Hymnbook

“ One of the first duties therefore which we owe to hymn-melodies is the restoration of their free and original rhythms, keeping them as varied as possible: the Plain-song melodies must be left unbarred and be taught as free rhythms, and all other fine tunes which are worth using should be preserved in their original rhythm; because free rhythm is better, and its variety is good, and because the attraction of a hymn-melody lies in its individual character and expression, and not at all in its time-likeness to other tunes. ”

“ A hymn is the rhythmic aspiration of the race. No one can look through a good hymnal—through Hymns Ancient and Modern, for instance, or the Church Hymnary—without feeling that therein is bound up the devotional life of the world. The spiritual outlook is cosmic. Our every mood of penitence, praise, and aspiration resounds in melodious and time-defying strains.
In art, the religious spirit broods over the great work of the world. In Angelo, Francesca, Veronese, Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto, and Correggio, the brush of the painter has set forth the adoration of the Church of God. ”

“ We find here, too, hymns for the Sabbath day and other festivals, hymns in commemoration of the older saints, national prayers and anthems, which confess the sin of the people or record the mighty works of God, setting the nation’s history to music. Indeed, it is difficult to discover in modern hymn-books any hymn which has not its prototype in the Psalter, though the Incarnation and its manifold revelation brought into Christian life and thought 41 a light that far outshines the brightest stars of the earlier dispensation. ”

“ An eminent Episcopal divine, (says the Christian Register,) one Trinity Sunday, at the close of his sermon, read three hymns by Unitarian authors: one to God the Father, by Samuel Longfellow, one to Jesus, by Theodore Parker, and one to the Holy Spirit, by N.L. Frothingham. “There,” he said, “you have the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
It is natural to speak of hymns as “poems,” indiscriminately, for they have the same structure. But a hymn is not necessarily a poem, while a poem that can be sung as a hymn is something more than a poem. Imagination makes poems; devotion makes hymns. ”

“ A hymn-tune, which they hastily assume to be the commonest and lowest form of music, actually possesses liberties coveted by other music [13] . It is a short melody, committed to memory, and frequently repeated: there is no reason why it should submit to any of the time-conveniences of orchestral music: there is no reason why its rhythm should not be completely free; nor is there any a priori necessity why [27] any one tune should be exactly like another in rhythm. ”

“ And, to the same end, why is it that your school can sing readily, even without the book, the first two or three stanzas of so many songs, while every stanza beyond is an unknown land to them? It is because, owing chiefly to the slowness of our ordinary singing, we seldom compass the whole of a hymn. At the close of a well-written hymn is the climax, the thought up to which the whole has led, which binds it all together. Our songs, if they are to get hold upon our minds and lives, must be sung beyond their prelude, sung straight through. ”

“ Our study of English hymns has carried us through three centuries and a half—from the rough, halting lines of Coverdale to the smooth and easy rhythm of the hymn-writers of to-day.
From Sternhold and Hopkins to the modern hymn-book is a long and delightful journey. ‘I envy not in any mood’ the man who finds in devotional poetry only matter for criticism. If it be true that the heart makes the theologian, it is more true that the heart makes the hymnologist. ”

“ At the same time, since literary, musical, and religious standards vary, a really inclusive collection must of necessity be larger than the needs of each particular individual: hymn books, indeed, afford special facilities in this respect, because those who use them can select according to their requirements. Such a method of selection we have ourselves suggested in the Musical Edition by a List of simple hymns, which may satisfy the ordinary needs of many parishes; while we have also arranged a Table of hymns for all the Sundays and Holy-days of the year, which covers the whole ground. ”

“ The Apostle Paul and other writers of the New Testament, who quote freely from a variety of sources, have used fragments of hymns to reinforce their teachings or with a devotional purpose. One gains from such citations a text only, or a fragment of text. Singing is not implied. The apocalyptic vision of the Book of Revelation, however, contains several magnificent hymns of praise which testify not alone to the form and content of the early hymn but also to the practice of worship in song. The praises of the heavenly host are mirrored in the praises of the congregation upon earth. ”

“ Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student, came to add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was the ‘sweet singer’ of the movement. His hymns expressed the fiery conviction of its converts in lines so chaste and beautiful, that its more extravagant features disappeared. The wild throes of hysteric enthusiasm passed into a passion for hymn-singing, and a new musical impulse was aroused in the people which gradually changed the face of public devotion throughout England. ”

“ Gall manuscripts, as Gautier noted, were furnished with musical notation. This is occasionally true of later manuscripts, especially as we enter the closing medieval centuries. The traditional melodies of certain hymns, like the Salve festa dies and Gloria laus et honor are known to-day. Musicologists and students of liturgical music are currently engaged in bringing this music to present-day knowledge. For example, the hymn used in procession before the reading of the Gospel appears in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a conductus or conductum which, in turn, is related to the cantio. ”

“ When my Lord comes I trust I shall
—through all the loving rotations of the crude hymn-tune. Such song-births of spiritual enthusiasm are beyond enumeration—and it is useless to hunt for author or composer. Under the momentum of a wrestling hour or a common rapture of experience, counterpoint was unthought of, and the same notes for every voice lifted pleading and praise in monophonic impromptu. ”

