, without perspective, wanting a sense of reality. That is the weakness of abstract thinking, whether in theology or political economy.
If the hymn, therefore, is to perform its functions, it must be definitely emotional to a greater or less extent. This is particularly true of hymns of Christian experience or in the hymn’s functioning in inspiration and exhortation. To confuse animal excitement with emotion is bad psychology. The genuine emotionality of a hymn is the best criterion of its practical value, for only through emotion can the will be reached.
The first requirement in this definition is that the hymn must be poetry. It should havemeter and rhyme, else there can be no musical setting practicable for congregational use. The first task Calvin and his associates faced, after reaching the conclusion that only the inspired Psalms could be sung in the public religious assembly, was the preparation of a metrical version. True, the Psalms had been sung by the Greek and Roman Catholic churches, but only as chants by priestly choirs. In the English church service, these chants were frequently only led by the choir, the congregation joining in their singing. But this was practicable only in larger and long-established congregations, and even then there was more or less confusion. In general, this chanting was a failure, and the English church adopted the metrical versions. The use of the Psalms for responsive readings in our modern church services is a definitely practicable way of utilizing their liturgical and spiritual values.
The ostensible hymns of the Greek Church, of which Dr. Neale and Dr. Brownlie have furnished translations, or rather transformations, are not verse but prose. They were not sung by the congregations, or put into their hands, but were reserved for the reading of the clergy.
In like manner, the Latin hymns, although poetical in form—often complicated to an absurd degree—were not sung by the people, but were versified devotions inserted in the prose Psalms usually read by the priests.
In the Reformed churches for many centuries the word “hymn” referred to verses of “human composure,” as opposed to metrified inspired Psalms.
The famous American hymnologist, Dr. Louis J. Benson, lays less stress on this metrical form: “A Christian hymn, therefore, is a form of words appropriate to be sung or chanted in public devotions.” This opens the way for the inclusion of the “Te Deum Laudamus,” the “Sanctus,” and other canticles among our hymns. But as these historic texts are rarely or never sung by the people outside of the Church of England service, and used chiefly as texts for more orless elaborate musical compositions sung by choirs, we may accept the common conception of the hymn as a metrical composition.
While having the superficial music of the regularly recurring accents, and the liquid harmony of the vowels and consonants of the words as they flow through the lines, there must be also the deeper, more entrancing music of the literary grace of spiritual thought singing its beautiful expression. If poetry is “the expression of thought steeped in imagination and feeling,” all the more must the hymn be expressive of religious thought transfigured by deep and sincere emotion.
While a hymn may be didactic, formulating doctrine, or enforcing obligation, it is not a really good and effective hymn unless the thought or exhortation is vitalized by imagination and emotion. Arid versification of Christian doctrines metaphysically conceived, or of ethical discussions with no heat of conviction, will stir no pulses of body, mind, or soul, but will conduce to the all too prevalent sense of the unreality of religious ideas and life.
It must have unity of thought, emotion, and expression, all growing out of a definite vision of emotion, having a beginning, middle, and end, which mark the progress of the idea or feeling seeking formulation.[2]
Yet this element must be felt in the spirit of the hymn rather than in intention. Preciosity of phrase, elaborate metaphors and similes, obscure allusions, flights of fancy, are rarely in place. John Newton, the great hymn writer, speaks to this point in his usual forceful way: “Perspicuity, simplicity, and ease should be chiefly attended to; and the imagery and coloring of poetry, if admitted at all, should be indulged in very sparingly and with great judgment.” Sir Roundell Palmer is more detailed in his criticism: “Affectation or visible artifice is worse than excess of homeliness; a hymn is easily spoiled by a single falsetto note.”[3]
The emphasis of the literary and poetical elements in hymns has produced some most valuable sacred lyrics, notably the hymns of Keble and Heber; but occasionally it has also led to such refinement, to such sought-out subtlety, and to such conscious preciosity that the virility and emotional contagion of what might have been an otherwise really effective hymn have been lost.
Poems of fancy with a few religious allusions cannot be classed as Christian hymns. The objection to the “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere”[4]has been rather heatedly urged, and there is no small justification for the criticism. The aboriginal idea of “the happy hunting grounds” might be referred to by its rather invertebrate fancy, instead of the heaven of the Christian faith. Eugene Field’s “The Divine Lullaby” so vaguely suggests the divine care that it can hardly pass muster as a hymn. For use as a hymn, a poem must be explicitly Christian in thought and expression.
