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   Title: The Hymns of Wesley and Watts: Five Papers
   Creator(s): Manning, Bernard L.
   Print Basis: London: The Epworth Press (Edgar C. Barton), 1942, "The
   Hymns of Wesley and Watts: Five Papers" by Bernard L. Manning, M.A.
   Rights: Released into the Public Domain
   CCEL Subjects: All; Hymns; Proofed
   LC Call no: BV312.M24
   LC Subjects:

   Practical theology

   Worship (Public and Private) Including the church year, Christian
   symbols, liturgy, prayer, hymnology

   Hymnology
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                         The Hymns of Wesley and Watts:
                                  Five Papers

   Bernard L. Manning, M.A.
   (Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge)

   THE EPWORTH PRESS (EDGAR C. BARTON)
   25-35 CITY ROAD, LONDON, E.C.1
   July 1942 (now public domain [J.H.])
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  FOREWORD

   REV. HENRY BETT, M.A., LITT.D.

   It must be more than a dozen years ago that I met with a small pamphlet
   entitled Christian Experience throughout the Centuries. It was the
   report of an address delivered before the Assembly of the
   Congregational Union, I believe, and the title-page bore the name of
   Bernard L. Manning, M.A., Fellow and Bursar of Jesus College,
   Cambridge. I had never heard of Mr. Manning before, but the booklet was
   of such an extraordinary excellence that I began to look out for
   anything else that he had written. The next discovery came in 1933 when
   the London Quarterly and Holborn Review published an article under the
   title [1]Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists'. This was a
   paper which had been read to the University Methodist Society at
   Cambridge a few months before. Now the early part of it was especially
   interesting to me, not only as a native of Lincolnshire, but because it
   gave some details of Mr. Manning's early life. I remembered that when I
   lived in Lincoln between 1911 and 1914, one of the Congregational
   ministers of the city was the Rev. George Manning. Evidently the writer
   was his son. I continued to read everything that Mr. Manning wrote, and
   in The Spirit of Methodism I paid him a sincere tribute of admiration.
   I am very glad now that I did, and I am also glad that I saw him once,
   when I was on a visit to Cambridge, and my friend the Rev. W. F.
   Flemington was good enough to invite Mr. Manning to lunch, so that we
   could meet. As one would expect, he was the most modest of men. Any one
   might have thought on that occasion that it was he, and not I, who was
   having the privilege of meeting a man of genius. I went on reading, and
   recommending to my friends, everything that bore Mr. Manning's name --
   his two books, Why not abandon the Church? and Essays in Orthodox
   Dissent, and his various articles and addresses. Then a few months ago
   came the sad news of his untimely death -- in my deliberate judgement,
   the most serious loss that religion in this country has suffered for
   years past.

   Bernard Manning was a religious genius, and one of a very uncommon
   type. He was a unique combination -- a scholar, a wit, a writer with a
   remarkably effective English style, and an Evangelical believer. It is
   not often that you find any one who is all these things at once. His
   scholarship was never obtruded, but it was always behind all that he
   wrote. His pleasantly acid wit was a perpetual joy: no one ever poked
   fun more delightfully at the follies and pretensions of unbelief and at
   the timidities of conventional religion. But, deeper than all this,
   there was beneath all that he ever wrote the soul-stirring passion of
   the Evangelical faith and the Evangelical experience.

   Methodism owes a special debt of gratitude to Bernard Manning. I have
   tried, for forty years past, to recall Methodists to a sense of the
   greatness of their spiritual heritage in the hymns of the Wesleys. In
   these hymns we possess a unique treasury of devotional poetry, but we
   have been neglecting this, and singing instead the flabby and
   sentimental verses of modern poetasters. It was Bernard Manning, a
   devoted member of another communion, who told us again of the supreme
   excellence of our Methodist hymns, and said that the Collection of 1780
   ranks with the Psalms, the Book of Common Prayer, the Canon of the
   Mass. In its own way it is perfect, unapproachable, elemental in its
   perfection ... a work of supreme art by a religious genius'.

   It is pathetic to remember that the last printed words from Bernard
   Manning's pen are a sermon preached in Cheshunt College Chapel not very
   long before he died -- a sermon on The Burial of the Dead, afterward
   printed in the Congregational Quarterly. At the end of it he quotes
   some triumphant lines of Charles Wesley's, and nothing could be more
   appropriate as our farewell to this very gifted man, who was a humble
   and penitent believer:


   No, dear companion, no:

   We gladly let thee go,

   From a suffering church beneath,

   To a reigning church above:

   Thou hast more than conquered death;

   Thou art crowned with life and love!
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Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists

   Bernard Manning

   A paper read to the University Methodist Society at Wesley Church,
   Cambridge, on Sunday, November 20, 1932.

   Come with me to John Wesley's own country: Lincolnshire. Come to the
   North Wolds, where from the Earl of Yarborough's woods at Pelham's
   Pillar you can see the line of the Humber and the North Sea, and the
   Dock Tower of Grimsby by day; and by night the lantern of Spurn
   lighthouse, the dull glow of Hull on the north, the duller glow of
   Gainsborough on the west, and between them the flaring furnaces of
   Scunthorpe. Come to the place where the hill-country of the Wolds ends
   suddenly with a sharp escarpment. Away to the west stretches the
   chess-board of variegated woodland, meadows, and ploughed fields till
   it rises suddenly on a far horizon to that sharp ridge on which, thirty
   miles away, stands the cathedral church of Lincoln. Half-way down this
   steep western escarpment of the Wolds in the hungry forties of last
   century, in the ancient Roman town of Caistor, the Methodists built a
   new chapel, square and high and red, in a county of red bricks and
   curly red tiles. Inside, the chapel had a deep gallery, and a lofty
   rostrum. Under the rostrum was the vestry, and through a trap door in
   the rostrum floor the preacher climbed from the vestry to his place.
   You saw him enter the vestry below by an ordinary door, and then in due
   time appeared his head and beard, and you hoped he would forget to shut
   the trap door, but he never did.

   In that chapel it was my fortune to hear many sermons and to be bored
   by not a few. I am not less grateful for those that bored me than for
   those which held me interested; for in the effort to escape from
   boredom I made the most of the resources of my grandfather's pew.
   Attempts to read the one plain tablet at the side of the rostrum always
   failed. I grew weary of wondering why the bright yellow blinds were
   fitted only on the south side of the chapel, not on the north (I was
   very young, you see). I knew by heart the beauties of the thin iron
   pillars painted by some very ingenious person to deceive us into
   thinking they were marble. I had to wait for the hymns before the boy
   who blew the organ would begin his attractive diving and jumping. I had
   tried to imagine what would really happen if I suddenly put both my
   hands on the bald head of our friend there in the pew in front until
   the fascination of the experiment became so great that I was compelled
   for safety's sake to put away the thought. What, then, was left? Only
   the pile of Bibles and hymn-books in the left-hand corner. The Bibles,
   I regret to confess, did not attract me; but Wesley's Hymns, Wesley's
   Hymns with a Supplement, and Wesley's Hymns with New Supplement, upon
   these I fell week after week. And there in that pew began an
   unregulated, passionate, random reading which has gone on ever since.

   I could inflict upon you, but I will not, a description of the other
   chapel that I knew well in those days: the 1662 meeting house of my
   father's Congregational Church. There I found sermons less dull, for my
   father preached them; but the casual ministrations of strangers drove
   me to Part II of Dr. Barrett's Hymnal, where among Ancient Hymns of the
   Church' I found Irons's noble translation of the most moving of all
   medieval hymns -- Dies Irae; and from Dies Irae, not knowing what I
   did, I caught the infection of a love of Medieval Christianity. To
   boring sermons, then, I owe two of the best things that I know.

   Now, few of you have Methodist grandfathers at Caistor; few of you hear
   boring Methodist sermons; and, even if you did, few of you would still
   find your old hymn-books left in the pew. I may be wrong, but I suspect
   that many of you hardly know even the outward and visible signs of the
   hymn-book about which I am to talk; and I propose, therefore, before we
   try to approach its inward and spiritual grace to discuss its external
   make-up. The power of the late Wesleyan Conference was so great that
   when in 1904 it said Let there be a new hymn-book', behold, it was so.
   Old hymn-books passed away; all hymnbooks became new. Henceforth you
   were to know only your new hymn-book of 1904, which came in when I was
   only a boy, but which still left the old on the pew shelves for my
   research.

   I do not speak of it, The Methodist Hymn-Book, with its commonplace
   title, like every one else's hymn-book, I speak of your glory: A
   Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists. By the
   Rev. John Wesley, M.A., sometime Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.
   With a supplement. London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 2 Castle Street,
   City Road; sold at 66 Paternoster Row.' That was a title page. {The
   edition of the hymn-book which I describe in this paper is not the
   classical one of 1780, but an undated mid-nineteenth-century edition
   (used by my grandfather), with the 1830 supplement.} It had English
   history and English life in it, enough at least to set one bored little
   boy wondering. Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford': so even at Caistor
   we had some touch with Oxford; but what Oxford was, I had no notion. I
   suppose I respect and love Oxford more than I should otherwise because
   I first heard of it in a Methodist hymn-book. Sometime Fellow of
   Lincoln College.' What was a Fellow and a sometime Fellow? And why
   Lincoln College? -- a pertinent question in Lincolnshire. And then,
   opposite the title page -- surely in almost every one of the old books
   -- there was what ought never to have been removed from any of them,
   the page of thicker paper with the clean-cut, chaste engraving of the
   venerable man himself, and his clear, beautiful signature, John Wesley.
   It was in itself an introduction to the engraver's art, for it was a
   good engraving; and early familiarity with that dignified figure -- the
   long curling hair, the Geneva gown and cassock and bands -- gave me, I
   imagine, my ineradicable prejudice in favour of a properly dressed
   minister and my revulsion from the parson in mufti. Did it do no more?
   It did, and you made one of the profoundest mistakes you ever made when
   in 1904 you removed that engraving from your hymn-books. That engraving
   alone stamped on the mind and heart of your people the figure of the
   founder of Methodism. Your devotion to him has been a by-word with the
   rest of us, you know, since Crabbe wrote of you as folk whose John the
   Elder was the John Divine'.

   Well, let Crabbe have his joke: I think Methodism will lose a most
   valuable and most characteristic bit of itself when the lineaments of
   its founder are less clear in the mind of all its people. Every
   Methodist ought to know at least what Wesley looked like: and you began
   to erase his image when you removed him from the book. Why you did so
   wanton and so silly a thing, I cannot imagine. Yes, I can; but I will
   not go into that.

   So much we learnt from the first opening of the book. Now turn over. A
   single page of close print contained the Preface, signed like the
   portrait, John Wesley, and dated (how many of you know the date?)
   London, October 20, 1779; a great but unobserved Methodist feast. I am
   inclined to read the whole of the Preface to you; for, unwilling as I
   am to think ill of you, I believe that many of you have never read it.
   Never read it! Why, you have never seen it. The rascals who compiled
   your hymn-book in 1904 saw to that. They had the effrontery to refer to
   it as a celebrated preface' (a preface' forsooth); and the wickedness
   to banish it from the book which you were to use for thirty years. They
   robbed you in 1904 of what, as the children of John Wesley, you should
   regard as one of your priceless heirlooms. I use strong language, but
   that Preface is, to begin with, one of the noblest pieces of eighteenth
   century prose extant: from its quaint opening words, For many years I
   have been importuned', to its moving conclusion, When Poetry thus keeps
   its place, as the handmaid of Piety, it shall attain, not a poor
   perishable wreath, but a crown that fadeth not away'. I used to read it
   often; I do not say I understood it then; but because I read it first
   in Caistor chapel I have kept on reading it till I begin to understand
   it. Apart altogether from Methodist interest, it is a first-rate
   introduction to the mind of the eighteenth century, a stimulating bit
   of literary criticism, and a model of plain, forceful, and at times
   sarcastic prose. I shall return to the Preface, but let us now pass on.

   The [2]Table of Contents follows. It is, of course, unique. Wesley
   said, The hymns are not carelessly jumbled together, but carefully
   ranged under proper heads, according to the experience of real
   Christians'. The arrangement is quite unlike that with which we are now
   all familiar: hymns, I mean, arranged as they are in almost all our
   books under the three main heads: God, the Father, the Son, and the
   Holy Ghost; Man, his needs and moods; the Church, its privileges and
   services. Wesley arranged his hymn-book as a spiritual biography of the
   sort of person whom he called in the Preface a real Christian. There is
   the introductory section, Exhorting sinners to return to God'; followed
   by a contemplation of the great facts which should induce them to do
   so: the Pleasantness of Religion, the Goodness of God, and the last
   four things, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. Next, the outlines of
   religion being sketched for the contemplation of the Exhorted Sinner,
   Formal Religion is described and distinguished (in Part II) from Inward
   Religion. With this precaution taken, the real work begins in Part III.
   Here we have the sinner trying to find the light. He prays for
   repentance in Section I. In Section II he is already a mourner
   convinced of sin. He is on the sure way to become a believer. But stay;
   before we deal with the sinner turned believer, we must glance at
   another class. Not all those who pray for repentance and wish to begin
   the true life do it now for the first time. Some have been here before,
   have started well, then have failed, and by this time need to get their
   second wind, or, it may be, their third or fourth. These are the people
   delightfully called Backsliders. And so we have the two sections: For
   Persons convinced of Backsliding' and For Backsliders recovered'.
   Wesley now sees his way clear. He has put the saving facts before
   sinners; warned them against mistaking false religion for true; and
   brought them to genuine repentance, whether for the first or a later
   time. He can now pass on to consider their experience as believers. He
   contemplates them first rejoicing, then fighting, praying, watching,
   working, suffering, seeking full redemption -- a long and most
   distinctive section -- and then saved; finally interceding for the
   world. In the last section Wesley considers his Society (the Methodist
   Church, as we should now call it); and we have the hymns of corporate
   life: For the Society Meeting, Giving Thanks, Praying, and Parting.

   With the history of the various supplements I do not propose to deal.
   In them we find the beginning of the more usual present-day grouping of
   hymns. They contain, of course, some of the greatest of Charles
   Wesley's hymns at first published separately; we find here in
   particular some of the sacramental hymns and the hymns for the great
   festivals. Into the very canon approved by John Wesley his followers
   did not hesitate, however, to insert a few not inserted in his life;
   but they marked these evidences of their rash piety by branding these
   pirate hymns with an asterisk. Most famous of these is Jesu, Lover of
   My Soul'. {Included in Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1753, but not in the
   hymn-book of 1780.} In 1830 the compilers confess that some of the
   hymns which they now admit sink below the rank of the Wesley poetry',
   but they defend their inclusion of these because of some excellence
   which will be found in the sentiment', because they afford a greater
   choice of subjects, and because Mr. Wesley' himself gave most of them
   his sanction by putting them in smaller supplemental books of his own.

   Before we look into the hymns themselves, we must glance at the end of
   the book. Here is a mass of indexes: {The index of subjects and the
   index of texts were added in 1808.} indexes which by their thoroughness
   and minuteness link the book with Medieval and Renaissance scholarship.
   Scholars had not yet forgotten the way to index a book when Wesley
   published his hymns, and so we have a variety of indexes, which show
   that the book was used, as he intended it to be used, as a little body
   of experimental and practical divinity'. There is an excellent index of
   subjects -- not an apology for one, but the genuine article, of great
   use to any user of the book. There is an index of texts of Holy
   Scripture illustrated in the volume. This is not complete, it goes
   without saying, for there is a reminiscence of Holy Scripture in every
   verse, almost in every line, that Charles Wesley ever wrote. But,
   necessarily incomplete as it is, this index proves how fully justified
   was John Wesley's suggestion that in no other publication of the kind
   could men discover so distinct and full an account of Scriptural
   Christianity'. Of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, only four
   are not recorded as illustrated: Ezra, Obadiah, Nahum, and Zephaniah.
   Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, only one: the Third
   Epistle of St. John. Some books, e.g. Romans and Isaiah, are
   illustrated chapter by chapter, almost verse by verse. There are, for
   instance, over thirty references to Romans viii. Last among indexes
   there is the Index to every verse: giving evidence, if there were no
   other, that the book was used for reference and study. The book is
   indeed a treasury for the expression of every state of mind and every
   condition of the soul. It is a modern Book of Psalms. Exactly as the
   devout of all times have found in the Psalms a better expression of
   their fears and hopes, their defeats and victories, than in any words
   they could put together for themselves, so the lover of Wesley's hymns
   finds inevitably and unconsciously that he drops into quoting them
   whatever point he has to make, whatever confession he has to utter.
   Before we look at the hymns themselves, then, I want to emphasize to
   you the unique possession of your Church in this book which you hardly
   know today. You talk much, and you talk rightly, of the work Methodism
   does for the world and for the universal Church; but your greatest --
   incomparably your greatest -- contribution to the common heritage of
   Christendom is in Wesley's hymns. All the other things which you do,
   others have done and can do as well, better, or less well. But in
   Wesley's hymns you have something unique, no one else could have done
   it, and unless you preserve it for the use of all the faithful, till
   that day when we are all one, we shall all lose some of the best gifts
   of God. I implore you then, in these days when you are tempted to look
   at other parts of the Church and to dwell on your likeness to them and
   on the great things that we all have in common, keep that good thing
   committed peculiarly to your charge. This is your vineyard: do not come
   one day saying, Whatever I have done elsewhere, mine own vineyard have
   I not kept'. In Wesley's hymns, not divorced from the great tunes of
   the Handel tradition, you have what only you understand and what (I
   sometimes fear) you no longer think it worth while to understand.

   You may think my language about the hymns extravagant: therefore I
   repeat it in stronger terms. This little book -- some 750 hymns
   {Wesley's Collection of 1780 has only 525 hymns.} -- ranks in Christian
   literature with the Psalms, the Book of Common Prayer, the Canon of the
   Mass. In its own way, it is perfect, unapproachable, elemental in its
   perfection. You cannot alter it except to mar it; -- it is a work of
   supreme devotional art by a religious genius. You may compare it with
   Leonardo's Last Supper' or King's Chapel; and, as Blackstone said of
   the English Constitution, the proper attitude to take to it is this: we
   must venerate where we are not able presently to comprehend.

   If you are now in a fit state of mind, we will look at the hymns. Let
   me admit at once that, in spite of all I have said, Charles Wesley did
   not always write well. The book contains many stilted, feeble, dull
   verses, and not a few that may strike us as ludicrous. These weaknesses
   are especially to be noticed when Wesley writes of occasional or less
   exalted subjects. Among the hymns included under the heading For
   Believers Interceding' are, for instance, some For Masters'. These are
   interesting inasmuch as they give us the point of view of an
   eighteenth-century householder with his apprentices, his servants, and
   his family around him:


   Inferiors, as a sacred trust,

   I from the Sovereign Lord receive,

   That what is suitable and just,

   Impartial I to all may give:


   O'erlook them with a guardian eye;

   From vice and wickedness restrain;

   Mistakes and lesser faults pass by,

   And govern with a looser rein.


   The servant faithfully discreet,

   Gentle to him, and good, and mild,

   Him would I tenderly entreat,

   And scarce distinguish from a child.


   Yet let me not my place forsake,

   The occasion of his stumbling prove,

   The servant to my bosom take,

   Or mar him by familiar love.


   As far from abjectness as pride,

   With condescending dignity,

   Jesus, I make Thy word my guide,

   And keep the post assigned by Thee.

   That you may think merely quaint, but it is much to be wished that all
   modern employers read on to the last two verses:


   O could I emulate the zeal

   Thou dost to Thy poor servants bear!

   The troubles, griefs, and burdens feel

   Of souls entrusted to my care:


   In daily prayer to God commend

   The souls whom God expired to save:

   And think how soon my sway may end

   And all be equal in the grave!

   The hymns For Parents' show some concern lest the rod be too much
   spared, and the child spoilt.


   We tremble at the danger near,

   And crowds of wretched parents see

   Who, blindly fond, their children rear

   In tempers far as hell from Thee:


   Themselves the slaves of sense and praise,

   Their babes who pamper and admire,

   And make the helpless infants pass

   To murderer Moloch through the fire.

   Parents are to be concerned rather --


   To time our every smile or frown,

   To mark the bounds of good and ill,

   And beat the pride of nature down,

   And bend or break his rising will.

   And again, in another hymn:


   We plunge ourselves in endless woes,

   Our helpless infant sell;

   Resist the light, and side with those

   Who send their babes to hell.


   We mark the idolizing throng,

   Their cruel fondness blame;

   Their children's souls we know they wrong; --

   And we shall do the same.

   Yet parents may hope to avoid extreme measures:


   We would persuade their heart t' obey;

   With mildest zeal proceed;

   And never take the harsher way,

   When love will do the deed.

   The hymn For the Mahometans' has great interest for students of Church
   history. Wesley has given a vivid and a true picture of the devastation
   wrought in the Christian East by Islam. He displays a sympathetic
   appreciation of the facts remarkable for his time when English
   Christians were perhaps even less understanding about the tragedy of
   the Eastern Church than we are today. This hymn alone would mark the
   extra-ordinarily wide and understanding survey which the Wesleys made
   of the Christian world; it was not an idle boast, that of John's: I
   look upon the whole world as my parish.' The two brothers had the most
   truly Catholic mind in eighteenth-century England -- nay, in
   eighteenth-century Christendom:


   The smoke of the infernal cave,

   Which half the Christian world o'erspread,

   Disperse, Thou heavenly Light, and save

   The souls by that Impostor led,

   That Arab-chief, as Satan bold,

   Who quite destroyed Thy Asian fold.


   O might the blood of sprinkling cry

   For those who spurn the sprinkled blood!

   Assert Thy glorious Deity,

   Stretch out Thine arm, Thou Triune God

   The Unitarian fiend expel,

   And chase his doctrine back to hell.

   The couplet about the Unitarian fiend has perhaps a wider application
   than to Mahometans; as I have sometimes wondered in old days if Wesley
   did not write with a prophet's pen that couplet about a widely
   circulated religious weekly:


   The world, The Christian World, convince

   Of damning unbelief.

   I know not how it is among you, but many well-meaning
   Congregationalists, I am sorry to say, are now too well-bred, or too
   squeamish, to sing that great missionary hymn of Heber's, in which we
   can breathe again the fervent faith of the heroic days of modern
   missions. I mean, of course, From Greenland's icy mountains'. How then
   would they get on with Wesley: For the Heathen'?


   The servile progeny of Ham

   Seize, as the purchase of Thy blood;

   Let all the Heathens know Thy name;

   From idols to the living God

   The dark Americans convert;

   And shine in every Pagan heart.

   There are, of course, quaint passages in the main body of hymns:


   Me, me who still in darkness sit,

   Shut up in sin and unbelief,

   Bring forth out of this hellish pit,

   This dungeon of despairing grief.


   Suffice that for the season past

   Hell's horrid language filled our tongues;

   We all Thy words behind us cast,

   And loudly sang the drunkard's songs.

   There are references to the contemporary controversy with the
   Calvinists. Were the benefits of the Atonement intended for the whole
   race or only for those who did in fact receive them? Here is a hymn
   which sounds today as if any one might sing it; but in Wesley's time it
   was a battle-song of militant Arminianism. Notice the stab at debased
   Calvinism in every line:


   Father, whose everlasting love

   Thy only Son for sinners gave;

   Whose grace to all did freely move,

   And sent Him down the world to save:


   Help us Thy mercy to extol,

   Immense, unfathomed, unconfined;

   To praise the Lamb who died for all,

   The general Saviour of mankind.


   Thy undistinguishing regard

   Was cast on Adam's fallen race;

   For all Thou hast in Christ prepared

   Sufficient, sovereign, saving grace.


   The world He suffered to redeem:

   For all He hath th' atonement made:

   For those that will not come to Him,

   The ransom of His life was paid.


   Arise, O God, maintain Thy cause!

   The fulness of the Gentiles call:

   Lift up the standard of Thy cross,

   And all shall own Thou diedst for all.

   It is time to leave these curiosities and turn to the central part of
   the book. Why do I confidently make such great claims for it? Well,
   first a word about the language and literary form. It was Charles
   Wesley's good fortune, or (if you like) it was in the providence of
   God, that he was set to express the Catholic faith as it was being
   newly received in the Evangelical movement at a moment when prevailing
   taste and prevailing literary habits combined to give him a perfect
   literary instrument for hymn-writing. Dryden, Pope, and the rest of the
   much derided Classical' school had just shown what could be done with
   the English language inside the limits of what Milton called the
   troublesome and modern bondage of riming'.

   Charles Wesley's generation was bred to the use of rhymed couplets and
   formal metres as you today are bred to the control of cars and wireless
   sets. In trying to say what he had to say in common metre, long metre,
   short metre, 6.8s, 7s and 6s, 8s and 6s, and the like, he was not
   kicking against the pricks as the genius of Francis Thompson or
   Christina Rossetti would have been. He was moving naturally in what was
   to him a natural medium, and so you simply are not aware of the
   trammels of the literary form, because he is not. He moves with
   complete mastery, with an ease that conceals mastery. His art is so
   cunning that it is difficult indeed to illustrate it.

   We are, however, all aware of odd jolts that we get in some hymns where
   the sense quarrels with the metre or oversteps it. That very literary
   person, F. S. Pierpoint, in his exquisite (I use the adjective in its
   good and its bad sense) hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth', though he
   is rather oppressively cultured' most of the time, is not master of his
   metre and crashes awkwardly in verse two:


   For the beauty of each hour

   Of the day and of the night.

   You don't want to emphasize the absurd word of', but Pierpoint has
   contrived his couplet so ill that you must.

   Or we may look at Tennyson (though this is not quite fair, because
   Tennyson was not writing a hymn). The opening stanzas of In Memoriam
   make a noble hymn; but there is that metrical difficulty (apart from
   discovering exactly what Tennyson means) in the last stanzas:


   Let knowledge grow from more to more,

   But more of reverence in us dwell,

   That heart and mind, according well,

   May make one music as before,


   But vaster. We are fools and slight.

   But vaster is an awkward carry over' to a new verse and a new start of
   the tune. It is a great merit in a hymn if each line, to say nothing of
   each verse, contains a more or less rounded thought. I dare say that
   you have often felt that in singing the great hymn of Dr. Watts on
   which John Wesley died, I'll praise my Maker'. It goes smoothly enough
   till you come to -


   Happy the man whose hopes rely

   On Israel's God! He made the sky,

   And earth and seas, with all their train.

   I know that it is partly the Psalmist's fault. Watts was following him,
   and the Psalmist has this sudden transition: He made the sky'; but it
   would have been neater, nevertheless, if Watts had made the transition
   in meaning at the end of the line where you get the natural transition
   of metre. And what I am driving at is that Charles Wesley never, or
   almost never, is caught out by his metre as Pierpoint and Watts and
   Tennyson (considered as a hymn-writer) are; and as almost every one is.
   There may be examples in Wesley: I can only say that I have noticed
   none. His strong accent always seems to fall in the right place; and
   most lines contain one thought and not more than one.

   You do not notice his perfect mastery of his medium, I said; but you
   can trace it. To do that helps to explain the smoothness of his verse
   and his success in bringing it off every time with a facility which, at
   its worst, is almost a sort of slickness. I will give you one example.
   You know the literary artifice called by the grammarians chiasmus'. You
   have four ideas which hang together in two pairs, which we can call A
   and B. Instead of dealing first with the first pair, the A's and then
   with the B's, you mention one of the first pair, then both the second
   pair, and then finish with the second member of the first pair: A B B
   A. There sounds to be little in it, but it is most effective,
   especially in four lines of verse. Let us look at a hymn in detail.
   Take the great baptismal hymn, Come Father, Son, and Holy Ghost'. You
   remember verse two:


   We now Thy promised presence claim,

   Sent to disciple all mankind,

   Sent to baptize into Thy Name,

   We now Thy promised presence find.

   You have there the lines 1 and 4 similar and the lines 2 and 3 similar.
   You see how Wesley rings the changes. Beginning with promised presence,
   he goes off to the idea of Sent to do this; then he presses that home
   again, Sent to do that; and finally gives the knock-out blow by a
   return to the place from which he started, promised presence.

   Now take a hymn like Jesu, Lover', about which I dare say you think you
   know everything. Here Wesley's feeling is very high. You know this hymn
   is often criticized as poor in literary form, though moving in its
   piety. Many jests have been made about the confused navigation pictured
   in the metaphors of verse one: a bosom in a storm becomes a ship; and
   our Saviour, from being the pilot (safely to the haven guide') is
   turned into some one on the shore who welcomes the vessel. That sort of
   comment is all very small and silly; I mention it only to show that,
   even in a hymn where Wesley's control of his metaphors is not the
   tightest, he still is very active with his quiet skill of weaving a
   pattern in his words. Consider the famous verse that brings divine
   consolation to millions who never think of its literary form. Have you
   noticed the fingerprints of the accomplished classical scholar still on
   that?


   Just and holy is Thy Name,

   I am all unrighteousness;

   False and full of sin I am,

   Thou art full of truth and grace.

   Here you have two people in contrast: the holy Saviour and the sinful
   speaker. Wesley begins with the Saviour. Just and holy is Thy Name';
   then he has two lines on the sinful speaker:


   I am all unrighteousness;

   False and full of sin I am.

   And, finally, he mentions the Saviour again: Thou art full of truth and
   grace.'

   The contrast, that is to say, is made two ways in the first two lines:
   Saviour -- sinner; then in the next two, sinner -- Saviour: A B B A.
   But look at the pattern of the verse a little more closely. Inside this
   main design you see two variants of it worked, so to say, on a smaller
   scale. Take the lines about the sinner:


   I am all unrighteousness:

   False and full of sin I am.

   Here you have the pronoun I' and a description of the speaker, I am all
   unrighteousness': I am false and full of sin'. But you see how Wesley
   arranges it: I' first, then epithet: I am all unrighteousness'; then
   comes another epithet, and lastly I': False and full of sin I am'. A B
   B A.

   Now look at the two lines about the Saviour. They exactly balance; and
   the same literary device is used in precisely the same way.


   Just and holy is Thy Name; A B

   Thou art full of truth and grace. B A

   So in four very simple lines, on the most simple theme, we have the
   same effective pattern twice woven small, and then the whole enclosed
   in a larger setting of exactly the same pattern.

   This, I know, has been tedious, and perhaps not very convincing. I must
   mention it, however, because it gives you a hint of the literary power
   and skill and instinct for form that lie behind Wesley's success as a
   verse maker. I must not analyse more. If he does that in four
   comparatively simple lines, you may judge what he does elsewhere. Ex
   pede Herculem. I do not suggest that Methodist congregations know why
   the verse is good; but if it is good and clear, and not tedious and
   flat, it is so, I submit, because your congregations unconsciously
   benefit by Wesley's literary power. And it was, as I said, Wesley's
   good fortune that the sort of literary skill most appreciated in his
   day, and therefore that in which he was most trained, was a skill which
   helped him in writing the concise verse that is necessary in hymns.
   After the Romantic Revival, another kind of verse -- of a more
   continuous, straggling kind -- came into fashion; and when it was
   chopped into verses, it often seemed, and indeed it was, unnatural and
   unhappy.

   But it was not only in the form of his metre that Wesley was happy. He
   lived in an age of robust common sense, common sense that was often
   pedestrian and uninspiring and commonplace, but common sense for all
   that. This gave his language a clarity and reality and vigour that are
   most precious. For in religion, if it is to save souls (or whatever the
   modern phrase may be) those qualities -- clarity, reality, vigour --
   are essential. In religious talk you must understand what the fellow
   means; you must be sure he is talking about facts and talking
   sincerely; you must be knocked down, or at least effectually persuaded,
   by what he says. Now, of all people who talk about religion, Charles
   Wesley is the least sentimental and soulful. There is no sort of
   self-conscious tension or priggishness or humbug about him. He says
   what he has to say in the simplest, plainest way he can. He does not
   take refuge in abstract nouns and over-subtle adjectives. Concrete
   nouns, active verbs, and plain metaphors: these are his material. He
   can use a Latin word on occasion with great effect. At times he can be
   so scholarly as to be hardly understood by the crowd. But these are
   quite exceptional moods; and he is never foggy. His allusions sometimes
   may be too erudite for most to grasp; but, once grasped, they are quite
   simple. Take these examples -- space permits only sample verse
   quotations:


   Arm of the Lord, awake, awake!

   Thine own immortal strength put on!

   With terror clothed, hell's kingdom shake,

   And cast Thy foes with fury down.


   As in the ancient days appear!

   The sacred annals speak Thy fame:

   Be now omnipotently near,

   To endless ages still the same.


   Thy arm, Lord, is not shortened now;

   It wants not now the power to save;

   Still present with Thy people, thou

   Bear'st them through life's disparted wave.


   Where pure, essential joy is found,

   The Lord's redeemed their heads shall raise,

   With everlasting gladness crowned,

   And filled with love, and lost in praise.

   You will notice how full this is of scriptural allusion: in places it
   is almost a transcript from scripture. You will notice its vigour, its
   simple metaphors, its occasional Latin, omnipotently near', pure
   essential joy'.


   When Israel out of Egypt came,

   And left the proud oppressor's land,

   Supported by the great I Am,

   Safe in the hollow of His hand,

   The Lord in Israel reigned alone,

   And Judah was His favourite throne.


   Creation, varied by His hand,

   Th' omnipotent Jehovah knows;

   The sea is turned to solid land,

   The rock into a fountain flows;

   And all things, as they change, proclaim

   The Lord eternally the same.

   Here is an extreme example of Wesley's more erudite verse (he is
   speaking of Heaven):


   Those amaranthine bowers

   (Unalienably ours)

   Bloom, our infinite reward,

   Rise, our permanent abode;

   From the founded world prepared;

   Purchased by the blood of God.

   Amaranthine bowers' and the founded world' need footnotes; but little
   of Wesley is like that. On the other hand, it is pleasant to find with
   how sure a touch he deals with a technical subject like heraldry, as he
   does in the verse:


   What though a thousand hosts engage,

   A thousand worlds, my soul to shake?

   I have a shield shall quell their rage,

   And drive the alien armies back;

   Portrayed it bears a bleeding Lamb:

   I dare believe in Jesu's name.

   Portrayed is a word that betrays the man who knows how to describe a
   shield.

   This use of simple, direct words is illustrated by the Table of
   Contents. Where modern editors talk in long Latin abstract nouns,
   regeneration, temptation, discipline, resignation, aspiration,
   consecration, Wesley hits out simply: For Believers fighting,
   suffering, praying.'

   This gift of elemental simplicity and stinging direct speech comes out
   in such a hymn as that for the Watch Night Service, Come, let us anew'.
   I know not how it is with you, but familiarity has never made me proof
   against the sheer magic of the words:


   Our life is a dream;

   Our time, as a stream,

   Glides swiftly away

   And the fugitive moment refuses to stay.


   The arrow is flown;

   The moment is gone;

   The millennial year

   Rushes on to our view, and eternity's here.

   Notice the supreme cunning which introduces into the simple Anglo-Saxon
   the two Latin adjectives, the fugitive moment, the millennial year.

   But all this, you will say (and you will say very truly), does not
   suffice to make the book great, religiously great. I agree. So far I
   have spoken only of the external things because I want you to see
   those, as I saw them, first. That was not first which is spiritual, but
   that which is natural. Wesley might have done all that I have mentioned
   so far, and yet have been no more than one of those competent
   versifiers with whom the eighteenth century abounded. His precise verse
   and his simple, unaffected language, had there been nothing behind
   them, would have produced a book edifying indeed, but dull and
   unmoving. We have to inquire, therefore, what was behind. What made
   Wesley different from the pious poetasters of his generation --
   different as the Canon of the Mass is different from modern Romanist
   handbooks of devotion, different (that is to say) by the whole
   difference of religious genius? I will name three things among the many
   which might be named.

   First, there is the full-orbed and conscious orthodoxy of a scholar
   trained and humbled as he contemplates the holy, catholic, and
   evangelical faith in its historic glory and strength. The hymns are
   charged with dogma. They set forth, not the amiable generalizations of
   natural religion in which Wesley's contemporaries delighted, but the
   peculiar and pungent doctrines of uncompromising Christianity.
   References to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, of the Incarnation, of
   Redemption by the Passion, of the Resurrection -- we never move far
   from these. Simply to state the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is for
   Wesley a pleasure and a means of grace. Often he wants nothing more
   than that: it is enough for him to name the Name of God:


   Round us when we speak Thy Name

   There spreads a heaven of light.

   This quality in his work puts Wesley in line with the greatest
   hymn-writers of the Greek Church. A most prominent feature in their
   hymns, as in his, is the spiritual exaltation which they discover as
   they glory in a statement of the orthodox faith and as they
   triumphantly assert the Christian doctrine of God. Hear Wesley on the
   Incarnation:


   Let earth and heaven combine,

   Angels and men agree,

   To praise in songs divine

   The incarnate Deity;

   Our God contracted to a span,

   Incomprehensibly made man.


   He laid His glory by,

   He wrapped Him in our clay,

   Unmarked by human eyes,

   The latent Godhead lay;

   Infant of days He here became,

   And bore the mild Immanuel's name.

   Hear him on the Passion:


   With glorious clouds encompassed round,

   Whom angels dimly see,

   Will the Unsearchable be found,

   Or God appear to me?


   Jehovah in Thy person show,

   Jehovah crucified!

   And then the pardoning God I know,

   And feel the blood applied.

   Wesley's orthodoxy, it is true, some of your modern theologians have
   been rash enough to question. With puny daring, they suggest that he
   denies the true humanity of the Son and flirts with patripassianism.
   This is a feeble and unconvincing display by men who wince before the
   strength of his doctrine. Let them master the doctrine of the
   communication of attributes, as Wesley mastered it, and fears for his
   orthodoxy will give place to fears for their own. It is, then, because
   Wesley has such great things to say -- stupendous assertions about God
   made Man -- that in his hands the slick mechanical metres of the
   eighteenth century are not only smooth and easy, but moving and even
   harrowing.

   But Wesley, as probably he does not quite reach the excellence of the
   Greek writers in dogmatic hymns, goes beyond them in another way. For
   Wesley has not only the full faith to set out; he goes on to tell of a
   present experience, of its effects in his own life:


   What we have felt and seen

   With confidence we tell.

   Most men and women merely disgust us when they talk about their souls
   and their secret experiences; they did this quite effectually even
   before psychology became the rage; but Wesley's common sense and
   scholarly taste kept him from mawkish excesses without crushing his
   spirit. The result is that few people have been as successful as he was
   in speaking at once with passion and with decency about God's work in
   their own lives. For him the important things are the great, external,
   objective truths about God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,
   and the definite impact of faith in these on his own life and other
   men's. Through all the book there rings an absolutely overmastering
   note of confidence, certainty, and happiness. The best of all is, God
   is with us', with us especially in Emmanuel, the incarnate Son: nothing
   can make Wesley forget that. Historic Christianity applied to the
   individual soul and the sharing of this experience with other men who
   know it too -- so Wesley reaches that sense of a common life which all
   real' Christians -- Wesley's word -- live. So, too, he comes to yearn
   over the great troubled world that is missing this heavenly treasure.

   Lastly, there is something else. There is the solid structure of
   historic dogma; there is the passionate thrill of present experience;
   but there is, too, the glory of a mystic sunlight coming directly from
   another world. This transfigures history and experience. This puts past
   and present into the timeless eternal NOW. This brings together God and
   man until Wesley talks with God as a man talks with his friend. This
   gives to the hymnbook its divine audacity, those passages only to be
   understood by such as have sat in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, and
   being caught up into paradise have heard unspeakable words which it is
   not lawful for a man to utter.

   Let me illustrate this mystical quality by two of the most famous
   hymns. In them Wesley is at the height of his inspiration: nothing
   short of inspiration keeps the daring emotion sane and reverent and
   orthodox. The first is:


   Ah! show me that happiest place,

   The place of Thy people's abode,

   Where saints in an ecstasy gaze,

   And hang on a crucified God;

   Thy love for a sinner declare,

   Thy passion and death on the tree;

   My spirit to Calvary bear,

   To suffer and triumph with Thee.

   The second example is, of course, Wrestling Jacob', that hymn described
   with such power by Percy Lubbock in his account of Dr. Warre's sermons
   in Eton Chapel. Wesley saw in this story of Jacob prevailing over the
   mysterious Wrestler even under the old dispensation a mystical
   revelation of the humiliation of the Word; and he argues, commands, and
   hectors as if the Word of God were already wearing our Flesh. I should
   like to quote it all; I will remind you only of it:


   Come, O Thou Traveller unknown,

   Whom still I hold, but cannot see!

   Incidentally, we notice those doctrines that Barth is teaching us anew
   in the lines:


   When I am weak, then I am strong;

   And when my all of strength shall fail,

   I shall with the God-Man prevail.

   There have been other writers of dogmatic hymns (we think of the Greek
   Church); there have been other writers of hymns revealing a personal
   experience of religion (we think of the nineteenth century); there have
   been other writers of mystical religious poetry (we think of the
   seventeenth century). It is Wesley's glory that he united these three
   strains -- dogma, experience, mysticism -- in verse so simple that it
   could be understood, and so smooth that it could be used, by plain men.
   You can find a union of these qualities in the greatest Latin hymns of
   the Medieval Church, but hardly (I believe) anywhere else.

   These three qualities, among others, give such a life to the hymns that
   they can never grow old while Christians experience God's grace. There
   is indeed a strange timelessness about them: their essential confidence
   does not rest on the position won by the gospel at the time of Wesley's
   writing, on the progress or lack of progress of the work of God. Some
   few of the expressions are such as we should not use today, but the
   main things that Wesley has to say we want still to say. He is greatest
   when he is on the greatest things; greatest of all, possibly, in his
   sacramental hymns. In reading fully one which your modern book
   truncates, I end. Notice its simple language, its profound and vigorous
   orthodoxy, its firm personal faith and experience, its mystical air:


   Victim Divine, Thy grace we claim,

   While thus Thy precious death we show:

   Once offered up a spotless Lamb.

   In Thy great temple here below,

   Thou didst for all mankind atone,

   And standest now before the throne.


   Thou standest in the holy place,

   As now for guilty sinners slain;

   The blood of sprinkling speaks, and prays,

   All prevalent for helpless man;

   Thy blood is still our ransom found,

   And speaks salvation all around.


   The smoke of Thy atonement here

   Darkened the sun, and rent the veil,

   Made the new way to heaven appear,

   And showed the great Invisible;

   Well pleased in Thee, our God looked down,

   And calls His rebels to a crown.


   He still respects Thy sacrifice;

   Its savour sweet doth always please:

   The Offering smokes through earth and skies,

   Diffusing life, and joy, and peace;

   To these, Thy lower courts, it comes,

   And fills them with divine perfumes.


   We need not now go up to heaven,

   To bring the long-sought Saviour down;

   Thou art to all already given,

   Thou dost even now Thy banquet crown:

   To every faithful soul appear,

   And show Thy real presence here!
     __________________________________________________________________

The Recall to Religion in the Hymns of Charles Wesley

   Bernard Manning

   In the last years of the War and the first years of the peace, Arthur
   Christopher Benson was Master of Magdalene. He lived, not in the new
   Lodge, but in the old Lodge in Magdalene Street, a house turned now
   into sets of rooms. It was my good fortune to be one of the many on
   whom he showered kindnesses, and often in those years I used to call on
   him and go out with him walking or bicycling. You rang a bell at the
   street door, and after a rather long delay you were admitted: not, as
   you at first expected, to the house, but to a short cloister open on
   one side and leading to a french window. Before you passed through the
   french window, you often heard the comfortable notes of organ music
   proceeding in a smothered sort of fashion from an inner room. The
   french window admitted you to an outer hall, dark with tapestry and
   crowded with pictures; from it you entered an inner waiting-room,
   sandwiched (as you learnt later) between the Master's study and his
   bedroom. This room looked out on the Master's garden. It was lighted by
   windows partly filled with quaint Dutch painted glass of the
   seventeenth century. In this inner waiting-room you found the Master
   playing, with apparent carelessness and with infinite satisfaction, a
   small organ.

   What was he playing? Well, as often as not, Charles Wesley's hymns to
   such tunes as Stella; and, if you glanced round the room you saw at
   least half a score of busts and images of the great John himself.
   Benson was the son of an archbishop, but he had been a boy in Lincoln
   Chancery and a young man in Methodist Cornwall; and in those congenial
   atmospheres he had acquired, as he often told me, a devotion to the
   Wesleys. To be sure, he treated them as disrespectfully as he treated
   every one else of whom he was fond. He dissected, criticized, mocked
   at, and misunderstood them with conscious but entertaining perversity.
   Nevertheless, he returned to them with affection and veneration, and he
   liked nothing better than to play these hymns and to quote them.

   As I used to go into that dark and slightly mysterious house and hear
   the familiar tunes, I got many and many a time the feeling that
   something had assured me of the unshaken truth of essential
   Christianity. Those years of war were years of much argument, much
   questioning, much doubt, much despair; but to hear the tunes which
   cried out the words of Wesley's faith was, at least for me, to feel
   myself confirmed mysteriously in the faith itself. Why this happened no
   doubt any fifth-rate psychologist could explain. Those tunes and (to
   use one of Wesley's favourite expressions) the latent words I had first
   known and had unforgettably learnt in the remote Lincolnshire wolds.
   The tunes and the faith still enjoyed the security, the certainty, that
   then were features of all my schoolboy life. -- Wesley's hymns to
   Stella, Euphony, Sovereignty, Irish, Justification by Faith, the Plan
   of Salvation, the Gift of God, the Wages of Sin, it was all as certain
   to recur on Sunday as the football match on Saturday, an illicit drive
   over the Wolds about every other week, the sheep fair in March, and the
   roundabouts in the Market Place in May. The plan of salvation and
   justification by faith were as much in the nature of things, as
   self-evident, and as much to be taken for granted as the benevolence of
   the Liberal party, the malevolence of the Conservatives, the wisdom of
   the minority on the Board of Guardians, and the iniquity of the local
   solicitors.

   Yes, it all may be so. I think, nevertheless, that there was more in it
   than that; and to that I shall in due course return. Meanwhile I ask
   you to remember that sense of security as we take a look at the hymns
   themselves.

   It will be difficult not to spend too much time over the form and
   structure: difficult especially for me who most Sunday nights in term
   endure Hymns Ancient and Modern with the wretched versification,
   doubtful grammar, and questionable theology thereof, much of it
   nowadays most appropriately set out in what I may call the jazz music
   of Vaughan Williams. Or, if we seek relief from Ancient and Modern,
   there is the English Hymnal, better it is true, but stuffed out with
   second-rate creaking translations of Greek and Latin hymns, fusty as a
   second-hand Lewis and Short, more like the meritorious exercises of the
   classical sixth than Poetry, the handmaid of Piety. Worst of all there
   is the self-conscious preciosity of Songs of Praise, mistaking
   quaintness for strength and antiquarianism for orthodoxy. From all such
   let us turn to Charles Wesley, and as we linger in the outer court let
   us notice, first, a simple but useful virtue which Wesley practises in
   almost every hymn. I mean that he binds his verses, not merely by
   rhyme, not merely by consecutive thought, but by verbal references
   which, without our noticing them, lead us from line to line. Wesley
   gives us no jumps in language to distract our attention from what he
   and we are saying. I choose a verse at random:


   Thou waitest to be gracious still;

   Thou dost with sinners bear,

   the second Thou carries us on from the first:


   That, saved, we may Thy goodness feel,

   we of this third line is sinners of line 2,


   And all Thy grace declare.

   Thy grace, a repetition of the idea in Thy goodness of line 3.

   It is the technique that the careful reader notes in Macaulay: every
   sentence is linked with the preceding sentence by a word or an
   allusion. This word or allusion throws the reader back to something
   which he has not had time to forget and so knits Macaulay's paragraph,
   like Wesley's verse, into one.

   You value this fully if you have suffered from what I may call the
   ill-regulated verse of the next century: say, George Macdonald's
   morning prayer:


   Lord, let me live and act this day,

   Still rising from the dead; [Why, still?]

   Lord, make my spirit good and gay --

   Give me my daily bread.

   Admirable sentiments, but a thought disconnected. The connexion between
   goodness and gaiety and rising from the dead needs looking for and
   exposing, if indeed it exists; whilst the connexion in thought between
   daily bread and what precedes seems to consist only in this: that bread
   rhymes undeniably with dead. It is the verse of a tyro: the verse that
   you and I write. I slide over the (to me) horrible posing childishness
   of praying to be gay. Wesley, I think, I hope, never descends to the
   triviality which pretends to be simplicity.

   But let us compare Wesley with hymn-writers who were no tyros. In two
   writers at least in the nineteenth century we may perceive a mastery of
   the art of versification which excludes the grosser faults: Bishop
   Walsham How and Bishop Wordsworth at least knew that of is not a very
   good word on which to allow an accent to fall. Neither of them, we may
   think, would have written the shocking lines in that popular hymn of
   the Rabbi Felix Adler, Sing we of the golden city':


   It will pass into the splendours

   Of the city of the light.

   Let us see then what they can do.

   Wordsworth can do well. Hark! the sound of holy voices' is honest verse
   and wholesome doctrine, even if its language is not so classically
   scriptural as Wesley's. But this is exceptionally good for Wordsworth.
   More often Wordsworth takes a scriptural metaphor and beats it out too
   thin in line after line, or, worse still, takes a metaphor of his own
   composing and does the same to it. He has a fatal facility for verse.
   He does not, like George Macdonald, have to think as far as bread to
   get a rhyme with dead; he gently expands every notion till it is sure
   sooner or later to rhyme with anything that may be about. Gospel light
   for Wordsworth does not merely glow: it glows with pure and radiant
   beams. Living water does not merely flow: it flows with soul-refreshing
   streams. The Bishop leaves nothing to the imagination. He drags out,
   shakes out, and ticks off every commonplace extension of every
   commonplace thought.

   Until it was set to a feeble dance tune by Vaughan Williams, Bishop
   How's For all the saints' was a hymn with merit. It is perhaps a trifle
   too luscious and romantic to ring quite true for those of us whose
   human treasure is in fact in heaven. There is more than a touch of King
   Arthur and the Round Table about the distant triumph song, the golden
   evening brightening in the West, and Paradise the blest. But that is
   nothing. When we reach the last two verses, they ring dreadfully false
   and thin. The exactness of the geography of earth's bounds and ocean's
   coast does not fit the apocalyptic gates of pearl, and then with this
   unreal picture of the saints rising from land and sea and entering the
   gates of pearl we come suddenly on what should be no Arthurian romantic
   stuff: the doxology to the Holy Trinity. Compare this combination of
   Malory's tinsel and a young lady's water colour of a sunset with
   Wesley's virile presentation of the same communion of saints under the
   same metaphor of an army. I can scarcely bear not to quote it all, but
   you know it:


   One army of the living God,

   To His command we bow;

   Part of His host have crossed the flood,

   And part are crossing now.


   His militant embodied host,

   With wishful looks we stand;

   And long to see that happy coast,

   And reach the heavenly land.

   Not a word wasted. It is as spare and taut as the warriors it
   describes. Yet if more spare it is far more daring than How. Listen:


   Even now by faith we join our hands

   With those that went before,

   And greet the blood-besprinkled bands

   On the eternal shore.

   There is a communion of saints indeed.


   Our spirits too shall quickly join,

   Like theirs with glory crowned,

   And shout to see our Captain's sign,

   To hear His trumpet sound.

   If you want a military metaphor, that is it. No distant triumph song
   stealing in the ear or countless host streaming through gates of pearl,
   but -


   Shout to see our Captain's sign,

   To hear His trumpet sound.

   Not in vain for Wesley had Balaam prophesied: The Lord his God is with
   him; and the shout of a king is among them.'

   If we study Wesley's use of metaphors and similes, we shall note that a
   very large proportion of them come directly from Holy Scripture or are
   reminiscences of Holy Scripture. John Wesley (you remember the Preface)
   praised his brother's hymns for their exposition of Scriptural
   Christianity'. The praise, of course, was merited, but might have been
   extended; in metaphor and simile, not less than in doctrine, Charles
   Wesley deserves that high and unfashionable commendation: scriptural.
   This constant reference to the classical language of the faith -- the
   written Word of God -- gives Charles Wesley's hymns themselves a
   classical poise and accent which marks them off, I believe, from all
   other modern hymns. It saves Wesley from the deplorable bathos and
   feeble amateurishness into which almost all other hymn-writers fall at
   times and from which some never escape. Great poetic genius is needed
   to use metaphor and simile in verse. Homer, Virgil, Milton can do it:


   Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks

   In Vallombrosa,

   and so on. But we ordinary folk, flying to metaphor and simile in our
   own strength, merely make ourselves ridiculous. Let me illustrate. The
   perfectly well-intentioned J. D. Burns attempts a metaphor of his own
   invention and at first fares pretty well:


   Thy ways are love -- though they transcend

   Our feeble range of sight,

   They wind through darkness to their end

   In everlasting light.

   But, encouraged, alas! by this success, he proceeds:


   Thy thoughts are love, and Jesus is

   The loving voice they find;

   Christ is indeed the Word, but what follows?


   His love lights up the vast abyss

   Of the Eternal Mind.

   We plunge from the sensible (I cannot say the sublime) to the
   ridiculous, perhaps indeed to the blasphemous. The vast abyss of the
   Eternal Mind' is not a reverent or a complimentary expression -- even
   if you spell Eternal Mind' with capital letters and light it with a
   voice. That is what happens when a man of ordinary ability leaves the
   classical metaphors of Holy Scripture. Charles Wesley, who could do it
   with less risk than most hymnwriters, takes the risk less often than
   most. And when he does seem to me to have no scriptural authority, I
   believe that it is almost always because my knowledge of Holy Scripture
   is too exiguous to detect the reference.

   I do not say that the non-scriptural metaphor always fails. Even the
   wishy-washy Faber succeeded with it once, in his one good hymn, because
   he kept it simple and short:


   Through life's long day and death's dark night,

   O gentle Jesus, be our light.

   But for one success there are a thousand failures.

   Baring Gould is a writer for whom, despite my better judgement, I have
   a sneaking affection, and Onward! Christian soldiers' is not to be
   written off hastily; but compare his treatment of a scriptural phrase
   with Wesley's treatment of the same phrase:


   Crowns and thrones may perish,

   Kingdoms rise and wane,

   But the Church of Jesus

   Constant will remain.


   Gates of hell can never

   'Gainst that Church prevail;

   We have Christ's own promise

   And that cannot fail.

   How does Wesley say it? Before we read him, we may be sure he will
   avoid a bad stress like that in the last line And that cannot fail'. He
   will avoid the ugly 'gainst' and the needlessly emphatic that Church',
   as if there were a multitude of churches. Notice the climbing effect of
   his verse. He saves his scripture till the last line; and boldly
   exaggerates the Gospel word from a negative resistance to a positive
   attack. Notice, too, the subtle use of alliteration: w in the first
   half of the verse, m in lines 5 and 6, s in lines 7 and 8.


   When He first the work begun,

   Small and feeble was His day:

   Now the word doth swiftly run,

   Now it wins its widening way;

   More and more it spreads and grows

   Ever mighty to prevail;

   Sin's strongholds it now o'erthrows,

   Shakes the trembling gates of hell.

   The Gospel word prevail is wrested from the use of the gates of hell --
   the gates of hell shall not prevail -- and the Church does not merely
   resist the gates, the prevailing word shakes them. It is the strong
   finish, all saved for a knock-out blow. Every verse of that superb hymn
   ends in such a line. All the preceding lines lead by steps to an
   emphatic concluding phrase.

   Verse 1 ends:


   All partake the glorious bliss!

   Verse 3 ends:


   Him Who spake a world from nought.

   Verse 4 ends:


   All the Spirit of His love!

   These other fellows appear at once as mere children and bunglers when
   we can, as here, compare their treatment of a theme with Wesley's
   treatment of the same theme.

   I do not except Newman. Praise to the Holiest' is almost a great hymn.
   It has some very great verses; but you must have lamented over the
   feebleness of its ending. After presenting in awful language the
   theology of the sacrifice of Calvary, Newman ends as a Unitarian might
   have ended, as indeed a Unitarian did end, his Passion hymn. The second
   Adam, the higher gift than grace, God's Presence and His very Self --
   to what does it lead Newman? To this: the sacrifice of God Himself on
   the Cross is to teach us to bear suffering and death. True, no doubt;
   but what a perfect anti-climax! The Unitarian Martineau has it more
   passionately, for he can go as far as that:


   O Lord of sorrow, meekly die:

   Thou'lt heal or hallow all our woe,

   and


   Great chief of faithful souls, arise,

   None else can lead the martyr-band.

   It is not to the Roman Cardinal that we must look to supply the
   deficiencies of the Unitarian's faith. It is to one of ourselves,
   blessed be God. Hear Wesley:


   Come, then, and to my soul reveal

   The heights and depths of grace,

   The wounds which all my sorrows heal,

   That dear disfigured face.


   Before my eyes of faith confest,

   Stand forth a slaughtered Lamb;

   And wrap me in Thy crimson vest

   And tell me all Thy name.


   Jehovah in Thy Person show,

   Jehovah crucified!

   And then the pardoning God I know,

   And feel the blood applied.


   I view the Lamb in His own light,

   Whom angels dimly see,

   And gaze, transported at the sight,

   To all eternity.

   Or this:


   Endless scenes of wonder rise

   From that mysterious tree,

   Crucified before our eyes,

   Where we our Maker see;

   Jesus, Lord, what hast Thou done?

   Publish we the death divine,

   Stop, and gaze, and fall, and own

   Was never love like Thine!


   Never love nor sorrow was [Note that verbal link.]

   Like that my Saviour showed:

   See Him stretched on yonder Cross,

   And crushed beneath our load!

   Now discern the Deity,

   Now His heavenly birth declare!

   Faith cries out, 'Tis He, 'Tis He,

   My God, that suffers there!

   Contrast Newman's mean conclusion:


   To teach His brethren, and inspire

   To suffer and to die.

   Newman's is a humanitarian tinkling. Wesley's is the catholic,
   evangelical, orthodox, holy faith.

   Here I must turn aside for a moment to triumph in Wesley's scholarship.
   To that we owe a feature of our eucharistic worship which neither the
   confused and truncated canon of the Roman Mass nor the Anglican rite
   has preserved. The epiclesis takes us back to the earliest and purest
   celebrations of the Supper of the Lord. This link with primitive
   catholicism which Rome and Canterbury threw away, Wesley restored.


   Come, Holy Ghost, Thine influence shed,

   And realize the sign.

   Thy life infuse into the bread,

   Thy power into the wine.

   I need not quote more. Wesley gave us what Canterbury now struggles
   illegally to recover and what Rome stupidly lost in the Dark Ages and
   still rejects in these days of her wanton and self-conscious schism
   from ancient orthodoxy. We have almost nothing to learn even
   liturgically that we cannot learn from Wesley.

   It is tempting, and you see that I cannot resist the temptation, to
   linger over the flawless forms of Wesley's hymns. Let us now move to
   consider two or three of the more obvious features of the content of
   the hymns. If you will suffer the paradox, we will begin by noting one
   feature that is not prominent. Last summer I read and re-read the whole
   of Isaac Watts's hymns. I seal my lips lest I begin to praise them, but
   I mention one quality which distinguishes them sharply from Wesley's.
   Watts, time and again, sets the faith of the Incarnation, the Passion,
   and the Resurrection against its cosmic background. He surveys the
   solar system, the planets, the fixed stars, the animal creation, from
   the beginning to the end of time.

   He surveys the whole realm of Nature, as in an immortal phrase he has
   described it, and at the centre he always sees the dying and crucified
   Creator. Methodist editors have drawn freely on Watts to supply hymns
   of this type: I name only one, God is a Name my soul adores'. You
   remember it:


   A glance of Thine runs through the globe,

   Rules the bright worlds, and moves their frame;

   and so on. Methodists have borrowed these hymns to supplement Wesley,
   because Wesley had comparatively little to say on that subject. Wesley
   is obsessed with one theme: God and the Soul; for the stage in space
   and time on which that drama is set he has little concern. He is always
   at Calvary; no other place in the universe matters, and for him the
   course of historic time is lost in the eternal NOW. This is partly
   because of the urgent poignancy of his own evangelical experience. It
   is partly because his education, if more polished in classical form
   than Watts's, was less wide, less philosophical, less sweeping.

   You find, therefore, that in the age of Deism Wesley is, of all
   writers, the least Deistic, the most uncompromisingly, the most
   exclusively Christian. There is little touch of Natural Religion' in
   Wesley. Do not misunderstand me. I do not charge Watts with Deism and
   Natural Religion. Watts, in that earlier generation, was near enough to
   the profound evangelicalism of seventeenth-century Calvinism to survey
   the whole realm of Nature and still to remain invincibly Christian; but
   fifty years later the experiment would have been more dangerous. It was
   perhaps well for Wesley that, in his more Deistic generation, he wore
   so constantly the blinkers that restricted his view to the essentials
   of the Christian faith. A cosmic view in his time was more difficult
   than in Watts's to combine with passionate orthodoxy.

   We note then the exclusively Christian and New Testament quality of
   Wesley's hymns. Truly he says of himself (accurate in every word):


   My heart is full of Christ, and longs

   Its glorious matter to declare!

   Of Him I make my loftier songs,

   I cannot from His praise forbear.

   Take one rough, and not exhaustive, test. Of the 769 hymns in one
   edition not fewer than 84 have as their first word the Name: Jesus,
   Christ, or Saviour. One hymn in every nine opens so. In Songs of praise
   the proportion is more like one in twenty-four. I have not gone a step
   lower, but I suspect that Wesley is one of the hymn-writers least well
   represented in Unitarian hymn-books.

   You find in Wesley, therefore, comparatively few occasional hymns, for
   social, national, or human occasions. The index of your old hymn-book
   teaches you that. God and the Soul: clear directions for making your
   calling and election sure, for perfecting holiness in the fear of God'
   -- this is Wesley's concern. We find Sinners exhorted, Mourners
   convinced of sin, Persons convinced of backsliding, Backsliders
   recovered. We find believers in many postures, and the society in
   several. We find formal and inward religion distinguished. We find the
   goodness of God, the pleasantness of religion, and the four last
   things, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell, described. Wesley means
   business all the time. He is in deadly earnest. He has no leisure for
   frills and furbelows. He makes no concessions to human interests and
   the sentimental associations of religion. He condescends to write a
   morning hymn, it is true, and enriches the world by the glorious line,
   reminiscent of Dante, Christ, whose glory fills the skies', but Wesley
   forgets the time of day before he has written far.

   Take a look at the work of Percy Dearmer, Vaughan Williams, and Martin
   Shaw as it is revealed in the Index to Songs of Praise. Here we find
   sixty hymns on the Christian Year and nearly as many on the Church and
   its ordinances; but by far the greatest number of the titles are such
   as New Year, Spring, May, Morning, Noon, Evening, Hospitals, Social
   Service, Absent Friends. My account is unfair, because the bulk of the
   book is under the heading General', yet the contrast with Wesley
   remains valid and impressive. Dr. Dearmer and his friends do not
   arrange their hymns in the exclusively Christian and New Testament
   categories used by Wesley.

   Do not suppose that I am merely praising Wesley and condemning Dearmer.
   As I distinguished Wesley from Watts, I now distinguish him from his
   successors. Watts sounded some notes which have been used to supplement
   Wesley; and more recent writers have supplemented him usefully too.
   But, when all is said, Wesley's obsession with the greatest things
   saved him, and us, from much that it is well to be saved from. Wesley's
   scheme did not tempt him to the vaguely religious poetizing which asks
   us to sing


   Day is dying in the west,

   and chokes us with metaphorical confectionery. Nor does he indulge in
   those bird's-eye tours round the world which read like a versified
   Holiday Haunts:


   Sun and moon bright, night and moonlight,

   Starry temples azure-floored;

   Cloud and rain, and wild wind's madness,

   Breeze that floats with genial gladness,

   Praise ye, praise ye, God the Lord.


   Bond and freeman, land and sea man,

   Earth with peoples widely stored,

   Wanderer lone o'er prairies ample,

   Full-voiced choir in costly temple,

   Praise ye, praise ye, God the Lord!

   Still farther is Wesley from the impieties of modern Roman and
   Anglo-Catholic hymns. These, like the degenerate late medieval and
   modern papal architecture, push aside the central acts of God in Christ
   in favour of the imaginary adventures of sinful mortals. When I glance
   at these hymnbooks, they remind me of the beautiful blasphemy of the
   west front of Rheims Cathedral: there the Passion of the Son of God and
   His final Judgement of mankind serve as minor side ornaments to the
   central panel. And what is the central panel? The so-called Coronation
   of the Virgin, a matter with no place in history or theology or
   reputable legend. Precisely this blasphemy you will find in the
   hymn-books of certain schools, but you find it without the beauty of
   the Rheims blasphemy. God, as the Psalmist noted, has punished their
   own inventions. Not only orthodoxy, but the power of writing tolerable
   verse has deserted them.

   Wesley's obsession was with the greatest things: I do not abandon my
   phrase, but I want to add to it. Despite my profound veneration of his
   verse, there are two or three things about Wesley's literary form that
   I regret -- his use of compound adjectives like soul-reviving, and the
   unhappy use of mine and every in phrases like this heart of mine' and
   our every so and so'. It is the same with the content of the hymns.
   There is one feature which, to a Calvinist especially, seems unworthy
   of Wesley, though it is, to be sure, the defect of his qualities.
   Sometimes he speaks as if our feelings were of greater importance than
   I believe them to be. Occasionally a verse might give a hasty reader
   the impression that salvation almost depended on our feelings. It is
   perhaps the Pelagian shadow which has sometimes accompanied
   Arminianism, but it is an accidental and detachable shadow. For Wesley
   himself, the substance of revealed religion was too overwhelming to
   leave him at the mercy of his feelings, and it is but fair to
   Arminianism to remember that there were eighteenth-century Calvinists
   who suffered like Arminians from an over-emphasis on feelings about
   salvation. It was difficult for a man with Wesley's vivid experience
   not so to speak of experience as to make it take too prominent a place
   in the life of men who lacked the massive foundation of his instructed
   faith. Yet we may wish that by writing some hymns differently he had
   protected his ignorant and sensitive followers from the tortures of
   their ignorant sensitiveness.

   I end by returning to my first inquiry. Why do Wesley's hymns confirm
   and restore our confidence, and build us up securely in our most holy
   faith? It is no doubt partly because they show us something of the life
   of one of the pure in heart who saw God. We may not see God. We cannot
   fail to see that Wesley saw Him. Purity of heart: we are near Wesley's
   secret there; scriptural holiness, purity of heart, inevitably
   reflected in his clear mind and limpid verse.

   But I think I see another thing. Those very limitations which we have
   noticed in his hymn-book: his exclusion of all but God and Soul; his
   indifference to historical setting, cosmic backgrounds, times of day,
   seasons of the year; his frank neglect of any serious attempt to insert
   the gospel into natural religion, to tinge and colour normal human
   activities and occasions with a Christian hue; his ruthless inattention
   to everything that St. Thomas Aquinas wished to do to the natural order
   and the divine order -- in all of this limitation we see one source of
   Wesley's power. Concern with all these things is no doubt needed in
   each generation; but the more appropriately and fully the work is done
   for a particular generation the more dated and transient it is. Wesley
   leaves all that aside. He is obsessed with the greatest things, and he
   confirms our faith because he shows us these above all the immediate,
   local, fashionable problems and objections to the faith. We move to the
   serener air. We sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus; and simply to
   be taken there -- that is, after all, the supreme confirmation of
   faith.


   What we have felt and seen

   With confidence we tell.

   This same obsession with the greatest things lifts Wesley and us, his
   readers and singers, above all ecclesiastical divisions and discussions
   into the realm of religion. The Pleasantness of Religion', formal
   religion, inward religion, it is on these lines Wesley's thought moves,
   not on lines of valid and invalid, regular and irregular, historic and
   personal, priestly and prophetic ministrations. Wesley had his
   ecclesiastical opinions and could express them with his customary
   vigour and clarity; but, as he tells us himself, he escapes with joy
   from all such things to religion. The Bicentenary is indeed a recall to
   religion, to religion not merely when opposed to irreligion, but when
   opposed to religiousness, to theological gymnastics and ecclesiastical
   politics. I end with words which, for some reason, none of our editors
   will permit us to sing. You know them, but you shall hear them all
   again. In them Wesley tells you plainly what I have fumbled in my
   saying about that ampler air of pure religion: our security and our
   fellowship and our duty there:


   CATHOLIC LOVE

   Weary of all this wordy strife,

   These notions, forms, and modes and names,

   To Thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life,

   Whose love my simple heart inflames,

   Divinely taught at last I fly

   With Thee and Thine to live and die.


   Forth from the midst of Babel brought,

   Parties and sects I cast behind;

   Enlarged my heart, and free my thought

   Where'er the latent truth I find;

   The latent truth with joy to own

   And bow to Jesus' name alone.


   One with the little flock I rest,

   The members sound who hold the Head,

   The chosen few, with pardon blest,

   And by the anointing spirit led.

   Into the mind that was in Thee,

   Into the depths of Deity.


   My brethren, friends and kinsmen these

   Who do my heavenly Father's will;

   Who aim at perfect holiness,

   And all Thy counsels to fulfil,

   Athirst to be whate'er Thou art

   And love their God with all their heart.


   For these, howe'er in flesh disjoined,

   Where'er dispersed o'er earth abroad,

   Unfeigned unbounded love I find

   And constant as the life of God;

   Fountain of life, from thence it sprung,

   As pure, as even, and as strong.


   Joined to the hidden church unknown

   In this sure bond of perfectness,

   Obscurely safe, I dwell alone,

   And glory in the uniting grace,

   To me, to each believer given,

   To all Thy saints in earth and heaven.
     __________________________________________________________________

Wesley's Hymns Reconsidered

   Bernard Manning

   A paper read before the Cambridge University Methodist Society on
   February 9, 1939.

   SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, sometime Scholar of Jesus College in the
   University of Cambridge, once wrote some ingenious verses {Metrical
   Feet: Lesson for a Boy.} to help his sons to remember the chief sorts
   of metre. If Coleridge had been a Methodist instead of a pilgrim from
   Anglicanism to Unitarianism and back again, he would have needed to do
   no such thing: he would have needed only to advise his boys to learn a
   selection of Wesley's hymns. From this point I begin. Leaving on one
   side for the moment any discussion of the meaning and content of the
   hymns, let us notice the metre, the rhyming, and the accentuation of
   them. These things deserve more attention than they usually get, and by
   this side road we shall approach the more important parts of the
   subject. By observing the mere form of the hymns, we shall learn more
   than we might expect.

   Take the old hymn-book, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People
   called Methodists. By the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Sometime Fellow of
   Lincoln College, Oxford. Get an edition with tunes, and turn to the
   index of metres. You will gasp with astonishment at the variety. You
   will be tempted to believe that Charles Wesley alone used as many
   metres in writing hymns as all other hymn-writers taken together. There
   are common metre, long metre, short metre, double short metre, 6.8s,
   7s, 8s and 6s, 6s and 8s, 7s and 6s, 10S and 11S, 4.6s and 2.8s, 8s, 5s
   and I IS, 2.6s and 4.7s (to take a few examples) and the large number
   lumped together, very properly, as peculiar metre.

   Wesley's variety is not fully represented by a mere enumeration of the
   syllables in each line, as that list might suggest. There is variety
   too in his arrangement of the stressed syllables. It is difficult to
   say much about this without coming under the condemnation passed by the
   Translators of the Authorized Version on a part of their own Preface to
   the Reader: We weary the unlearned, who need not know so much, and
   trouble the learned, who know it already.' Despite this, it is worth
   while to glance at a few technical matters in order to drive home what
   has been said about Wesley's infinite variety.

   In English verse, the books tell us, the stressed and unstressed
   syllables take the place of the long and short syllables in classical
   Latin verse, and it is convenient to use some of the classical names
   for the metres. The metre most familiar to most of us is, I suppose,
   iambic: in this metre the line is divided into pairs of syllables with
   the stress falling on the second syllable.


   The way was long, the wind was cold.

   This metre is familiar in the common metre of hymns:


   He breaks the power of cancelled sin,

   He sets the pris'ner free;

   in long metre:


   Our Lord is risen from the dead;

   Our Jesus is gone up on high;

   in short metre:


   To serve the present age,

   My calling to fulfil;

   in 6.8s:


   O Thou eternal Victim, slain

   A sacrifice for guilty man;

   in 8s and 6s:


   O Love divine, how sweet Thou art

   When shall I find my willing heart

   All taken up by Thee?

   The exact opposite of the iambic metre is, of course, the trochaic. In
   this the stress falls on the first of the two syllables. Wesley is
   hardly less fond of this than of the iambic metre:


   Jesu, Lover of my soul,

   Let me to Thy bosom fly

   Depth of mercy, can there be

   Mercy still reserved for me?

   Wesley sometimes combines the two, and so produces a very effective
   verse in 7s and 6s. A seven-syllable trochaic line is followed by a
   six-syllable iambic line:


   Who is this gigantic foe

   That proudly stalks along,

   Overlooks the crowd below,

   In brazen armour strong?

   Notice the jumpy effect caused by the change in the alternate lines. It
   can be very moving; and it is a device peculiarly characteristic of
   Wesley. Here is another example:


   Christ, whose glory fills the skies,

   That famous Plant Thou art;

   Tree of Life eternal, rise

   In every longing heart!

   Bid us find the food in Thee

   For which our deathless spirits pine,

   Fed with immortality,

   And filled with love divine.

   The quick succession of strong stresses in the last syllable of line 2
   and in the first syllable of line 3 has the effect of knitting the
   verse very tight. The same device makes us rush almost breathlessly
   from line 4 to line 5. So it comes about that the four lines in the
   first half of the verse are not separated from the four lines iri the
   second half, as would happen if either iambic or trochaic measures were
   used alone. The same structure is to be found in the famous hymn:


   Son of God, if Thy free grace

   Again hath raised me up,

   Called me still to seek Thy face,

   And giv'n me back my hope;

   Still Thy timely help afford,

   And all Thy loving kindness show:

   Keep me, keep me, gracious Lord,

   And never let me go!

   So far all is simple, but have you considered what complications may
   lurk under that innocent-looking heading 8s'? It does not always mean a
   simple accumulation of iambic lines of eight syllables, as in 6.8s.


   Lo! God is here! let us adore,

   or, as in long metre,


   Thy arm, Lord, is not shortened now.

   Often it means something quite different. It covers a subtle system of
   accentuation, anapaestic, which Wesley uses for some of his most moving
   and most inspired hymns. No other hymn-writer, it is fairly safe to
   say, has approached him in mastery of this particular metre. In it we
   have no longer a simple alternation of stressed and unstressed
   syllables, but in the later part of each line we have two unstressed
   syllables followed by one stressed syllable. The line is not divided in
   the way that we have already observed, 2: 2: 2: 2, but 2: 3: 3. The
   supreme example of this is to be seen in what is perhaps the most
   passionate and exalted of all Wesley's hymns:


   Thou Shepherd of Israel, and mine,

   The joy and desire of my heart,

   For closer communion I pine,

   I long to reside where Thou art.

   The pasture I languish to find,

   Where all who their Shepherd obey

   Are fed, on Thy bosom reclined,

   And screened from the heat of the day

   We have a yet more complicated arrangement of anapaestic measures in
   hymns like:


   Come, let us anew

   Our journey pursue,

   Roll round with the year,

   And never stand still till the Master appear.

   This is an amazing, magical metre which Wesley used with the surest
   touch. Hardly any one else, I think, has succeeded in it, or even tried
   to master it. The accumulation of anapaests in the last line is most
   subtle.

   Nothing shows Wesley's superb mastery of metre more than his use of the
   perverse, unnatural, and almost ludicrous metre 2.6s and 4.7s. On this
   tight rope, to all appearance fit only for acrobatics, Wesley moves
   with ease and confidence and grace. In this metre, indeed, he writes
   some of his most characteristic hymns. The metre 2.6s and 4.7s is so
   artificial as to be at first, even in Wesley's hands, slightly
   irritating and precious; but once you have made yourself familiar with
   it (especially if you have taken the trouble to see precisely what
   Wesley is doing) it holds you.


   How weak the thoughts, and vain,

   Of self-deluding men;

   Men, who, fixed to earth alone,

   Think their houses shall endure,

   Fondly call their lands their own,

   To their distant heirs secure.

   Fairly flat that seems: an uninspired, almost solicitor-like version of
   a not very attractive psalm. Yes, but wait till Wesley has left the
   solicitor's office. By the time he has reached verse 4 he is finding
   his wings:


   High on Immanuel's land

   We see the fabric stand;

   From a tott'ring world remove

   To our steadfast mansion there:

   Our inheritance above

   Cannot pass from heir to heir.


   Those amaranthine bowers

   (Unalienably ours)

   Bloom, our infinite reward,

   Rise, our permanent abode;

   From the founded world prepared;

   Purchased by the blood of God.

   Unless you have in mind the precise wording of Psalm xlix; unless you
   catch the reference to the fourteenth chapter of St. John in mansion;
   unless you lick your lips over the contrast between the Saxon language
   of the earlier verses and the gathering Latinisms as the hymn proceeds:
   mansion, inheritance, amaranthine, unalienably, infinite, permanent;
   unless you relish the pure Latin construction from the founded world;
   unless you catch the deftly sudden change in the position of one stress
   in


   High on Immanuel's land;

   you do not begin to learn the art of Wesley or to understand why he
   dominates the lesser fry as he does.

   Examine another hymn, also about heaven, in the same perverse metre. It
   is clear that, like every other man who knows that he has the power of
   doing something difficult, Wesley enjoys exercising his skill. He bends
   the intractable material to his purpose with a certain zest.


   Again we lift our voice,

   And shout our solemn joys;

   Cause of highest raptures this,

   Raptures that shall never fail;

   See a soul escaped to bliss,

   Keep the Christian Festival.


   Our friend is gone before

   To that celestial shore;

   He hath left his mates behind,

   He hath all the storms outrode,

   Found the rest we toil to find

   Landed in the arms of God.

   Regard for space prevents the transcription of the rest of this hymn,
   notable for its dignity and its superb faith. We observe in passing the
   reminiscence of the familiar lines of Spenser about rest after toil and
   the natural way in which it is combined with the reminiscence of the
   text in Deuteronomy xxxiii. 27.

   The verse known as 10s and 11s presents another very subtle
   combination. For some reason the insertion of an insignificant, odd,
   extra syllable in the last two lines gives the verse a lilt that four
   symmetrical lines of ten syllables each has not got. The verse is
   anapaestic. The first half of all four lines is the same. In the first
   couplet the second half line merely repeats the first half line; but in
   the second couplet we come on the extra syllables which give the
   leaping effect.


   O what shall we do Our Saviour to love?

   To make us anew, Come, Lord, from above!

   The fruit of Thy passion, Thy holiness give:

   Give us the salvation Of all that believe.

   It is not until we have explored a few of his metrical mazes that we
   begin to understand why in his thousands of lines Wesley so rarely lets
   the accent fall on the wrong syllable. Only a master of versification
   could trip so seldom, but, of course, unless he had been a master of
   versification Wesley could never have written anything whatsoever in
   many of these metres. When you take into consideration the large flank
   which Wesley presents for attack, it is astonishing how few successful
   attacks can be made on him. Most hymn-writers with only a tenth of the
   number of hymns in our books give us a larger number of unhappily
   placed stresses. Wesley rarely offends by writing such a line as that
   which is a sad blemish in Crossman's one well-known hymn, My song is
   love unknown'. Crossman lets the stress fall intolerably in one solemn
   line:


   They rise and needs will have

   My dear Lord made away.

   The careless reader may think that he has caught Wesley napping
   sometimes, and at times, of course, Wesley does nod disastrously; but
   before the amateur critic like myself boasts too rashly about catching
   Wesley out, he should study Dr. Bett's invaluable book on the Wesley
   poetry. {The Hymns of Methodism in their Literary Relations, Epworth
   Press.} There, with the modesty of high scholarship, Dr. Bett traces
   the changes in the pronunciation of certain words such as confessor and
   acceptable which have made some of Wesley's verses seem (to the
   ignorant) incorrectly stressed.

   More than most writers, Wesley makes the end of his lines correspond
   with natural pauses in his thought. The sound and the sense coincide.
   This is it which makes his verse specially suitable for singing. This
   is it which makes it possible to sing his hymns so easily to the
   so-called old-fashioned' tunes, the florid, repetitious tunes, in which
   any line may be repeated almost at random in almost accidental
   combinations. But even Wesley's arrangement of lines does not always
   win applause. At times the meaning runs over' the end of one line into
   the middle of the next:


   Ah, soften, melt this rock, and may

   Thy blood wash all these stains away!

   and


   Relieve the thirsty soul, the faint

   Revive, illuminate the blind.

   This seems ugly when it is contrasted with the next couplet, written in
   the more usual happy style:


   The mournful cheer, the drooping lead,

   And heal the sick, and raise the dead.

   But before we say, or even think, too much about these irregular'
   lines, we should ponder what Dr. Bett has to say about them and the
   light that they may throw on the tangled problem of separating the
   compositions of John from those of Charles.

   One part of the attractiveness of the older hymn-writers is their
   frequent use of proper names. They inherited this habit from their
   predecessors, who had simply paraphrased Holy Scripture. Paraphrasers,
   it is clear, had no choice. They had to take the rough with the smooth.
   They had to boil down the weirdest geographical and personal names into
   rigid metre. Dexterity in the art, once acquired, persisted; and it was
   bequeathed to hymn-writers.

   It is by no means only in his paraphrases that Wesley uses proper
   names. He knew what our psychologists are now giving one another Ph.D.s
   for discovering by research in dark rooms with coloured slips of paper.
   He knew that the use of a proper name with associations may start or
   clinch a train of thought more effectively than a flood of colourless
   words will start or clinch it. To you and to me, with our beggarly
   knowledge of Holy Scripture, this magic is less potent than it was to
   Wesley. What was once moving may seem to us only quaint. Even you and
   I, it is true, can pick up a reference to the Church as Sion or
   Jerusalem, a reference to death as Jordan, a reference to heaven as
   Canaan. But how much farther can we go? What does a modern congregation
   make of


   None is like Jeshurun's God?

   We may not have got to the pass of the undergraduate who politely
   enquired, Yes, but who was Jehovah?' but, if we are honest, many of us
   might ask, Who was Jeshurun?' In the hymn beginning


   O Great Mountain, who art thou,

   Immense, immovable?

   how many will catch the reference in the line


   My Zerubbabel is near?

   More easy are the allusions in the following:


   In soft Laodicean ease

   We sleep our useless lives away

   and


   Less grievous will the judgment-day

   To Sodom and Gomorrah prove.

   and (as we used to be allowed to sing in O for a thousand tongues')


   Cast all your sins into the deep,

   And wash the Aethiop white.

   But this is more difficult:


   Take when Thou wilt into Thy hands,

   And as Thou wilt require;

   Resume by the Chaldean bands,

   Or the devouring fire.

   The first and the second Adam are never far from Wesley's thought, and
   no hymn-writer has more happily used the Pauline antithesis. One
   mention of the name must be made, for it gives a classic summary of St.
   Paul's teaching concerning the solidarity of lost and of saved mankind:


   Adam, descended from above!

   Federal Head of all mankind.

   From such a use of Holy Scripture it is but a short step to the
   paraphrase proper. Wesley's paraphrases have a distinctive quality of
   their own. Most men's paraphrases tend to be wooden in their exactness.
   They often say in feebler language what has been said superbly in Holy
   Scripture; and the better we remember the scriptural words the worse we
   think of the paraphrase. Wesley avoids this peril by the freedom with
   which he paraphrases. He is very bold. His verses are a commentary on
   the passage as well as a restatement of it. Nowhere has he more
   profited from the example of his master, Dr. Watts. Dr. Watts provided
   evangelical interpretations for psalms and for Old Testament passages
   and Wesley uses the same method, but with even greater boldness.

   Wesley's paraphrases form but a small part of the book, but among them
   are some of his masterpieces. They deserve more exact study than they
   have received. How are we to select? There is the sublime treatment of
   the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy xxxiii: None is like Jeshurun's God.'
   There is the promise of the Corner Stone in Zechariah iv: O Great
   Mountain, who art thou?' There is the survey of the Promised Land from
   Pisgah -- ravishing stuff indeed:


   O that I might at once go up!

   No more on this side Jordan stop,

   But now the land possess;

   This moment end my legal years;

   Sorrows, and sins, and doubts, and fears,

   A howling wilderness.

   There is the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah: The wilderness and the
   solitary place.' Here we note the use of proper names:


   Lo! abundantly they bloom;

   Lebanon is hither come;

   Carmel's stores the heavens dispense,

   Sharon's fertile excellence.

   The Revised Version (in the interest of zoological truth, no doubt)
   degrades the dragons of this chapter into mere jackals: in the
   habitation of jackals where they lay.' Wesley, with more inspired
   imagination, increases the vigour of the Authorized Version not by
   merely retaining the dragons, but by bestowing old age upon them, and
   so making them the type of Satan, the old Dragon.


   Where the ancient Dragon lay,

   Open for Thyself a way!

   There let holy tempers rise,

   All the fruits of Paradise.

   A last example of Wesley's paraphrases is provided by the confused and
   magical mystery of the Christmas lesson in Isaiah ix. Of the Authorized
   Version of that chapter, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has said: the old
   translators made nonsense, and, in two passages at least, stark
   nonsense.' The Revised Version straightens out the meaning into
   somewhat prosaic common sense. Wesley solved the problem in a third
   way. For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and
   garments rolled in blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of
   fire.' Granted the rhythmical antithesis,' writes Sir Arthur
   Quiller-Couch, where is the real antithesis, the difference, the
   improvement? If a battle there must be, how is burning better than
   garments rolled in blood? and, in fine, what is it all about?' The
   inquiry is answered in the Revised Version, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
   points out, and every wise lover of the English Bible will have Sir
   Arthur's words by heart. {On the Art of Writing, lectures VI and VII;
   On the Art of Reading, lectures VIII, IX, and X.} Yet it is still worth
   while seeing what Wesley makes of the matter. Here is his paraphrase
   and his notion of the reality of the antithesis:


   Thou hast our bonds in sunder broke,

   Took all our load of guilt away;

   From sin, the world, and Satan's yoke,

   (Like Israel saved in Midian's day,)

   Redeemed us by our conquering Lord,

   Our Gideon, and His Spirit's sword.


   Not like the warring sons of men,

   With shout, and garments rolled in blood,

   Our Captain doth the fight maintain;

   But lo! the burning Spirit of God

   Kindles in each a secret fire,

   And all our sins as smoke expire!

   Wesley's hymns provide, as we have seen, an education in the use of
   proper names; but he deals not only with proper names. To sing or to
   read his hymns is to expand one's vocabulary and to learn the power of
   pregnant words. In general, Wesley prefers the Saxon word, but no one
   can more effectively use Latin words either alone or in combination.
   Here are a few typical lines:


   Here we in the spirit breathe

   The quintessence of praise.


   Joyful consentaneous sound,

   Sweetest symphony of praise.

   That couplet, Latin and Greek, ends one verse; the next ends with pure
   Saxon:


   Only sing and praise and love.

   Here is another fine set of strong words:


   Implunged in the crystal abyss,

   And lost in the ocean of God.

   And here is a full mixture of Latin and Saxon, with powerful
   repetitions:


   Thee let me drink, and thirst no more

   For drops of finite happiness;

   Spring up, O Well, in heavenly power

   In streams of pure, perennial peace,

   In joy, that none can take away,

   In life, which shall for ever stay.

   Wesley does not stop at words derived from Latin and Greek. In one
   famous passion hymn, which Dr. Bett has fully discussed, he goes
   farther and refers to a classical legend in severely classical
   language: Great Pan is dead.'


   Lo! the powers of heaven He shakes;

   Nature in convulsions lies;

   Earth's profoundest centre quakes;

   The great Jehovah dies!

   Dies the glorious cause of all,

   The true eternal Pan

   Falls to raise us from our fall,

   To ransom sinful man!

   Well may Sol withdraw his light....

   We may compare the reference to Thor and Woden:


   Less guilty if with those of old

   We worshipped Thor and Woden still.

   As we should expect in the hymns of an eighteenth-century writer, there
   are in Wesley's some words and phrases that sound oddly today. His
   rhymes betray a few changes in pronunciation. He rhymes words like join
   and mine, as every one must have noticed. When a word has changed in
   meaning, it has usually changed for the worse. Words like bloody and
   blasted are today less solemn and impressive than they once were; but
   in the main the changes are fewer than we might have expected. The
   impression made by Wesley's language is very different from that made
   by Watts's. Watts was born only one generation before Wesley. He was
   thirty-four years older, but he speaks what is almost a different
   language. You cannot read many lines of Watts without coming on some
   grotesque or quaint expression. Watts used many words in a fashion
   quite unlike our own. That is why it is so difficult to use most of
   Watts's hymns today. His book, crammed as it is with magnificent
   things, has a decidedly antiquarian aroma. Wesley's usage is separated
   from ours by a less gulf. Only occasionally does he write an odd line
   like this on death:


   And when the storms of life shall cease,

   Jesus, in that important hour,

   In death as life be Thou my guide;

   or this:


   But, O almighty God of love,

   Into Thy hands the matter take.

   No one understood better than Wesley what may be called the
   conventional literary devices. Elsewhere I have written at some length
   about his use of the chiasmus, of which he was an accomplished master.


   We now Thy promised presence claim,

   Sent to disciple all mankind,

   Sent to baptize into Thy name,

   We now Thy promised presence find.

   On the simple device of repetition he rings endless changes. A whole
   essay would be needed even to begin to do them justice. One hymn alone
   will provide several examples.

   There is, first, the simple repetition of the invocation:


   Come, Holy Ghost, all-quick'ning fire,

   Come, and in me delight to rest;

   then with an echo of it, we continue:


   Drawn by the lure of strong desire,

   O come and consecrate my breast!

   In the next verse we begin again with the simple repetition:


   If now Thy influence I feel,

   If now in Thee begin to live,

   and we continue with a variant of the same device:


   Still to my heart Thyself reveal;

   Give me Thyself, for ever give.

   Next comes, not repetition, but a pair of parallel phrases:


   A point my good, a drop my store,

   and now the last line of this verse and the first line of the next
   verse are tied together by a treble repetition: a repetition of these
   three words: eager, ask, pant.


   A point my good, a drop my store,

   Eager I ask, I pant for more.


   Eager for Thee I ask and pant;

   So strong the principle divine,

   and so on.

   Contrast the effect of verses so knit and so coloured with (let us say)
   the verses of that casual Papist rhymer Faber. Faber adds line to line,
   careful of nothing, if the second line comes near to rhyming with the
   fourth. He not only does not achieve anything more: he does not even
   attempt anything more. Here is the wretched stuff; but we ought not to
   call it careless or casual, for we must observe the care with which he
   has packed it with false stresses:


   O it is hard to work for God,

   To rise and take His part

   Upon this battle-field of earth,

   And not sometimes lose heart.

   It would make first-rate prose.


   He hides Himself so wondrously

   As if there were no God,

   He is least seen when all the powers

   Of ill are most abroad.

   Yet our hardest words must not be for Faber, but for the Methodist
   editors alike in 1904 and in 1933. Wesley had built his hymn on the
   principle of repetition, the climax being in the two adjacent verses
   (as we have seen). One ended


   Eager I ask, I pant for more.

   The other began


   Eager for Thee I ask and pant.

   Now, unless the thing had happened, we could not have believed it. The
   1904 editors printed the earlier verse without the later; the 1933
   editors printed the later verse without the earlier. They agreed only
   in this: that what Wesley had joined together his followers should put
   asunder. One is tempted to inquire if any one in 1904 or in 1933 had
   taken the trouble to read through the whole hymn.

   A more cumulative effect of repetition we get in Holy Lamb, who Thee
   confess'; but note, first, the perfect balance of the first four lines.


   Early in the temple met,

   Let us still our Saviour greet;

   Nightly to the mount repair,

   Join our praying Pattern there.

   There...

   Notice this repetition linking the two halves of the verse and
   preparing us for the crashing repetitions to follow:


   There by wrestling faith obtain

   Power to work for God again;

   Power His image to retrieve,

   Power, like Thee, our Lord, to live.

   By a similar device in


   Come, Thou long-expected Jesus,

   Born to set Thy people free,

   we have the word born appearing early in the verse to prepare us for
   the triple use that is to follow:


   Born Thy people to deliver,

   Born a child and yet a king,

   Born to reign in us for ever;

   Now Thy gracious kingdom bring.

   Still more daring, but completely triumphant, is the sixfold repetition
   of one in this hymn on the Communion of Saints:


   Build us in one body up,

   Called in one high calling's hope;

   One the Spirit Whom we claim;

   One the pure baptismal flame;

   One the faith, and common Lord,

   One the Father lives adored,

   Over, through, and in us all

   God incomprehensible.

   And yet (is it possible?) when we want a hymn about our unity, we have
   the effrontery to forget Wesley and to sing Baring-Gould's ditty:


   Through the night of doubt and sorrow.

   Wesley's art does not exhaust itself in the choice and use of single
   words. His hymns have a quality which is perhaps fairly described as
   dramatic and architectural. In a few lines Wesley sketches a
   background. At once you are made aware of a vista, a setting, and an
   atmosphere. You see and feel and hear and even smell the action as it
   proceeds. Often it is liturgical action. It is shown, perhaps,
   supremely in Victim Divine, Thy grace we claim' (but not in the
   fragment printed in the new Methodist Hymn-book) and in Entered the
   holy place above'. This art Wesley learnt, we cannot doubt, from the
   Apocalypse. Take this exalted passage on the Beatific Vision from Come
   on, my partners in distress':


   That great mysterious Deity

   We soon with open face shall see;

   The beatific sight

   Shall fill heaven's sounding courts with praise,

   And wide diffuse the golden blaze

   Of everlasting light.


   The Father shining on His throne,

   The glorious co-eternal Son,

   The Spirit, one and seven,

   Conspire our rapture to complete;

   And lo! we fall before His feet,

   And silence heightens heaven.

   Wesley has added heightens to what he found in the Apocalypse about
   silence in Heaven. It is one of the sharp strokes which illustrates the
   soundness and the brilliance of his intuition.

   If we are to measure the merit of Wesley here we must set his picture
   beside that of, say, Kelly. Kelly shared much of Wesley's faith and
   experience. He is always trying to say the same things. He is sincere
   and he is likeable. But his achievement is not equal to his good
   intention. In trying to be sublime, he is so vigorous as to be almost
   irreverent; and yet, for all his loud emphasis, we feel that when he
   comes to great things he is sadly guilty of under-statement. He is like
   the schoolgirl who wrote of the Apostle, St. Luke was a good man'. It
   was true, but it was so inadequate as to be patronizing.

   Contrast Kelly's picture of the final glory of Heaven with Wesley's.
   Kelly wrote:


   Hark! those bursts of acclamation!

   Hark! those loud triumphant chords!

   Jesus takes the highest station;

   O what joy the sight affords!

   The last line is exquisite bathos, and the last couplet suggests a
   certain relief in finding that the issue has not, after all, been
   different.

   Contrast again Bridges' lines:


   All hail! Redeemer, hail!

   (For Thou hast died for me)

   Thy praise shall never, never fail

   Throughout eternity.

   In an attempt to be personal, the author pushes himself forward in the
   wrong way. It is an unfortunate version of the song of the redeemed in
   the Apocalypse. Moreover, never, never fail is an example of precisely
   the wrong way to repeat a word. It is like Watts's unhappy line


   There shall we see His face,

   And never, never sin.

   We more than half fear that the word is repeated, not for emphasis, but
   only to fill up the required number of syllables. Set beside such lines
   the moving repetitions which we have studied in Wesley. Nothing is
   weaker than repetition weakly done. Nothing is stronger than repetition
   strongly done. In Wesley's jubilation we discern the dignity and the
   reverence due to the Son of God. The personal note is not missing, but
   it is subordinate; and there is no half-suggestion that the event might
   have been otherwise.


   Jesus the Saviour reigns,

   The God of truth and love;

   When He had purged our stains,

   He took His seat above:

   Lift up your heart, lift up your voice;

   Rejoice; again I say, rejoice.

   That exhortation is more vigorous and more scriptural than Kelly's
   exclamation:


   O what joy the sight affords!

   To conclude this matter, there is Wesley's less familiar verse in which
   all the notes are struck:


   Extol His kingly power;

   Kiss the exalted Son,

   Who died, and lives, to die no more,

   High on His Father's throne.

   Our Advocate with God,

   He undertakes our cause,

   And spreads through all the earth abroad

   The victory of His cross.

   It is time to leave these smaller matters of language and to say
   something of the more general character of Wesley's hymns. The first
   quality which must strike us is their faithful, moving, but utterly
   unsentimental record of every phase of religious feeling. There is no
   mood of the Christian soul that is not reflected in Wesley's hymns. If
   you are depressed, elated, energetic, enervated, full of doubt, secure
   in faith, you can find in Wesley's hymns, as you can find nowhere else
   but in the Psalms, the appropriate words in which to pour out your soul
   to God. You can indeed often find in Wesley's hymns words more
   appropriate than you will find in the Psalms, because Wesley's are
   Christian words. They are written for you against the background of the
   Cross. They do not need the interpretation and the allegorizing which
   the Psalmist's words sometimes need and which we are sometimes too
   badly broken to give. Here is one example. Can we hope to express
   repentance better than this?


   Stay, Thou insulted Spirit, stay,

   Though I have done Thee such despite,

   Nor cast the sinner quite away,

   Nor take Thine everlasting flight.


   Though I have steeled my stubborn heart,

   And still shook off my guilty fears;

   And vexed, and urged Thee to depart,

   For many long rebellious years:


   Though I have most unfaithful been,

   Of all who e'er Thy grace received;

   Ten thousand times Thy goodness seen,

   Ten thousand times Thy goodness grieved:


   Yet O! the chief of sinners spare,

   In honour of my great High-Priest;

   Nor in Thy righteous anger swear

   To exclude me from Thy people's rest.


   This only woe I deprecate;

   This only plague I pray remove;

   Nor leave me in my lost estate;

   Nor curse me with this want of love.

   But, though Wesley portrays all feelings potently, there is one note in
   his hymns which rings out clear above all the rest. It is the note of
   confidence, heavenly and inviolable confidence: The best of all is, God
   is with us.


   As far from danger as from fear,

   While love, almighty love, is near.

   What mighty troubles hast Thou shewn

   Thy feeble, tempted followers here!

   We have through fire and water gone,

   But saw Thee on the floods appear,

   But felt Thee present in the flame,

   And shouted our Deliverer's name.

   (In passing, we note the characteristic interpretation of the
   Psalmist's words, we went through fire and through water,' by
   references to our Lord walking on the Sea of Galilee and to the
   appearance of One like the Son of God in the Babylonian furnace.)


   Lord, we Thy will obey,

   And in Thy pleasure rest;

   We, only we, can say,

   Whatever is, is best'.

   Faith, mighty faith, the promise sees,

   And looks to that alone;

   Laughs at impossibilities,

   And cries, It shall be done!'

   (In passing, we note another favourite device of Wesley's: he likes to
   use a word which refers us to a passage of Holy Scripture, but to
   change and often to strengthen its meaning. Faith laughs' at
   impossibilities. Wesley has taken the notion of laughing from the story
   of Sarah's incredulity about Isaac's birth. Originally it was Sarah who
   laughed in scornful unbelief. Wesley baptizes Sarah's laughter, and in
   his scheme of things it is faith, not unfaith, which laughs. The point
   is small, but very characteristic. We catch, too, in line four a
   reference to Pope's dictum, Whatever is, is right. Stated by Pope as a
   general truth, it is open to question. Wesley rewrites it in the light
   of Romans viii. 28. He makes it less general, and so, though more
   emphatic, less questionable.)

   Why this confidence? What is its basis? We need look no farther than
   the hymns themselves. Wesley's confidence is rooted in the orthodox,
   catholic, evangelical faith. Nowhere have you a better body of sound
   doctrine. If you know Wesley's hymns, you receive (whether you wish it
   or not) a magnificent course of instruction in high dogmatic theology.
   Here is a prayer to the Holy Ghost:


   Thy witness with my spirit bear,

   That God, my God, inhabits there,

   Thou, with the Father and the Son,

   Eternal light's co-eval beam: --

   Be Christ in me, and I in Him,

   Till perfect we are made in one.

   Here is an address to the Son:


   Effulgence of the Light Divine,

   Ere rolling planets knew to shine,

   Ere time its ceaseless course began;

   Thou, when the appointed hour was come,

   Didst not abhor the virgin's womb,

   But, God with God, wast man with man.

   Here is a sacramental prayer to the Father (copied, I suspect, by Dr.
   Bright in his better-known, but less excellent, hymn, And now, O
   Father, mindful of the love');


   With solemn faith we offer up,

   And spread before Thy glorious eyes,

   That only ground of all our hope,

   That precious, bleeding Sacrifice,

   Which brings Thy grace on sinners down,

   And perfects all our souls in one.

   Nothing is more untrue than to represent the heart of Wesley's religion
   as personal experience or even personal feeling. The heart of Wesley's
   religion is sound doctrine. The common misrepresentation of him can be
   cherished only by those who never read, for instance, the eucharistic
   hymn which begins:


   And shall I let Him go?

   If now I do not feel

   The streams of Living Water flow,

   Shall I forsake the Well?


   Because He saith, Do this,

   This I will always do.

   We find in Wesley, then, not merely the comfort and the drive of
   personal religion, not merely a heart strangely warmed and hands
   vigorous for the fight: we find displayed in the hymns the secret power
   that warms the heart and teaches the fingers to fight. Today many of us
   envy Wesley's enthusiasm and Wesley's assault upon the world. We do
   well to envy; and we can perceive in the hymns that what we envy is the
   product of something else. The hymns present to us, time and again,
   glorious confessions of faith in the Incarnate Word of God, confessions
   in which Wesley has rarely been equalled and never surpassed. Very God
   and Very Man: it is that vision which inspires and drives Wesley, as it
   inspired and drove the writers of the New Testament.


   Fairer than all the earth-born race,

   Perfect in comeliness Thou art;

   Replenished are Thy lips with grace,

   And full of love Thy tender heart:

   God ever blest! we bow the knee,

   And own all fulness dwells in Thee.

   The greatness of Wesley's hymns lies in the exactness with which they
   recapture and represent the life of the New Testament. In them, as in
   it, we move high above all ecclesiastical divisions and out of hearing
   of almost all theological controversies. Wesley speaks the language of
   the Gospels and the Epistles. The dramatic action of his hymns is drawn
   from the Apocalypse. His picture of a Christian society is copied from
   the Acts of the Apostles. We see all this in the great Easter hymn as
   savagely and as criminally truncated in the new Methodist Hymn-book as
   it was even in the English Hymnal. Here are the verses which no one now
   permits us to sing: verses in which Wesley's theology, literary art,
   use of Old Testament allegory, and dominant confidence all find
   illustration:


   What though once we perished all,

   Partners in our parents' fall?

   Second life we all receive;

   In our heavenly Adam live.


   Risen with Him we upward move,

   Still we seek the things above;

   Still pursue and kiss the Son,

   Seated on His Father's throne.


   Scarce a thought on earth bestow,

   Dead to all we leave below;

   Heav'n our aim and loved abode,

   Hid our life with Christ in God.


   Hid, till Christ our life appear,

   Glorious in His members here,

   Joined to Him we then shall shine,

   All immortal, all divine.

   That is the faith; but is it without works and dead?


   That bloody banner see,

   And, in your Captain's sight,

   Fight the good fight of faith with me,

   My fellow-soldiers, fight!

   In mighty phalanx joined,

   To battle all proceed;

   Armed with the unconquerable mind

   Which was in Christ your Head.


   The world cannot withstand

   Its ancient Conqueror;

   The world must sink beneath the hand

   Which arms us for the war

   This is our victory!

   Before our faith they fall;

   Jesus hath died for you and me;

   Believe, and conquer all.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Hymns of Isaac Watts

   Bernard Manning

   A paper read to the University Congregational Society in Cambridge on
   Sunday, October 17, 1937.

   DR. HENRY BETTS and Dr. Albert Peel have recently revived the
   respectable game of comparing the hymns of Watts and the hymns of
   Wesley. I shall have to take a turn or two at it myself before I finish
   this paper. Indeed, no one can read Watts without having Wesley in
   mind, and nothing will enable a man to see the greatness of Watts's
   hymns so well as a thorough knowledge of Wesley's. I make no apology,
   then, for beginning and continuing and ending with the comparison at
   the back of my mind. Watts himself began the game when he said with the
   generosity of a Congregationalist and the exaggeration of a preacher
   that Wesley's Wrestling Jacob' was worth all that he himself had ever
   written.

   This paper is about Dr. Watts's hymns, not about Dr. Watts. We must,
   for all that, take a look at Dr. Watts himself. He was born in 1674 and
   died at the age of seventy-four in 1748. His life, that is to say,
   covered the period in which Protestant Dissent won its permanent place
   in English society. When Watts was born, Protestant Dissent was
   proscribed and persecuted. When he was a boy, there occurred the
   decisive struggle with Popery and the Popish King, James II. The
   Glorious Revolution of 1688 brought security to the Church of England
   and Toleration to Protestant Dissenters. When Watts was in middle life
   the end of the Stuarts and the accession of the House of Hanover marked
   the failure of the Tory attack on the settlement of 1688, an attack
   aimed especially at the Dissenters, but promising a revival of Popery
   too. At the very end of his life, Dr. Watts had the satisfaction of
   witnessing in the failure of the '45 the collapse of the Young
   Pretender, and the final deliverance of Great Britain from the dangers
   that had menaced it since the death of Oliver Cromwell. The
   Constitution was saved from Divine Right. Protestantism was saved from
   France and the Pope. Dissent was saved from Toryism and persecution.
   Watts, then, was one of those fortunate persons whose life coincides
   with the increasing triumph of his own cause. The right people win. The
   wicked are cast down. All things -- visibly -- work together for good
   to them that love God. The note of cheerfulness -- perhaps the most
   distinct note in Watts's poetry -- comes appropriately from such a
   setting.

   That is the setting. We glance now at the career. Watts's grandfather
   was a naval officer who served under Blake, the Cromwellian admiral,
   one of our greatest naval heroes. Watts's father, as became a Dissenter
   after the collapse of the Rule of the Saints, led a humbler life. He
   was in business in Southampton. But remember the grandfather and
   observe Watts's rather warlike patriotism, his pride in the sceptred
   isle', set in the silver sea', in the Navy which protects it, in the
   naval traditions of our race. All this, which comes leaking through
   Watts's pious prayers for Britain, reminds us of Blake's lieutenant.
   Watts himself was two things: a minister and a scholar, great in each
   work. His studies ruined his health. In 1712, just before he was forty,
   he went to live with Sir Thomas Abney, of Abney Park, and he spent the
   rest of his life there. He did not completely abandon the active
   ministry, however, and at the time of his death he was something like a
   national figure. He has a memorial in Westminster Abbey. About his
   scholarship we observe that, vast as it was, he amassed it under the
   difficulties which hampered all Dissenters till 1870. He was excluded
   from Oxford and Cambridge, and went to a Dissenting academy. The
   academies tried to do what the national universities refused to do for
   Dissenters. Compared with Oxford and Cambridge, the academies had many
   disadvantages, but they had one notable advantage. On them the dead
   hand of mathematics and classics lay less heavily. They developed a
   wider notion of education. Philosophy, natural science, history, modern
   languages found a place. Accordingly, Dr. Watts possessed an
   encyclopaedic sort of scholarship, less fine and nice, it might be, in
   the classics than the most polished Oxford man of his time might have,
   but vastly wider in scope and more liberal in tendency. I do not mean
   that Dr. Watts knew little Greek and Latin. He was accomplished in
   both; but he knew other things too.

   So much, but no more, does it seem necessary to say by way of
   introducing the author. We now open the book: The Psalms of David
   imitated in New Testament Language together with Hymns and Spiritual
   Songs. It has two parts, as the title indicates, and they are of about
   equal length. In the first part Dr. Watts presents a metrical version
   of the Book of Psalms. It is not a mere reproduction of the 150 psalms.
   Some are omitted. Some are abbreviated. Some are represented by more
   than one version in different metres. Some are divided into several
   parts. All are baptized into the Christian faith. But Watts shall tell
   you in his own words what he has done:

   It is necessary to divest David and Asaph, &c. of every other Character
   but that of a Psalmist and a Saint, and to make them always speak the
   common Sense of a Christian.... Where the Psalmist describes Religion
   by the fear of God, I have often joined faith and Love to it: ... Where
   he talks of sacrificing Goats or Bullocks, I rather chuse to mention
   the Sacrifice of Christ, the Lamb of God: Where he attends the ark with
   Shouting in Zion, I sing the Ascension of my Saviour into Heaven, or
   his Presence in his Church on Earth.'

   The second part of the book contains hymns. First comes a book of hymns
   collected from the Holy Scriptures' -- that is to say, paraphrases of
   both Old and New Testament passages. Second is a book of hymns composed
   on Divine Subjects' -- that is to say, hymns as we should understand
   the word, freely composed without particular reference to Holy
   Scripture. Third, and last, are hymns prepared for the holy ordinance
   of the Lord's Supper'. As Watts had ended his Psalter by six versions
   of Gloria Patri in various metres, so he ends the hymnbook by others.
   Some are in the form of hymns. Some are single verses. To these he adds
   four hosannas to the Son of God. The result is a very substantial
   volume.

   I shall not pretend to any bibliographical knowledge of Watts's works.
   If you want that knowledge, you will find it in Julian's Dictionary of
   Hymnology. I mention only that the Hymns were published in 1707 and
   enlarged in a second edition in 1709; and that ten years later the
   Psalms were published. We will take the volume as it stands compacted
   of these two.

   Nor shall I give you, what I am indeed unfit to give you, an historical
   sketch of hymn-singing in our churches. I note only that Watts is a
   pioneer. Hymns were being sung in our churches in the late seventeenth
   century; but there was a prejudice against them as both Popish and
   unscriptural. That prejudice died hard; and, what was worse, the supply
   of English hymns was meagre and poor. To Watts more than to any other
   man is due the triumph of the hymn in English worship. All later
   hymn-writers, even when they excel him, are his debtors; and it is
   possible to hold that his work for hymns is greater than Charles
   Wesley's, even if as a writer of hymns we place him a little lower than
   Wesley. Metrical psalms in great numbers there were before Watts, and
   they were much used. But here, as in his hymns, Watts was a pioneer. In
   his Christian interpretation of the Psalms, he had predecessors, but no
   one had so thoroughly carried out the plan before.

   In examining what Dr. Watts wrote, we must then always remember that he
   is hewing his way through an almost unexplored territory, and that his
   successors, not having his rough work to do again, will be able to
   polish and improve. We must expect him to make many experiments that
   fail, and to try many arrangements before he finds the best. His book
   is a laboratory of experiments. Only in a few places can we expect him
   to bring one off. Another set of conditions hampered him. He was
   writing for congregations that were often ignorant. His hymns had to be
   suitable to be announced and sung line by line by illiterates. He had
   to write in only a few well-known metres, a limitation of which he
   often complained.

   I claim at this point the historian's privilege: the privilege of
   mentioning dates. The hymns were published in 1707. Watts's mind, that
   is to say, was formed in the seventeenth century. He is a seventeenth-
   rather than an eighteenth-century writer. This appears in that quality
   of his verse which friends call quaint, and enemies grotesque. When
   Watts's taste was set the English language had not undergone that
   purging and purifying, that rationalizing and simplification, which we
   associate with the name of Addison. Here we find a contrast between
   Watts and Wesley. Watts's forebears wrote crabbed, allusive, tortuous
   prose and verse. Charles Wesley's forebears wrote the slick and
   polished stuff. To write great theology in common metre, long metre, or
   in 6.8s is not easy even if you have a perfect command of metre; but
   Watts found no metre ready tamed for his use. Read the metrical psalter
   of the Church of Scotland, and you will get a picture of the untamed,
   unbroken metres which Watts had to discipline. Wesley found that work
   done for him. The wonder is not that Watts is, when compared with
   Wesley, rough and grotesque, but that he has achieved even his moderate
   success in harnessing his verse to his theology. Here is an example at
   random from Psalm xx: Some trust in chariots and some in horses: but we
   will remember the name of the Lord our God'. The Scottish version is:


   In chariots some put confidence,

   Some horses trust upon;

   But we remember will the name

   Of our Lord God alone.

   Watts writes:


   Some trust in horses trained for war,

   And some of chariots make their boasts;

   Our surest expectations are

   From Thee, the Lord of heav'nly hosts.

   I have not chosen a grotesque, but an average, passage. But you can see
   Watts smoothing the verses down. In the eighteenth century they will be
   smoothed quite flat.

   From the seventeenth century Watts derived another quality which makes
   him very unlike Wesley. This quality reminds us of Milton, even though
   the difference between Milton and Watts is very great. Let me put it
   this way. Charles Wesley in his hymns concerns himself mainly (I had
   almost written exclusively) with God and the soul of man: their
   manifold relations, their estrangement, their reconciliation, their
   union. Watts, too, concerns himself with this drama; but he gives it a
   cosmic background. Not less than Wesley, he finds the Cross the centre
   of his thought: all things look forward or backward to the Incarnation
   and the Passion. But Watts sees the Cross, as Milton had seen it,
   planted on a globe hung in space, surrounded by the vast distances of
   the universe. He sees the drama in Palestine prepared before the
   beginning of time and still decisive when time has ceased to be. There
   is a sense of the spaciousness of nature, of the vastness of time, of
   the dreadfulness of eternity, in Watts which is missing or less felt in
   Wesley. You have a touch of it in the last verse of Watts's greatest
   and best-known hymn, When I survey'. Were the whole realm of nature
   mine': the whole realm of Nature -- no thought, no expression is more
   characteristic of Watts than that. It is an echo of his encyclopaedic
   philosophic thought. You constantly find Watts surveying' the whole
   realm of Nature and finding at the centre of it its crucified and dying
   Creator.

   In the most hideous period of the last war, in a rather dingy, dreary
   chapel in the Potteries, I heard Dr. F. B. Meyer preach (as only he
   could) on the Passion. He took for his text Watts' hymn When I survey';
   and to this day I can give you the headings and gist of that moving
   sermon. I recall what Dr. Meyer said about the word survey': a cold,
   rather formal word for the sinner's looking at the Saviour, he thought
   it, but it was (he admitted) very characteristic of Watts. It is the
   word of a man who, in seventeenth-century fashion, sees the world in a
   grain of sand and eternity in an hour. John Bailey says that in no poet
   are we so frequently made aware of the sky as in Milton. In this Watts
   is Milton's disciple. The spaciousness of the firmament is always
   appearing in his hymns, and he cannot glance or look at so vast an
   expanse of time and space as the scene of our redemption unfolds: he
   must survey it.


   Ere the blue heavens were stretched abroad

   From everlasting was the Word.

   There is a magical quality in that verse. Watts knows that the blue
   heavens' alone provide an adequate background for any thought of the
   Word. It is like Milton. It is like Dante. It has sublimity. That
   sublimity was partly lost in the intense examination of the human soul
   which marked the evangelical and pietist movements, but in Watts it
   leads straight to the Calvinist's awareness of the sovereignty of God.


   God is a name my soul adores

   The almighty Three, the eternal One;

   Nature and grace, with all their powers,

   Confess the Infinite unknown.


   Thy voice produced the sea and spheres,

   Bade the waves roar, the planets shine;

   But nothing like Thyself appears

   Through all these spacious works of Thine.


   Still restless nature dies and grows,

   From change to change the creatures run;

   Thy being no succession knows,

   And all Thy vast designs are one.


   A glance of Thine runs through the globe,

   Rules the bright worlds, and moves their frame;

   Of light Thou form'st Thy dazzling robe,

   Thy ministers are living flame.


   How shall polluted mortals dare

   To sing Thy glory or Thy grace?

   Beneath Thy feet we lie afar,

   And see but shadows of Thy face.


   Who can behold the blazing light?

   Who can approach consuming flame?

   None but Thy wisdom knows Thy might,

   None but Thy word can speak Thy name.

   These verses, though less august, show the same perception of the great
   realm of Nature:


   Firm are the words His prophets give,

   Sweet words, on which his children live;

   Each of them is the voice of God

   Who spoke and spread the skies abroad.


   Each of them powerful as the sound

   That bid the new-made world go round;

   And stronger than the solid poles

   On which the wheel of nature rolls.


   O for a strong, a lasting faith

   To credit what my Maker saith,

   T' embrace the message of His Son

   And call the joys of heaven our own!


   Then, should the earth's old pillars shake

   And all the wheels of nature break,

   Our steady souls should fear no more

   Than solid rocks when billows roar.


   Our everlasting hopes arise

   Above the ruinable skies,

   Where the eternal Builder reigns,

   And His own courts His power sustains.

   It is not, I think, an accident that the Methodists have drawn so
   freely on this type of hymn by Watts. Charles Wesley himself provided
   them with ample riches in the expression of evangelical faith; but the
   genius which presided over the evolution of the Methodist hymn-book
   consciously or unconsciously understood that Watts could supplement
   Wesley on this other side. In this way it has come about that the
   Methodists have a splendid store of Watts's hymns on what we may
   pretentiously call the cosmic setting of the Faith. They have valued
   Watts in some ways more than we.

   The verses that I last quoted contain two interesting words from which
   we may now jump to consider Watts's diction. Did you note the fine
   phrase above the ruinable skies'? Watts has a flair for the use of the
   memorable word. We shall find that as we proceed. The other word is
   old': should the earth's old pillars shake'. Unless you are very
   careful, that sounds ludicrous. We want Watts to say ancient' or to use
   a more dignified word. Old' is a word that has lost caste since 1709.
   Compare


   The sons of good old Jacob seemed

   Abandoned to their foes.

   Unhappily for Watts, many of his words have lost caste; and verse after
   verse of his psalms and hymns we find ruined by a turn of phrase that,
   once venerable, is become comic. The great divide, I surmise, is
   somewhere near Addison. Words have changed less since then. That is why
   Wesley seems less archaic or dated' than Watts, though, of course,
   there are a few expressions in Wesley that strike us as odd. But there
   are many in Watts. Very much too often we descend from the sublime to
   the ridiculous with a shattering bump, or, when he wishes to move us he
   makes us squirm.


   Here every bowel of our God

   With soft compassion rolls.

   Not merely by his fondness for bowels' and worms' does Watts disturb
   us, but by scores and scores of expressions that died in the polite
   reformation of Augustan English.

   So much then we must expect for the simple but adequate reason that
   Watts's taste was formed in the seventeenth and not in the eighteenth
   century. As an example, let me quote Watts's use of the exclamation
   Well'. He is very fond of this, but it gives a grotesquely colloquial
   touch to some of his solemn passages. He is contrasting the eternal
   life of God with the transitoriness of His creatures.


   The sea and sky must perish too,

   And vast destruction come;

   The creatures -- look, how old they grow

   And wait their fiery doom.


   Well, let the sea shrink all away

   And flame melt down the skies;

   My God shall live an endless day

   When th' old creation dies.

   Or, in another sense, he opens a hymn:


   Well, the Redeemer's gone

   T' appear before our God,

   To sprinkle o'er the flaming throne

   With his atoning blood.

   Or:


   Well, if our days must fly,

   We'll keep their end in sight.

   Bible readers will remember that the translators of the Authorized
   Version in their address to the Reader use Well' in a similar solemn
   manner. It is part of Watts's seventeenth-century inheritance.

   I could fill pages with examples of this unhappy change in the meaning
   of Watts's words.


   Thou has redeemed our souls from hell

   With Thine invaluable blood,


   Yet with my God I leave my cause,

   And trust His promised grace;

   He rules me by His well-known laws

   Of love and righteousness.


   [God] rides upon the stormy sky

   And manages the seas.


   Thee, mighty God, our souls admire.


   Must heaven's eternal darling die

   To save a trait'rous race?


   And Heaven without Thy presence there

   Would be a dark and tiresome place.

   and, perhaps oddest of all,


   Through all His [God's] ancient works

   Surprising wisdom shines.

   Examples leap from every page. These will suffice to explain why so
   many of Watts's hymns cannot be sung today.

   At times it is not the odd word, but the quaint or crude thought which
   puts the psalm or hymn out of court. Watts out-Wordsworths Wordsworth
   in his love of simple, everyday language; and as Wordsworth at times
   made the sublime ridiculous by his kindergarten expressions so also did
   Watts. At its best Watts's language is pure and transparent. It is as
   pure Anglo-Saxon as Bunyan's own:


   Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood

   Stand dressed in living green.

   But at its worst it is banal beyond belief. What modern versions of St.
   Paul's epistles have done for Romans and Ephesians Watts has done for
   the Psalms. The obscurity has gone: granted; but so has the awe, the
   majesty, the numinous, the divine. Here is a neutral example about
   manna:


   But they in murmuring language said,

   Manna is all our feast.

   We loathe this light, this airy bread,

   We must have flesh to taste'.


   Ye shall have flesh to please your lust'

   (The Lord in wrath replied)

   And sent them quails like sand or dust,

   Heaped up from side to side.


   He gave them all their own desire;

   And greedy as they fed,

   His vengeance burnt with secret fire,

   And smote the rebels dead.

   And meritorious as Watts's use of Anglo-Saxon words is, free as he is
   of pompous rubbish, his exclusion of Latin words deprives him of those
   magical changes that Wesley knows so well how to use. By the
   introduction of a word like essential' or transient' among Anglo-Saxon
   words Wesley will strike a deep note in a way that holds you
   spell-bound. When he would be strong, Watts is often merely violent.

   At times, however, his violence becomes grand:


   They love the road that leads to hell;

   Then let the rebels die

   Whose malice is implacable

   Against the Lord on high.


   But if thou hast a chosen few

   Amongst that impious race,

   Divide them from the bloody crew

   By Thy surprising grace.

   On Judgment Day:


   The angry nations fret and roar

   That they can slay the saints no more;

   On wings of vengeance flies our God

   To pay the long arrears of blood.

   On Satan:


   Now Satan comes with dreadful roar,

   And threatens to destroy;

   He worries whom he can't devour

   With a malicious joy.

   On the other hand, we have this pleasing picture of supernatural
   natural history:


   A thousand savage beasts of prey

   Around the forest roam,

   But Judah's Lion guards the way

   And guides the strangers home.

   Here is the Warning to Magistrates,' to the Tory invaders of the rights
   of conscience who attempted to undermine the Toleration Act. It is
   worth the attention of Hitler:


   Yet you invade the rights of God,

   And send your bold decrees abroad

   To bind the conscience in your chains.


   Break out their teeth, eternal God,

   Those teeth of lions dyed in blood,

   And crush the serpents in the dust.

   As empty chaff, when whirlwinds rise,

   Before the sweeping tempest flies,

   So let their hopes and names be lost.

   But Watts was sometimes a master of understatement, as well as
   sometimes a slave of exaggeration. There is a neatness about this next
   verse which makes even Esquire seem cumbrous. Watts is writing on the
   excellency of the Christian religion:


   Not the feigned fields of heathenish bliss

   Could raise such pleasures to the mind,

   Nor does the Turkish Paradise

   Pretend to joys so well-refined.

   You notice that, even when he is most grotesque, he lets slip the great
   phrase. The feigned fields of heathenish bliss' might be Milton. To pay
   the long arrears of blood' might be Shakespeare. Might it not be
   Aeschylus?

   One other quality that has not helped the hymns demands a word. Watts,
   it must be confessed, is not always very clever at rhymes. Something
   must be allowed for changes in pronunciation of vowels and diphthongs.
   Something may be due to a faulty ear. But much, I am persuaded, is due
   to haste and carelessness. Have you noticed how many poor rhymes, false
   rhymes, and mere assonances occur even in his great hymns? Watts rarely
   tries to rhyme more than the second and fourth lines. That, to begin
   with, is letting himself off easily. Contrast Wesley, who usually
   rhymes first and third as well as second and fourth, and so gets a more
   compact verse. Take as an example Jesus shall reign'. In six verses,
   with twelve alleged rhymes, we find no fewer than five of the twelve
   imperfect. Watts is in this matter distinctly inferior to Wesley, who
   had, of course, a gifted musical ear and a rare facility in Latin verse
   to help him. Wesley's book, as well as Watts's, contains, of course, a
   good many false rhymes and mere assonances, but Wesley's do not weaken
   his verse as much as one would at first expect. This is because, unlike
   Watts, Wesley leaves very few lines without some attempt at rhyming. If
   lines 2 and 4 rhyme badly, lines I and 3 partly save the situation for
   Wesley. Watts has too often neglected to provide himself with this
   safety valve, and one bad rhyme, being the only rhyme, puts the verse
   out of action. So marked is the difference that if you read a hundred
   pages of Watts at a sitting, and come (as you will come) on the hymn
   perfectly smoothed and perfectly rhymed, your inclination is to say,
   Why, Wesley might have written that!' for at his best Watts is as
   accomplished as Wesley.

   I take two of Watts's smoothest examples. You will note how much they
   gain because here, like Wesley, he sets out to rhyme lines I and 3 as
   well as 2 and 4. Even here, however, Watts does not give us perfect
   rhymes:


   Not all the outward forms on earth,

   Nor rites that God has given,

   Nor will of man, nor blood, nor birth,

   Can raise a soul to Heaven.


   The sovereign will of God alone

   Creates us heirs of grace,

   Born in the image of His Son,

   A new, peculiar race.

   Or this:


   Nor eye has seen, nor ear has heard,

   Nor sense, nor reason known,

   What joys the Father has prepared

   For those that love the Son.

   Each verse has one false and one true rhyme. Spread this defective
   rhyming equally all over the psalms and hymns and you see the result is
   considerable and depressing.

   You will perhaps assume from what I have said that the common opinion
   is true, that our hymn-books have selected the best of Watts, and that
   we are not missing much in missing all but the twenty-five hymns or so
   with which we are familiar. Let no word of mine lead you into that
   error. When every deduction for every reason has been made, Watts's
   psalms and hymns contain many, many pieces which would enrich our
   worship. Not a few, it is true, contain a phrase or word that is now
   comic or grotesque; but by no means all. And even those hymns which,
   for such reasons, we cannot sing in public, we neglect at our peril in
   private. I at least know of no devotional book richer than Watts's
   hymns and psalms. The whole piece may be unfit for use, but the great
   phrase, the great thought, the penetrating analysis, the blinding flash
   of genius lighting up Calvary afresh for us -- these things would purge
   and wring and subdue and elevate and all but save our souls, did we
   give them the chance. Watts's was a great mind, a great soul, a great
   experience. Much that he writes is too intimate except for the holy of
   holies. But we ought to use it there.

   Every one will make his own selection. I should have been sorry to miss
   this meditation:


   Here at Thy cross, my dying God,

   I lay my soul beneath Thy love.


   Not all that tyrants think, or say,

   With rage and lightning in their eyes,

   Nor hell shall fright my heart away,

   Should hell with all its legions rise,


   Should worlds conspire to drive me thence,

   Moveless and firm this heart should lie,

   Resolved (for that's my last defence)

   If I must perish, there to die.


   There I behold, with sweet delight,

   The blessed Three in One;

   And strong affections fill my sight

   On God's incarnate Son.


   And if no evening visit's paid

   Between my Saviour and my soul,

   How dull the night, how sad the shade,

   How mournfully the minutes roll.


   Deep in our hearts let us record

   The deeper sorrows of our Lord.


   The mount of danger is the place

   Where we shall see surprising grace.


   Turn, turn us, mighty God,

   And mould our souls afresh;

   Break, sovereign grace, these hearts of stone,

   And give us hearts of flesh.

   It is time, after examining the limitations, to observe the strong
   features of Watts's verse. We have glanced at the simple Anglo-Saxon
   words which compose it. Page after page shows no Latin word. Whole
   verses are in monosyllables. The experiment is too difficult to succeed
   always, but if it comes off it is heavenly in its clarity and light.
   You can notice this in everything that I quote from Watts.

   There are few tricks in Watts's verse, but he is fond of some simple
   devices. These interest us because first we can watch him practising
   them in scores of feeble or moderate verses, and then using them to
   bring off some distinguished performance in a classic hymn.

   He is very fond, for instance, of a sort of repetition or parallelism.
   This descends perhaps from his putting into verse so many of the
   parallel sentences of Hebrew poetry. At times he repeats an idea, at
   times a phrase, at times only a word.


   Down to the earth was Satan thrown,

   Down to the earth his legions fell,

   High on the cross the Saviour hung,

   High in the heavens He reigns.


   To Jesus our atoning Priest,

   To Jesus our superior King.


   I'll make your great commission known,

   And ye shall prove my gospel true

   By all the works that I have done,

   By all the wonders ye shall do.

   A more interesting type is here:


   He bids the sun forbear to rise,

   Th' obedient sun forbears.

   In the creation:


   Let blood,' He said, flow round the veins,'

   And round the veins it flows.

   Note the chiasmus there too.


   Our days alas! our mortal days

   Are short and wretched too;

   Evil and few,' the patriarch says,

   And well the patriarch knew.

   Watts is particularly fond of pairing his lines in a way of his own.
   Most writers pair lines I and 2 or 3 and 4, and Watts often does that
   too. But he very often secures an interesting effect by pairing lines 2
   and 3:


   Nor shall Thy spreading Gospel rest

   Till through the world Thy truth has run,

   Till Christ has all the nations blest

   That see the light or feel the sun.


   Down to this base, this sinful earth,

   He came to raise our nature high;

   He came t' atone almighty wrath;

   Jesus, the God, was born to die.

   Not very remarkable, you may say. Wait a moment. Turn now to the
   greatest of Watts's hymns, and see this particular form of parallelism,
   combined with a chiasmus, in the second and third lines of the verse.
   See Watts bring off with apparently artless art the performance for
   which he has practised scores and scores of times:


   See from His head, His hands, His feet,

   Sorrow and love flow mingled down.

   Did e'er such love and sorrow meet,

   Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

   Another device of which Watts is very fond is accumulation. He piles up
   words and ideas of the same order, and produces the effect memorably
   described in Burke's treatise, On the Sublime and Beautiful:


   His worship and his fear shall last

   Till hours and years and time be past.


   (There Persia, glorious to behold,

   There India shines in eastern gold)

   And barb'rous nations at His word

   Submit and bow and own their Lord.


   No bleeding bird, nor bleeding beast,

   Nor hyssop branch, nor sprinkling priest,

   Nor running brook, nor flood, nor sea,

   Can wash the dismal stain away.

   Sometimes Watts accumulates phrases, as when Wisdom speaks:


   Before the flying clouds,

   Before the solid land,

   Before the fields, before the floods,

   I dwelt at His right hand.

   Not much in it? Perhaps not; but, for all that, you will find it a
   feature of the greatest of his hymns:


   See from His head, His hands, His feet.


   While life and thought and being last,

   Or immortality endures


   While such as trust their native strength

   Shall melt away and droop and die.

   From Milton, I suspect, Watts learnt his mastery of proper names. They
   adorn his verse frequently and happily. Sometimes they strike us as
   odd.


   He takes my soul ere I'm aware,

   And shows me where His glories are;

   No chariot of Amminadib

   The heavenly rapture can describe.

   Or:


   So Samson, when his hair was lost,

   Met the Philistines to his cost,

   Shook his vain limbs with sad surprise,

   Made feeble fight, and lost his eyes.

   But this is impressive:


   What mighty man, or mighty God,

   Comes travelling in State

   Along the Iduman road

   Away from Bozrah's gate?

   And have you noticed the triumph of long practice with proper names in
   There is a land of pure delight'? In one couplet Watts works off three
   of them. We do not notice them as heavy or precious; and yet they
   awaken that historic memory which only proper names can command:


   So to the Jews old Canaan stood,

   While Jordan rolled between.

   Watts has achieved perfect mastery when he can use proper names to
   bewitch us without our noticing it.

   You remember that other quality which we observed earlier: Watts's
   awareness of the whole universe as the setting for human life and for
   the drama of salvation. That quality gives deep tones to his greatest
   hymns. That, too, he controls after much experiment. I need only remind
   you of


   Time, like an ever-rolling stream.


   The busy tribes of flesh and blood,

   With all their lives and cares,

   Are carried downwards by the flood

   And lost in following years.


   The Mighty God, whose matchless power

   Is ever new and ever young,

   And firm endures while endless years

   Their everlasting circles run.

   And of course supremely:


   Were the whole realm of nature mine.

   Watts, then, achieves his supreme triumphs not by accident. They are
   compounded of many ingredients already well known to him, experimented
   with happily and unhappily, carelessly as well as carefully, but
   finally subdued by his art in a classic hymn. For some of the hymns as
   whole pieces, notably for When I survey' and for There is a land', we
   can find rough drafts in his book.

   We have lingered perhaps too long on the lesser things. Let me ask a
   final question touching greater matters than diction and versification.
   What of Watts's choice of subjects? What are the psalms and hymns
   about?

   They concern, as is natural, some things of passing or historic
   interest. In making David speak like a Christian, Watts most properly
   made him speak also like an Englishman, not to say like an
   eighteenth-century Whig. Watts equates, that is to say, Palestine,
   Israel, Judea, Jerusalem with Great Britain. The exquisitely sensitive
   commentators call this vulgar. Vulgar or not, Watts does it. The result
   is that he gives us some fascinating reflexions on English history. The
   deliverances of the chosen people had their parallels in Gunpowder
   Plot, the landing of William of Orange, the accession of George I, and
   generally in the defeat of the French, the discomfiture of the Tories,
   and the confusion of the Papists. Popish idolatry reproved: a psalm for
   the 5th of November'; The church saved and her enemies disappointed:
   composed for the 5th of November, 1694'; Power and government from God
   alone: applied to the Glorious Revolution by King William or the happy
   accession of King George to the throne'. The hymns are full of sound
   political doctrine as well as thanksgiving.


   Britain was doomed to be a slave,

   Her frame dissolved, her fears were great.

   When God a new supporter gave

   To bear the pillars of the State.


   No vain pretence to royal birth

   Shall fix a tyrant on the throne.

   The lesson is clear:


   Oft has the Lord whole nations blest

   For His own church's sake;

   The pow'rs that give His people rest

   Shall of His care partake.


   Let Caesar's due be ever paid

   To Caesar and his throne,

   But consciences and souls were made

   To be the Lord's alone.

   Here is Guy Fawkes:


   Their secret fires in caverns lay,

   And we the sacrifice;

   But gloomy caverns strove in vain

   To 'scape all searching eyes.


   Their dark designs were all revealed,

   Their treason all betrayed.

   But nevertheless:


   In vain the busy sons of hell

   Still new rebellions try.

   The grandson of Blake's lieutenant rejoices in the success of our arms,
   in the cause of liberty and Protestantism:


   How have we chased them through the field,

   And trod them to the ground,

   While Thy salvation was our shield,

   But they no shelter found.


   In vain to idol saints they cry,

   And perish in their blood.

   The decline of the Dissenting interest in the early eighteenth century
   has left a pathetic reflexion in Watts. Empty churches are not new
   phenomena.


   'Tis with a mournful pleasure now

   I think on ancient days;

   Then to Thy house did numbers go,

   And all our work was praise.

   In God they boasted all the day,

   And in a cheerful throng

   Did thousands meet to praise and pray,

   And grace was all their song.


   But now our souls are seized with shame,

   Confusion fills our face.


   Yet have we not forgot our God,

   Nor falsely dealt with heav'n.

   Most of the psalms and hymns contain no local or passing reference.
   They deal -- ninety-nine out of a hundred of them -- with the great
   elemental facts that always dominate the Christian's mind. There is
   indeed a certain sameness about Watts's book because he deals so
   constantly with the same three or four topics. There is nothing
   denominational about him. We find rather less reflexion of the intense
   fellowship of classic Congregationalism than we should have expected.
   Watts deals with the great common themes of catholic Christianity.

   There is, to begin with, the most frank and most moving recital of the
   weakness, the unsatisfactoriness, the transience of human life. The
   hopes and fears of men Watts portrays with a tender but unflinching
   hand. No man has analysed more faithfully the doubts and hopes and
   fears that we all have.


   The passions of my hope and fear

   Maintained a doubtful strife,

   While sorrow, pain, and sin conspired

   To take away my life.

   And all is set over against the vast universe:


   Like flowery fields the nations stand,

   Pleased with the morning light;

   The flow'rs beneath the mower's hand

   Lie with'ring ere 'tis night.

   Watts is almost Virgilian in this. Not less than Virgil, he deserves
   Tennyson's great word:


   Thou majestic in thy sadness

   At the doubtful doom of human kind.

   There is no easy sentimentality in Watts. He has one foot firmly on
   earth. His quite ghastly poems about death and the grave, about Hell
   and Satan, provide valuable evidence that he at least had allowed for
   the emergence of Mussolini and Hitler. Watts is a sound Calvinist. He
   knows that mankind has fallen. He takes full note of evil, and allows
   handsomely for it.

   But if one of Watts's feet is firmly planted on earth, the other is no
   less firmly planted on catholic, evangelical, apostolic theology. A
   line which, for another purpose, I have already quoted gives us in
   strong epigrammatic form the other thing which Watts sees over against
   the tragedy of human life:


   Jesus, the God, was born to die.

   In its blazing antitheses: the Galilean carpenter who is God: the God
   who is born: the God who dies; it carries us back to the most ancient
   hymns of the Greek and the Latin Church.


   Our souls adore th' Eternal God,

   Who condescended to be born.

   The Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection -- these things are for
   Watts no less certain than the frustration of human hopes. That is why
   (in his own word) he is, on the balance, cheerful'.


   Till God in human form I see

   My thoughts no comfort find.


   But if Immanuel's face I see

   My hope, my joy begins.


   I love th' incarnate mystery

   And there I place my trust.

   Here is the final vision of a Love of God older than the universe and
   filling it:


   So strange, so boundless was the love

   That pitied dying men,

   The Father sent His equal Son

   To give them life again.


   Christ be my first elect,' He said,

   Then chose our souls in Christ our head,

   Before He gave the mountains birth

   Or laid foundations for the earth.


   Thus did eternal love begin

   To raise us up from death and sin;

   Our characters were then decreed

   Blameless in love, a holy seed.'


   So let our lips and lives express

   That holy gospel we profess.


   Now by the bowels of my God,

   His sharp distress, His sore complaints

   By His last groans, His dying blood,

   I charge my soul to love the saints.


   Tender and kind be all our thoughts,

   Through all our lives let mercy run;

   So God forgives our numerous faults

   For the dear sake of Christ His Son.

   These are the august notes of true Catholic theology and true Christian
   living. I know of no better introduction to classical theology than
   Watts. Let me give you two examples. Recently I read through the Gloss
   Ordinary and the other main commentaries used by medieval theologians
   on the first few chapters of the Song of Solomon. I found it again
   almost word for word in Watts's paraphrases of that book. And in
   Watts's Jesus shall reign' you have the great verse (omitted, of
   course, nowadays from our books because it is so great):


   In Him [Christ] the sons of Adam boast

   More blessings than their father lost.

   What is that but the glorious passage from the ancient Office for
   Easter Eve? O certainly necessary sin of Adam ... O happy fault which
   deserved to have such and so great a Redeemer.'

   Watts's book moves to a splendid end in his sacramental hymns. The
   Lord's Supper has an essential place in Watts's religion.


   I love the Lord, who stoops so low

   To give His word a seal.

   And thus our sense assists our faith

   And shows us what His gospel means.

   {St. Thomas Aquinas has the complementary thought in his great
   eucharistic hymn, Pange, lingua:


   Praestet fides supplementum

   Sensuum defectui.}

   He sets out the high sacramental doctrine of the Savoy Confession. The
   Lord's Supper is more than a memorial.


   This holy bread and wine

   Maintains our fainting breath

   By union with our living Lord

   And interest in His death.


   Here have we seen Thy face, O Lord,

   And viewed salvation with our eyes;

   Tasted and felt the Living Word,

   The bread descending from the skies.

   He remembers with infinite tenderness those who once partook with us of
   the Supper here on earth.


   While once upon this lower ground,

   Weary and faint ye stood,

   What dear refreshments here ye found

   From this immortal food.


   Here God's whole name appears complete,

   Nor wit can guess, nor reason prove,

   Which of the letters best is writ,

   The power, the wisdom, or the love.

   If I were asked to compare Watts with Wesley in a word, I should say, I
   think, though with great diffidence, that Watts seems to me to have the
   greater mind, the wider outlook, the more philosophic approach to human
   life and to the Christian revelation. He has also, I think, more
   original poetry in him. Now and then he hits out a greater and more
   elemental phrase than any that I remember in Wesley. But Wesley is the
   greater artist. He flies more surely. He crashes far less often. He
   reaches the heights far more often, though perhaps he does not go quite
   as high. His book, as a whole, far surpasses Watts. Watts, because he
   is dominated by the notion of paraphrasing, puts Scripture very often
   into his own words; it is not always to the advantage of Scripture.
   Wesley does little paraphrasing. He puts his own notions into Scripture
   language, and it is always to their advantage. Each is scriptural; they
   are equally scriptural, but in different ways, and the literary luck is
   with Wesley. Watts had it in him to do better than Wesley ever did,
   better than he himself ever did.

   But in essentials they are one; and they provide us with one quite
   conclusive reason for being Christians as far as we can be. They form a
   heritage that only a madman will let slip. Let Watts have the last word
   in the last lines of his superb doxology to the Holy Trinity:


   Where reason fails,

   With all her powers,

   There faith prevails

   And love adores.
     __________________________________________________________________

Some Hymns and Hymn-Books

   Bernard Manning

   A paper read before the Cambridge University Congregational Society in
   the Easter term, 1924.

   MISS ROSE MACAULAY has now attained that age, or that circulation, at
   which popular novelists become omniscient; and like others of her class
   in that condition she has tried her prentice hand on religion. Works on
   The Outline of History and How to Reconstruct Europe will follow, no
   doubt: but the attraction of a religious subject is such that only the
   very shrewd can resist attacking it first. In an article on How to
   Choose a Religion', as I expect you know, Miss Macaulay lately
   displayed all that ignorance of essential detail which Mr. Wells has
   taught us to associate with omniscience. In the course of some not
   unpleasing observations on the several sects of Christendom, Miss
   Macaulay speaks of the Greek Church as if it had not revised its
   calendar; she flounders in a vain effort to distinguish Presbyterianism
   and Calvinism; she says that the ugliest building in a village is sure
   to be the chapel, obviously forgetting that, true as this may have been
   in her youth, village halls have been built since; she adds that
   Unitarianism is a suitable religion for people who cannot believe much;
   when, as everyone knows, the precise opposite is true: Unitarianism
   asking people to believe all the most improbable part of Christian
   doctrine after removing all the reasons that begin to make it credible.

   But if you shy long enough, you are sure to hit something sooner or
   later, and Miss Macaulay has observed accurately one thing; she says
   that if ever you pass a Wesleyan or Baptist or Congregational chapel
   you will hear hymn-singing proceeding inside. She argues therefore that
   among us orthodox Dissenters, as distinct from the more fancy
   varieties, hymns take a great part in divine service. And here at least
   she is right; and that is why it is seemly that you should hear a paper
   on hymns, even if it be less certain that I can appropriately read it.

   For let me confess at the beginning that I have no special
   qualification and several special disqualifications for speaking about
   hymns. I lay claim at once to every kind of musical ignorance, doubting
   sometimes if I can go even as far as Dr. Johnson in calling music the
   least unpleasant of noises. I do not study, nor even possess, that book
   without which no student of hymns can allow himself to be, Julian's
   Dictionary of Hymnology. I have drawn up no statistical tables of
   authors, centuries, denominations, and subjects. I know about hymns
   only what any one must know who for a quarter of a century has been so
   addicted to chapel-going as to attend service twice every Sunday. I
   think I never sing a hymn without discovering who wrote it, and after
   doing this some scores of times I usually end by remembering. No
   particular credit is due to any of us who does this, for most
   hymn-books now have a list of authors and their dates somewhere. These
   details may have been supposed to interfere with the devotion of
   singers in times when denominational feeling ran high. They were
   suppressed, therefore, or relegated to decent obscurity in
   out-of-the-way indexes. It was doubtless by the use of this holy
   cunning that Methodists were induced to sing Rock of Ages' with a clear
   and happy conscience though its author, Toplady, had called John Wesley
   a low and puny tadpole in divinity', actuated by Satanic shamelessness
   and Satanic guilt'.

   Today, when the orthodox will sing hymns by Unitarians and Theosophists
   without turning a hair, these precautions are, it may be supposed,
   unnecessary. The Methodist Hymn-book issued in 1904 goes farther than
   names and dates. It adds biographical notes, often useful, often
   irrelevant, always interesting, and sometimes wrong. On what principle
   the Wesleyan Conference selected its information I defy any one to
   pronounce. When all else fails, the birthplace appears -- quite often
   alone: born at Brighton; born in London; born at Bath. Of Philip Bliss
   we learn only that he was an American killed on a railway; of Monsell
   that he was killed during the rebuilding of his church at Guildford; of
   Sears, the author of It came upon the midnight clear', it is a relief
   to learn that, though a Unitarian minister, he held always to the
   absolute divinity of Christ'; but when I am told of W. C. Dix, who
   wrote As with gladness men of old', that from thirty to forty of his
   hymns are in common use', I can only decline to believe it; for I never
   knew any one who has even heard of half a dozen.

   I am, nevertheless, very grateful for that Methodist Biographical
   Index. I have spent many happy hours in research into it; and sometimes
   the researcher comes on a treasure. I always loved James Montgomery;
   but I felt as if I knew him when I read that he was the son of a
   Moravian minister, lived in Sheffield for sixty-two years, edited the
   Sheffield Iris, and recited Hail to the Lord's Anointed, Great David's
   greater Son', at a Wesleyan Missionary Meeting in Liverpool in 1822. I
   can only be sorry for the people who do not know that; I can only be
   angry with the people who are not moved by the picture of the Editor of
   the Sheffield Iris reciting that splendid hymn. And yet, despite the
   riches of this sort that it brings us, we remember with a pang that
   this same Biographical Index in the new Methodist Hymn-book replaces
   that splendid single telling sentence in the old one: Where no name is
   given it may be assumed that the hymn is the work of Mr. Charles
   Wesley.'

   You will gather that the Methodist Hymn-book of 1904 is one of the hymn
   books I claim to know tolerably. The other is Dr. