Hymnology

“ Latin hymnology, moreover, is an aspect of ecclesiastical studies following the history of the Church through the classical and medieval ages into modern times.
A wider cultural background than the immediate interest of theology and religion is reflected in the hymns of any age. Here often lie secrets of interpretation which make possible an appreciation of contemporary thought. ”

“ No student can leave the consideration of early Christian hymnology without a sense of defeat. The past cannot be forced to yield the hidden knowledge of which it is the custodian. Sources are very scanty, especially in proportion to other literary remains of early Christianity. Specifically, there is no collection of hymns in existence which might correspond to a modern hymnary. ”

“ All three may have been represented, but for a hymn of the Ambrosian type, the chant as evolved in rendering the Gospels or the Psalms may have given place to a form of song more characteristic of the lyric.
IV. Themes
The tradition of Christian hymnology which upholds a way of life is fundamental in Ambrosian and contemporary hymns. The “way” is the first term by which Christianity was designated in the Scriptures. Thus to the Scriptures the hymn writers turned for the living characterization of their themes. The call to a virtuous life is sounded in Splendor paternae gloriae quoted above. ”

“ When classified into languages the greatest number are found to be in German, English, Latin, and Greek, in the order named. Other languages are also strongly represented, but fall far short of these in extent and importance. The leading articles on National and Denominational hymnody given in this work furnish a clear outline of the rise and development of this mass of hymn writing. Arranged chronologically they set forth the periods when hymn-writing began in various languages, and the subjects which engaged the attention of the writers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not to thy gifted numbers known?—
But the latest touch was light and calm,
As the voice of a hymn, the night-falling balm;
Holy and sweet, as its music were given
Less from a vision of earth than of heaven. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We can set our deeds to the music of a grateful heart, and seek to round our lives into a hymn—the melody of which will be recognized by all who come in contact with us, and the power of which shall not be evanescent, like the voice of the singer, but perenninal, like the music of the spheres. ”

“ Good melody is never out of fashion; and as it is by all confession the seal of high musical genius, so it is that form of music which is universally intelligible and in the best sense popular; and we have a rich legacy of it. What we want is that our hymn-books should contain a collection of the best ecclesiastical and sacred hymn-melodies, and nothing but these, instead of having but a modicum of these, for the most part mauled and illset, among a crowd of contributions of an altogether inferior kind ”

“ The hymn, the tune, the style, are each too closely associated with to be easily separated from herself, and when sung in one of her most animated moods, in the open air, with the utmost strength of her most powerful voice, must have been truly thrilling. ”

“ The structural qualities which constitute a true hymn are few and readily understood. Since a hymn must above all things be potent over the hearts and imagination of all the people, its diction must be vernacular—simple words of one and two syllables. Since a hymn must be singable by all the people in concert, its metrical flow must be short and rhythmical. In aesthetic qualities a hymn should be simple but beautiful in thought, sentiment and imagery. ”

“ With every sweet, every charming word of sympathy, every holy whisper received into the soul through the portal of the ear, we adore Thee. Aye, with every other sense in us we strike up a universal chorus, a song celestial of praise and a Hymn heavenly of glory unto Thee! ”

“ And hear her sing the hymn she loved about "The Promised Land."
Oh, my blossom! Oh, my darling! though it be but in a dream,
Speak to me,—I watch—I listen,—speak to me across the stream.
Kneeling—praying at the threshold—day and night, and night and day,
When I rise with heavy eyelids—when I kneel at night to pray—
Still I wait to catch the far-off music of the starry hymn,
Till I hear the voice that called thee bid me rise and enter in. ”

“ The purpose of this volume is to trace the history of the medieval Latin hymn from the point of view of usage. It must be evident to any student of a subject which is spread over a thousand years of human experience in the widening environment of an entire continent that a guiding thread is needed to show the way. One must not, at the same time, ignore the fact that a monumental religious literature in the poetic field is involved. But the hymn is functional, having its greatest significance as a lyric when employed in an act of worship. ”

“ At intervals, from within the ancient, but still stately dwelling, the solemn hymn, in honor of the noble dead, would swell in full chorus, and the rich melody would almost lead the soul of the listener to the heaven to which it directed its thoughts. ”

“ It has all the deep and powerful accents of high musical poetry from the religious accent, calm and imposing, to the wild clamors of the orgy. The composer can make it chant like a choir of priests, threaten, lament, ring a funeral knell, raise a hymn of glory, break forth into frantic cries, or sound a dread flourish to awaken the dead, or to doom the living. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Teach our faint desires to rise
above the dullest levels of devotion. There should be in a hymn a restrained fervour, a reverent rapture of poetic inspiration free from all admixture of the sensuous and morbidly emotional. ‘Be not drunken with wine ... but be filled with the Spirit.’
Quench then the altar-fires of your old gods,
Quench not the fire within. [29]
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Nay, rather, if we find no ‘minstrel rapture’ for the praise of the Most High, may we not ask with Charles Wesley—
Why breaks not out the fire within,
In flames of joy, and praise, and love? ”

“ The Hymn is the forehead, as before in the case of heaven. The object of its praise is the eye, and the eighty verses (of the hymn) are food, for by means of food he obtains everything.
13. The eighty verses (of the hymn) are alike food with reference to the gods as well as with reference to man. For all these beings breathe and live by means of food indeed. By food (given in alms, &c.) he conquers this world, by food (given in sacrifice) he conquers the other. Therefore the eighty verses (of the hymn) are alike food, with reference to the gods as well as with reference to man. ”

“ But his fame rests on his sacred poems and his hymns, which number over 500, and with much that is prosaic comprised "There is a Land of Pure Delight," "O God our Help in Ages Past," and "When I survey the Wondrous Cross," which has been called "the most majestic hymn in English speech." His Horæ Lyricæ was pub. in 1706, Hymns (1707) , Divine Songs (for children) (1715) , Metrical Psalms (1719) . Some of his poems, such as his exquisite cradle song, "Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber" have a perfect beauty and tenderness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ye to that bounteous path of yours, ye mighty, have ever borne away our thoughts with horses, Mind-swift and full of vigour, that the trouble of man who offers gifts might cease and slumber. 4. So ye, when ye have yoked your chariothorses, come to the hymn of the most recent singer. Our true and ancient Herald Priest shall bring you, the Youthful, bearing splendour, food, and vigour. 5. With newest hymn I call those Wonder-Workers, ancient and brilliant, and exceeding mighty, Bringers of bliss to him who lauds and praises, bestowing varied bounties on the singer. ”

“ A hundred years ago it was necessary to include in a hymn-book compositions that compensated for their lack of poetry by their undoubted piety, but we have such a wealth of song at our disposal that there need be nothing poor, prosaic, commonplace in our hymnals. ”

“ Their imaginations need to be stimulated. Their response to the charm of musical phrases, to the clearness and lucidity of the thought expressed, to the fitness of the unexpected and pleasing metaphors used, to the nice selection of the words employed to weave a garb of beauty for the message the hymn is intended to convey, can be and must be developed, if not only the proper appreciation of the hymns but also their highest efficiency as preachers are to be secured. ”