That a poem has a good moral does not authorize it to pose as a Christian hymn. “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” cannot be recognized as a Christian hymn, since it has no direct religious significance. There are recent ostensible sociological and humanitarian hymns that are open to the same criticism. It is not enough that the underlying assumptions are of Christian origin; they must be fundamentally religious, no matter what the application to practical living may be.
The value of hymns as a method of introducing and enforcing doctrines was recognized by the enemies of Christianity early in its history. The Arians in Asia Minor and in Northern Africa, and later throughout the Roman Empire, flooded the worldwith songs sung to the popular melodies attacking the deity of Christ; and by their influence nearly wrecked Christianity. In our own day various “sports” from Christianity, and hybrids with other religions, are issuing collections of songs and garbled Christian hymns to serve their purposes. The Buddhists of Japan also are taking Christian songs bodily, with such changes as seem to them necessary. Unitarian hymnal editors have not hesitated to alter orthodox hymns to suit their own views.
That these emasculated hymns are no longer Christian hymns need not be argued at length. The difficulty is that they have lost the kernel of genuine Christian thought. The same is true of humanistic lyrics of propaganda in behalf of brotherhood or social welfare or economic justice, in which the religious motive is not urged. In general, a controversial poem cannot be recognized as a hymn; there is no religious help in controversy. Its emotions are combative, not devout.
A Christian hymn should express some definite recognition of God as manifested in Jesus Christ. Even if, as in metrical psalms, the name of Christ is not used, it should be implied, and unanimously accepted as implied. It may be worship, praise, prayer, confession, acceptance of salvation through Jesus Christ, spiritual experience, consecration, Christian doctrine, Christian hopes—or any other aspect or activity of the Christian faith. This is the very heart of the Christian hymn.
If the hymn is to be religious and Christian, it must be based on scriptural ideas, of course; we have no other authoritative source for our doctrines or experiences. All our other religious ideas and methods—our doctrines, our ethics, our religious ideals and impulses—find their roots there. We cannot afford to sing far-fetched inferences from unrelated scriptural passages when we havesuch bodies of stupendous truth awaiting our contemplation, and when the hymnic expression of the emotions which those high and conspicuous doctrines call forth is so freely available. Scriptural truth, so plain that he who runs may sing, is the only raw material from which Christian hymns can be produced. It will provide for every religious need of the individual and of the Church.
There can be no question but that when scriptural phraseology is used spontaneously, it adds very much to the impressiveness of the hymn because of the devout associations it brings up in the minds of the singers. The hymn by so much acquires an authoritativeness and elevation beyond ordinary verbiage.
But while the body of thought in a hymn must be distinctly religious, and therefore scriptural, it does not follow that the forms of expression must be scriptural as well. A distinguished writer on the subject here seems to be at fault: “Nothing should be called a hymn and nothing should be sung in our assemblies which is not virtually a paraphrase—and that a very faithful one—of Scripture passages, whether they are immediately connected in the Holy Word or not.” Apply that rule to our hymnbooks and what would we have left?
Although biblical phrases do occur in many hymns, a very close adherence to this rule would stifle the poet’s spontaneity and make his hymn stiff and mechanical, like most of the metrical psalms. Such a rule may seem very devout to the cursory reader, but really it is mischievous; it is sheer bibliolatry, an emphasis of the letter that killeth at the expense of the spirit that maketh alive.
That the hymn is a distinctly social expression, participated in by the varied personalities massed in a congregation, introduces marked limitations that cannot be evaded.
It is a remarkable fact that only in Hebrew and Christian worship is a congregational use of hymns conspicuous. With all their literary and poetic urge for expression, the Greeks had no singing connected with their temple rites.[5]In so far as the Egyptians had musical elements in their temple ritual, it was choral and not congregational. In visiting pagan temples, one is struck by the utter absence of organized assembled worship; what worship occurs is individual only.
The Vedic hymns were not singing hymns, but reading hymns, for recital and meditation. According to Max Mueller, the only share the women had in the sacrifices was that the wife of the officiating priest, or head of the house, should recite the necessary hymns. Although in India there is singing connected with great festivals and processions, the songs used are so obscene that respectable Hindus are making an effort to have the public singing of them forbidden. They are usually sung by the female attendants of the idol, temple prostitutes, who are the professional singers of these ostensibly religious songs.[6]
The reason for this absence of true hymns is correctly indicated by W. Garrett Horder in hisThe Hymn Lover: “But so far as the material before us enables us to form an opinion, it is that hymns, as an essential of worship, have been mostly characteristic of the Christian and, in a less degree, of its progenitor, the Hebrew religion. Nor is this much to be wondered at, since it is the only religion calculated to draw out at once the two elements necessary to such a form of worship—awe and love—awe which lies at the heart of worship, and love which kindles it into adoring song.”