“ To present each hymn with its tune appeared the natural and most satisfactory way, as in most cases it is impossible to dissociate the two. The melody is the psychological coëfficient of the metrical text. Without it the verse of a seraph would be smothered praise. Like a flower and its fragrance, hymn and tune are one creature, and stand for a whole value and a full effect. ”

“ It seeks to explain, as far as possible, the origin of the words and music of every hymn in the Hymnary.
The great lyrics of the church, contributed by every age since the days of the apostles, are a precious heritage, and a source of inspiration and power. This work is intended to foster an understanding of and love for our hymns, new and old, and to stimulate the time-honored and blessed practice of congregational singing in the church today. ”

“ For what we know of the first formulated human prayer and praise we are mostly indebted to the Hebrew race. They seem to have been at least the only ancient nation that had a complete psalter—and their collection is the mother hymn-book of the world.
Probably the first form of hymn-worship was the plain-song—a declamatory unison of assembled singers, every voice on the same pitch, and within the compass of five notes—and so continued, from whatever may have stood for plain-song in Tabernacle and Temple days down to the earliest centuries of the Christian church. ”

“ The admission of secular tunes into the hymnology, which in the Anglican Church finds advocates even in the present century, has caused the publication of several curious collections of sacred poetry set to melodies taken from secular compositions of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and other celebrated musicians, and often painfully distorted to adapt them to the metre of the verses. True, the adaptation of secular melodies for sacred songs is not a new expedient. It was resorted to by our estimable composers of chorales and promoters of congregational singing at the time of the Reformation. ”

“ It will of course be understood that the tune appointed for each hymn is printed directly above it, all four parts being given at length, the two trebles printed in a not unusual way upon one staff, the tenor and bass having each separate lines. Therefore no difficulty in singing the hymns can be felt even by the inexperienced, especially as one stanza is printed with the notes to show the exact adaptation.
In fine, "Church Pastorals" is a work worthy of an extended circulation and capable of great usefulness. ”

“ The vastness of the subject can be gauged when we remember that we have above 400,000 hymns, in more than two hundred different languages and dialects.
Augustine says a hymn 'is a song with praise of God. If thou singest and praisest not God, thou utterest no hymn. A hymn, then, containeth these three things: song, and praise, and that of God. Praise, then, of God in song is called a hymn'. Gregory Nazianzen put it thus: 'Modidata laus est hymnus' A definition in the Cottonian MS. says a hymn must be praise of God or of His saints, be capable of being sung, and be metrical. ”

“ I. "Encore un hymne, O ma lyre Un hymn pour le Seigneur, Un hymne dans mon delire, Un hymne dans mon bonheur." One hymn more, O my lyre! Praise to the God above, Of joy and life and love, Sweeping its strings of fire! ”

“ It is suitable both for simple and elaborate settings, for hymns of praise or of the more intimate ideal emotions, and in a resonant building a choir of six voices can produce complete effects with it. The broad, sonorous swell of its harmonious intervals floods the air with peaceful power, very unlike the broken sea of Bach's chromatics, which, to produce anything like an equal effect of sound, needs to be powerfully excited. ”

“ But they are also genuinely songs of the people; true, simple, hearty, bright, and bold in expression, rapid in movement, no standing still and looking back, no elaborate painting and describing, no subtle demonstrating and teaching. Even in outward form they closely resemble the old German epics and the popular historical ballad, and were intended above all not merely to be read, but to be sung, and that by the whole congregation. The ecclesiastical authorities began to introduce hymn-books into the several provinces toward the end of the seventeenth century. ”

“ The new work, inserted in every case to fill an acknowledged gap or to introduce a tune of special excellence, must stand or fall on its merits. One feature, however, requires a word of comment. Hymns are printed, wherever possible, as their authors wrote them. To many it will be a surprise to find that the ascription of a hymn to this or that author, when it was given at all in hymnals of the last century, was very often misleading. The public now has the opportunity of comparing many originals with their altered versions ”

“ 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 ”

“ The following was adopted by The Hymn Society of America as its definition of a Christian hymn:
“A Christian hymn is a lyric poem, reverently and devotionally conceived, which is designed to be sung and which expresses the worshipper’s attitude toward God, or God’s purposes in human life. It should be simple and metrical in form, genuinely emotional, poetic and literary in style, spiritual in quality, and in its ideas so direct and so immediately apparent as to unify a congregation while singing it.”—Carl F. Price.
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“Some kinds of music are like mental and spiritual food. ”

“ The Value of Singing Hymns Too Often Overlooked.
Since the hymn has so high a spiritual value, it is all the more distressing that its possibilities of spiritual helpfulness are so generally overlooked and ignored by our ministers and their people. Even where it seems to be distinctly cultivated and emphasized, it is often the merely physiological effects that are sought. In other apparently earnest endeavors to develop its value, there is the aridity of merely artistic and literary emphasis, or the formal liturgical aspect that is stressed! ”

“ But one who studies the new hymn-books, reads the prefaces of their editors, and notes the character of the hymns that are most used in our churches, will realize that now, as it has always been in the history of the Church, the guiding thought and feeling of the time may be traced in popular song, more faintly but not less inevitably than in the instructions of the pulpit. When viewed in historic sequence one observes the growing prominence of the mystical and subjective elements, the fading away of the early fondness for scholastic definition. ”

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