The form of the verse is practically of commanding importance. The musical form of the hymn tune definitely fixes the form of the stanza. It must not be complicated or free in form, else the tune loses its needed simplicity and symmetry. More elaborate forms ofstanza may do for solo or choral numbers, where skilled composers write music that follows the vagaries of the form of the text; but the general congregation cannot be expected to sing tunes of elaborate and confusing structure. Although an occasional hymn of unusual form of stanza is fortunate in finding a happy musical mate, like “Lead, kindly Light” or “O Love, that wilt not let me go,” the usual hymn must be adapted to one of about a dozen fundamental meters. Although the Gospel song is not so circumscribed in its form, because its setting goes with it, its forms are only rhythmical variations of the standard meters.
The thought of a good hymn must lie on the surface. It must appeal not only to the scholarly and subtle minds in a singing congregation, but also to all who are expected to join the religious exercise. Paul’s word regarding unknown tongues applies here: “Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken?” The practical Paul enforces the parallel by saying a few verses further on, “I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.” No matter how high the thought or how deep the sentiment of a poem may be, or how felicitously they may be expressed, it is not an effective hymn if study (for which there is no time at the moment of singing) is required to bring out its meaning and feeling.
While a hymn may be the expression of the individual poet, it must be an appropriate expression of the mind and heart of the whole congregation as it sings. Yet in addition to the evident, clearly expressed thought, there may be singing,sotto vocebetween the lines, of deeper experiences and higher soarings of the spirit that only prolonged meditation can reveal.
Some sacred poems express a religious emotion in so individualand unusual a way that they are not at all fitted to express the emotion of a congregation. As an illustration of a poem too personal and individualistic, here are a few stanzas of a hymn of Rev. Samuel J. Stone, which is found in an increasing number of current hymnals:
“My feet are worn and weary with the marchOn the rough road and up the steep hillside;O city of our God, I fain would seeThy pastures green where peaceful waters glide.
“My feet are worn and weary with the march
On the rough road and up the steep hillside;
O city of our God, I fain would see
Thy pastures green where peaceful waters glide.
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
Patience, poor soul! The Saviour’s feet were worn,The Saviour’s heart and hands were weary too;His garments stained and travel-worn, and old,His vision blinded with pitying dew.”
Patience, poor soul! The Saviour’s feet were worn,
The Saviour’s heart and hands were weary too;
His garments stained and travel-worn, and old,
His vision blinded with pitying dew.”
This is a beautiful poem that would make an admirable text for a solo, but it is out of place on the lips of a congregation. Compare with this the very useful hymn by Bonar:
“I was a wand’ring sheep,I did not love the fold;I did not love my Shepherd’s voice,I would not be controlled.”
“I was a wand’ring sheep,
I did not love the fold;
I did not love my Shepherd’s voice,
I would not be controlled.”
Every one of the first eight lines of this once widely used hymn begins with the pronoun of the first person singular, yet there is no particular individuality in this confession; it is the expression of the common experience in a straightforward manner, void of all idiosyncrasy.
In some hymns there is found an intensity of feeling that leads to an apparent extravagance of expression that a single soul can sometimes sincerely accept as the vehicle of its own experience, but which a gathering of miscellaneous people cannot sing without the great mass of them being insincere. For a careless person idly to sing with Faber,
“I love Thee so, I know not howMy transports to control,”
“I love Thee so, I know not how
My transports to control,”
or
“Ah, dearest Jesus, I have grownChildish with love of Thee,”
“Ah, dearest Jesus, I have grown
Childish with love of Thee,”
is sheer blasphemy. It is the sin of Uzziah!
The following verses from one of Charles Wesley’s hymns combine the two faults of extravagance and too-intense individualism:
“On the wings of His love I was carried aboveAll sin and temptation and pain;I could not believe that I ever should grieve,That I ever should suffer again.
“On the wings of His love I was carried above
All sin and temptation and pain;
I could not believe that I ever should grieve,
That I ever should suffer again.
I rode in the sky (freely justified I),Nor envied Elijah his seat;My soul mounted higher in a chariot of fire,And the moon it was under my feet.”
I rode in the sky (freely justified I),
Nor envied Elijah his seat;
My soul mounted higher in a chariot of fire,
And the moon it was under my feet.”
Other poems are so full of imagination, so crowded with unusual and almost bizarre figures of speech, that they fail to be the natural expression of the religious emotion of an assembly of religious people. George Herbert wrote a great many religious poems whose beauty and charm are only enhanced by their quaint and unusual imagery. Occasionally a hymnal editor ventures on a selection, but it is so foreign to the methods of thought and expression of the churches as not to appeal to their taste and feeling. Take the beautiful poem on the Sabbath day, “O day most calm, most bright.” The first line is spontaneous, expressive, and musical, and appropriate for a hymn. The second line, “The fruit of this, the next world’s bud,” with its antithetical structure, is already somewhat formal and forced. But when the third and fourth lines,
“The indorsement of supreme delight,Writ by a Friend and with His blood,”
“The indorsement of supreme delight,
Writ by a Friend and with His blood,”
offer a purely legal and unpoetical figure, one’s sense of song is entirely obscured.
Yet, when Herbert’s imagery is most matter-of-fact and ungenial, there is a body of thought and there are a certain fitness and a clearness of relation that command admiration.
Hymns that have long, intricate sentences extending through two or more verses are impracticable for use in a song service, as the break between the stanzas dislocates the development of the idea. Every verse must be practically complete in itself, no matter what its relation to the development of the general idea of the hymn may be.
It must also be recognized that there are limits to the expression congregational music can give. A poem that is vividly descriptive, or is in part intensely dramatic, cannot be recognized as a practicable hymn, since all stanzas have the same tune, a tune which cannot vary its musical effect to suit the differing stanzas.
Then there are hymns that are too majestic, too glowing, for a hymn-tune composer to write a fitting tune out of the limited resources of musical effects available to him. Such a hymn is that one of Henry Kirke White, of lamented memory:
“The Lord our God is clothed with might,The winds obey His will;He speaks, and in His heavenly heightThe rolling sun stands still.
“The Lord our God is clothed with might,
The winds obey His will;
He speaks, and in His heavenly height
The rolling sun stands still.
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
His voice sublime is heard afar,In distant peals it dies;He yokes the whirlwind to His carAnd sweeps the howling skies.”
His voice sublime is heard afar,
In distant peals it dies;
He yokes the whirlwind to His car
And sweeps the howling skies.”
With a chorus of a thousand trained singers, an organ of extraordinary power, and an orchestra of five hundred instruments,all concentrated on “St. Anne,” one might make the music adequate to the words, but in an ordinary congregation the incongruity is painful. This must remain a reading hymn.
The efficient hymn must not distinctly belong to previous generations in its style and vocabulary or in its peculiar formulation of doctrine. Only as many of the older hymns have been purged of their obsolete and archaic words and turns of thought have they survived. For instance, we no longer sing, “Eye-strings break in death,” as Toplady originally wrote it.
Some minds, although strong and keen, seem to have a very small visual angle. Some such persons condemn all hymns that are not direct praise. The line in Lyte’s “Abide with Me”—“Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes”—has been objected to as Romish by some, blind to the fact that it is a prayer to Christ.
Others exclude hymns in which the pronoun of the first person singular occurs. Bishop Wordsworth, himself a hymn-writer of no mean merit (vide“O Day of rest and gladness” and “See, the Conqueror rides in triumph”), says, in his introduction to hisHoly Year, that while the ancient hymns are distinguished by self-forgetfulness, the modern hymns are characterized by self-consciousness. As illustrative examples, he cites the following: “When I can read my title clear,” “When I survey the wondrous cross,” “My God, the spring of all my joys,” and “Jesus, Lover of my soul.” It is strange that so keen a mind should not have seen that his objection would apply to all liturgies!
The minister with his eye fixed upon his spiritual purpose can afford to ignore all these supersensitive critics who have refined refinement until sensibility becomes hyperesthesia, a veritable disease.
The use of hymns of a somewhat indifferent literary value is often thoughtlessly condemned because the importance of the recognition of its topic is overlooked. Such a topic as“Church Erection,” or “Education,” may not occasion the deep feeling necessary to the writing of a great hymn, and yet it must find a place in the practical work of the church. Here again Dr. Phelps gives a useful warning: “The severity of aesthetic taste must not be permitted to contract the range of devotional expression in song.... Our desire to restrict the number of hymns upon occasions, and other hymns of infrequent use, ought not to banish such hymns entirely.... A hymn intrinsically inferior, therefore, may be so valuable relatively, as justly to displace a hymn which is intrinsically its superior.”
Aside from the topical symmetry referred to, this principle will find other applications in the practical use of hymns. Some inferior hymns have for some occasions a greater immediate effect than much better ones, perhaps because of a more singable tune or because its sentiment fits into the situation or because it makes a desired impression in a more efficient way.
The writing of the best hymns of the Christian Church was not a matter of ulterior purpose, any more than is the singing of the hermit thrush in the wilderness. They are the result of the urge for expression that lies back of all the best architecture, literature, and art of the human race. There is the vision, the sense of reality, the subjective response to truth, to beauty, and to exalted experiences that must find an objective bodying-forth in some appropriate form.
The great doctrines of Christianity loom up in their dignity and majestic sweep, in their adequacy to the highest and deepest needs of the human soul. The spontaneous hymn is but a cry of astonished delight, of exalted inspiration, of self-forgetful contemplation of the revealed glory, an instinctive appeal to other souls to share the rapture of the vision. Such a hymn is not calmly planned; it forces itself upon the mind of the rapt poet.
This instinct for sharing with others, for winning their attention and participation in a blessed experience, may produce a measure of premeditation and become a more or less clearly defined purpose. The idea of the needs of other souls, or of the Church at large, may becomean additional factor, bringing in the recognition of the importance of adaptation to the mental processes of those to be helped, or of practical methods of reaching them.
Also the originating impulse may grow, as in the case of Isaac Watts, out of the call of some perceived need among the writer’s fellows, or of some lack in the work of the Church. The emotional and poetic elements may be marshaled by bringing up the memory of some past exalted vision of the truth, or of some former quickening spiritual experience, or (better yet!) by an abiding realization of the truth of some doctrine, or by a perennial flow of devout feeling.
Dr. Martineau insisted that “every spontaneous utterance of a deep devotion is poetry in its essence, and has only to fall into lyrical form to be a hymn.” But he went further and declared that “no expression of thought or feeling that has an ulterior purpose (i.e., instruction, exposition, persuasion, or impression) can have the spirit of poetry.” His idealism failed to realize that the spirit of poetry in a writer may be associated with a purpose of helpfulness urging expression in an efficient form. To delete all the hymns in our church collections that have definite spiritual purposes would rob the Christian Church of most of its devoutest and most helpful hymns.
Both the literary and devotional value of a hymn of purpose will depend upon the writer’s ability to reproduce the mental conditions of a purely spontaneous hymn. If the purpose can be confined to the practical aspects of the hymn, while the spiritual and poetic impulses control the thought and spirit, then the most valuable and effective hymn may be produced.
But if the ulterior purpose fully occupies the mind of the writer, the hymn will be mechanical and uninspiring. In the more prolific hymn writers, like Watts and Charles Wesley, the relative influence of vision and purpose is easily detected. In their best hymns, the purpose is still present, but latent, and its guidance unconscious.
When we speak of the purpose of the hymn, therefore, it is not so much the mental attitude of the writer that is to be considered as that of the user of the hymn. He finds a body of religious verse ready to his hand, some of which is adapted to secure spiritual ends, or fitted to the social conditions which he seeks to improve. His purpose controls not the production of available verse, but the selection from existing stores of religious lyrics.
The choice of hymns by the user will be determined by the characteristics and limitations which his practical purposes demand. There are three inevitable factors: the end to be realized, the people to be influenced, and the hymns adapted to affect both.
The singing of hymns is the most practicable method of uniting assembled Christians in worship and praise and of creating a common interest in the various church activities. This is really the leading purpose of such a gathering.[1]
Worship in prayer, when it is spontaneous, must be largely individual; when it is expressed in responsive ritual, there is great danger of mechanical stiffness in the outward form of the prayers and in their reading, and also in the limited area of the thought to be expressed. But song is the natural and spontaneous vehicle for exalted feeling and gives the greatest opportunity for varied sentiment. No one individual could hope to strike all the strings of noble praise as have a thousand saints who have written our hymns.
There is a concentration of interest and attention. The common thought, the common emotion, the common impulse of devotion, the common expression, the unanimous attitude of will and purpose—allquicken the susceptibilities and enlarge the spiritual horizon. God seems nearer, more actual, and more realizable as the source of every blessing. Abstract ideas of God as Father, of his Son Jesus Christ as Saviour, of the Holy Spirit as Comforter, quicken into blessed realities. It is easy to appropriate the joy, the reverence, the adoration, the intimate communion with God, which the hymns so clearly, so movingly, so contagiously, even so rapturously express, and to make them intimately our own. This is true worship, the high peak in man’s experience of God.
The social elements in human nature come into play and intensify the religious emotions. The personal distractions and inhibitions that hamper devotion are eliminated. Under properly effective conditions there is a mass attitude, a mass emotion, that needs only a mass expression to affect every individual unit. The contagion of the crowd in expression and in action will affect the most sluggish and indifferent and carry them into an experience that they could not have reached alone. Add to this the stimulation of the music and the physical exhilaration of singing, and the worship is lifted to a pitch of enthusiasm not otherwise possible.
This worshipful use of hymns exercises a most inspiring and vitalizing influence on the participants. The reaction of the mind and soul of the singers to the exalted sentiments sung must have a profoundly spiritualizing effect upon their natures. One cannot sing the old Latin hymn, “Jesus, the very thought of Thee,” in any genuine way without feeling an accession of greater love to Christ; or “My faith looks up to Thee,” by Ray Palmer, without a deeper realization of one’s dependence on Jesus Christ for salvation and for keeping grace.[2]
Another office of the church hymn is to give a voice to those deep experiences in spiritual things that enrich the lives of the children of God. Many excellent Christians are dumb, unableto give expression to their genuine spiritual experiences. Others find their means of voicing what they feel totally inadequate. The hymns they sing and appropriate to themselves unstop their silent tongue. High tides of spiritual blessings, times of refreshing when Christ is near to the soul, hours of privilege when the whispering of the Holy Spirit is heard, victories over fierce or subtle temptation when God’s grace proves sufficient, moments of God’s overshadowing presence when the whole world is transfigured, and a thousand other marvelous experiences in the Christian life—all call for hymns to express them. They must be tender hymns, ecstatic hymns, triumphant hymns that will satisfy the craving of the soul to voice forth its deepest love, its spiritual ecstasies, its strange sense of overcoming power. The dumb soul, unable to speak of its explorations of divine grace, finds a voice in these hymns written by saints who had the divine gift of expressing like glimpses of the divine glory.[3]
These hymns not only bring the joy of giving articulate expression to these mountain-top experiences, thus reviving them again and again, but they validate these experiences by showing that others have shared them and give them reality in the hours when faith fails and the temptation arises to consider them mere mirages and illusions. Others have been with us in Bunyan’s Beulah Land and verify our experiences of its delights.
Another purpose in the use of hymns is to secure the clearest, most impressive, most appealing, most rememberable statement of the leading truths of the Christian faith that will fix them most ineradicably in the consciousness and the life of the individual and of the church. Such hymns must not be dry formulations of abstract doctrines, desiccated by logical discussions and metaphysical hair-splittings. Truth that is dry is no longer vital truth. Its vitamins of reality, of the deepfeelings called forth by a sense of its actuality, of spiritual and poetic intuition, of self-propagating vitality, have been lost. Aridity of orthodoxy begets aridity of heterodoxy and is usually responsible for it.
Didactic hymns that will serve the purposes of the Church must be living hymns, expressing truth transfigured by the feelings aroused by the contemplation of its glorious reality. “There is little heresy in hymns.” Heresies for the most part arise from arid mechanical reasonings; hymns flow from the intuitions of the heart.[4]This explains why some of our best hymns about Christ were written by Unitarians.
Another purpose of the singing of hymns is to secure the active participation of the whole congregation in the service. Although the responsive reading is valuable in this respect, the union of all the voices of the people in song is more striking, calls for more aggressive effort, and definitely wins the attention of all to the sentiments expressed in the hymn. It creates more interest and stimulates both body and mind.
The singing of hymns also adds marked variety to the order of service and so renders it more attractive. It supplies climaxes in different parts of the program and relaxations of attention to the spoken word. It represents a greater contrast with the other exercises because it calls for active participation and produces entirely different effects. The lack of song in the services of the Friends has been one of the greatest factors in the limited growth of a movement representing deep earnestness, conscientiousness, and spirituality.
This variety and the opportunity to take a modest part in the service have proved among the greatest attractions. The more singing, the more people, is the universal experience.
The use of hymns creates an atmosphere of religious interest and feeling that is realized not only by the believers in the congregation, but bythe unregenerate as well. They may not enter fully into the spirit of the exercises, but an intellectual interest is awakened by the singing that may rise into spiritual interest and into an approach to the spiritual life. Rev. George F. Pentecost, famous in his day as a preacher and as a very successful evangelist, recognized the aggressive and practical value of hymn-singing: “I am profoundly sure that among the divinely ordained instrumentalities for the conversion and sanctification of the soul, God has not given a greater, besides the preaching of the Gospel, than the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. I have known a hymn to do God’s work in a soul when every other instrumentality has failed—I have seen vast audiences melted and swayed by a simple hymn when they have been unmoved by a powerful presentation of the Gospel from the pulpit.”
No small practical value in Christian hymns is found in their use in family life where young and old sing them together and so sanctify and spiritualize the household atmosphere. The storing of the memories of the children with the leading hymns of the church is no small factor in their Christian nurture. The older members of the family also will be stimulated spiritually, finding in the memorized hymns strength and solace while they bear the heat and burden of the day. We have lost the spiritual atmosphere in many of our Christian homes, not only by the neglect of the family altar, but also by the neglect of the singing and memorizing of the hymns and tunes of the church.
One of the chief influences in the preparation of Ira D. Sankey for his great life-work was the singing of hymns as the family gathered around the great log-fire in the homestead. He not only familiarized himself with the old hymns and tunes and popular sacred songs, but he was impressed by their spirit and by their adaptation to the needs of the human soul.
The use of hymns in personalwork, in the visitation of the sick, in improvised religious gatherings in private homes, has been largely abandoned, much to the loss of the churches. When D. L. Moody was trying out Ira D. Sankey during the latter’s pregnant first visit to Chicago, his singing to the sick and to the spiritually needy ones they called upon was a notable item in the practical test.
Prof. Waldo S. Pratt, of the Hartford Theological Seminary, whose most valuable book has been quoted in these pages again and again, sums up the results of an intelligent and devout use of hymns most admirably: “Hymn-singing may surely be called successful when it affords an avenue for true approach to God in earnest and noble worship; when it exerts a wholesome and uplifting reflex influence on those who engage in it, establishing them in the truth and quickening their spirituality; and when it creates a diffused atmosphere of high religious sympathy and vigorous consecration, so that even unbelievers are affected and constrained by it.”[5]
But if these purposes of the singing of hymns are to be realized and their values exploited, they must be properly employed. They must be made vital and their messages brought home to the hearts of the people. There should be no listless, merely formal singing of noble Christian hymns. There is unwitting sacrilege in doing that. The truth of God, the high experiences of his saints, are rendered unreal and lose their appeal—they become stale.
There are multiplied millions of true believers who duplicate the unhappy experience of a prominent London preacher who declared that he did not exactly disbelieve the cardinal doctrines of Christianity, but that they had become unreal to him. They were only abstractions, playthings of his logical faculties, husks from which the living kernel had fallen, which left his soul hungry. How could a minister by the discussion of what seemed to him unrealities inspire and spiritualize his hearers? How can any minister to whom the hymns in hishymnal are dry and abstract rhymes about vague and uninteresting platitudes at best, be able to make his song service a vital contribution to the spiritual progress of his people? If the hymns stir him, he can easily make them stir the people.
The hymnbook is an evidence of what the Bible can do with unregenerate human nature. That the truth of the Bible should be able to take Newton, the slave driver, and make of him a minister of God, not only himself writing such hymns as “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” “Glorious things of Thee are spoken,” or “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds,” but inspiring and encouraging the poor hypochondriac, William Cowper, so that from his heart should well forth the hymns, “There is a fountain filled with blood,” “God moves in a mysterious way,” and “Sometimes a light surprises,” is in itself one of the great evidences of Christianity.
The extraordinary result of the use of hymns and psalms in the life of the church and of believers is another reason for the minister’s valuing hymns highly. The awkward lines of Sternhold and Hopkins’ version of the psalms entered into the speech and private devotion of Scotch and English Christians as even the Bible itself did not, becoming a very liturgy to the condemners and flouters of liturgies. Thomas Jackson in his life of Charles Wesley remarks that “it is doubtful whether any human agency has contributed more directly to form the character of the Methodist societies than the hymns. The sermons of the preachers, the prayers of the people, both in their families and social meetings, are all tinged with the sentiments and phraseology of the hymns.”
Listen to the personal experiences of Christians in our own day and you willhear more reference to hymns than to the Scriptures. There is now no such committing to memory of passages of the Bible and of hymns as there was in preceding generations, but almost without set purpose, by simple absorption, the average Christian can quote more lines of hymns than he can of Scripture verses. This extraordinary place in the affections and life of Christian people is no derogation to the Bible, for the hymns are simply the Bible in another form.
To some men who lack emotional and poetic insight, the hymnbook may appear dry and uninteresting. It certainly is uninteresting to the unspiritual man, no matter how poetical he may be, and this will account for the occasional attack upon the hymns of the Christian Church as being without poetical power or merit. But the Christian minister, who deals with spiritual things, for whom the emotions of the human heart give a great opportunity for sowing the seed of life, ought to find the study of his hymnbook a great delight.
If there were no other reason why a minister should be profoundly interested in hymns and their use in religious work, the example and exhortations of Paul should be sufficient. He does not lay as much stress upon preaching, nor upon praying, as he does on singing. He admonishes the Ephesians that they “be filled with the Spirit”; and that divine possession should manifest itself in “speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” A part of this exercise of singing was to consist of “giving thanks unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[6]
He exhorts the Colossians, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom,” and one of the results of such indwelling was to be “teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs”; he even urges earnestness and sincerity in such singing, “Singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”[7]Such singing should not bewith mere enthusiasm, for he assures the Corinthians that his singing was not only devout but intelligent as well: “I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.”[8]There is more than a suspicion that in some of his most striking passages he is quoting a current hymn or interjecting a part of an improvised hymn.
The emphasis placed on the value of song by the early church is made clear by Tertullian, who states that at the current “love feasts” each person in attendance was invited at the close of the feast to sing either from the Holy Scriptures or from the dictates of his own spirit a song of adoration to God.
In the middle of the third century St. Basil testifies to the value of congregational singing as practiced in his day: “If the ocean is beautiful and worthy of praise to God, how much more beautiful is the conduct of the Christian assembly where the voices of men and women and children, blended and sonorous like the waves that break upon the beach, rise amidst our prayers to the very presence of God.” The remark is made by one of the ancient fathers that the singing of the churches often attracted “Gentiles”—i.e., unconverted persons—to their services, who were baptized before their departure.
While by no means the only cause for such progress, a great increase in the writing and singing of hymns has been a conspicuous feature in every great religious movement. The converse is also true that when the privilege of congregational singing was curtailed or withdrawn, spiritual declension followed.
The victory of the Church over Arianism was a singing victory both in the Eastern and Western churches. The Crusades were marked by processional singing of religious songs. The singing Lollards and Hussites heralded the Great Reformation, and the most effective preaching of Huss and Luther and Calvin was the hymns and metrical psalms they introduced.Watts prepared the way for the Wesleyan revival, and the Wesley brothers entered the path he had blazed and made a great highway of Christian song. Dour New England found its voice during the Great Revival under Jonathan Edwards and later under Nettleton. The preachers who saved the pioneers of the Appalachian range of mountains and the budding Middle West from relapsing into paganism and savagery were “singing parsons” with their repertoire of “spiritual” revival choruses and religious ballads.
Even Charles G. Finney, the great praying evangelist and later founder of Oberlin College, whose revivals swept through New York and northern Ohio like a prairie fire, had the popularChristian Lyre, edited by Joshua Leavitt, as a breeze to fan the flame, although he often forbade the singing of hymns in certain conditions in his meetings. William B. Bradbury, S. J. Vail, Robert Lowry, William H. Doane, Fanny Crosby, George F. Root, Philip Phillips, P. P. Bliss, and many others had written and taught the American people the songs that prepared the way for the Moody and Sankey revival movement which so profoundly affected the religious life of both America and England and, through the missionaries, intensified the faith of the Christian Church throughout the world.
Through all the centuries it has been the singing armies that have won the religious wars. The successful denominations and individual churches have been pre-eminently singing churches led by singing preachers who swayed their communities. Cardinal Newman is now chiefly remembered for his hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light.” Washington Gladden, a great religious leader, will have his memory kept green by his hymn, “O Master, let me walk with Thee,” and Bishop Phillips Brooks fifty years hence will be chiefly remembered for his Christmas carol, “O little town of Bethlehem.”
In view of the considerationsand facts here marshaled, how strange is the general lack of interest among ministers toward their hymn service, toward the hymns themselves, their history, their meaning, the methods to be used in exploiting their great value. Is it saying too much to suggest that three out of five ministers have no adequate conception of the possibilities of hymn singing or appreciation of its value?
Outside of the lamentable weakness of egocentric human nature it is difficult to discover why the part of the divine service devoted to sacred song should be so utterly subordinated to the other parts of the sacred program; but that it is true is so evident to any reasonable observer that it needs little or no proof. The janitor religiously postpones opening or shutting windows, or shaking down the furnace, during the prayer, or sermon even, until the hymn is being sung. Members of the congregation seize the opportunity to leave the room, or to consult with others about church affairs in all too audible voices.
The hymn ought to be the consummate note of prayer and praise and devout meditation on sacred themes, the great co-operative climax in the worship of God. It is too often looked upon as a merely physical stimulus to liven up the tedious service.[9]
This ought not so to be! For the primary object of assembling the saints is united worship—united praise. There can be no true public prayer without an element of worship; but it has a recognition of personal needs and even wants. This human factor makes it a composite of the human and the divine and lowers its dignity. In genuine praise there is a forgetfulness of the human element and a rising into the pure realm of the divine. In true praise the human soul is unconscious of self and utterly absorbed in God.
Hence it is not too much to say that congregational song is the supreme element in all worship.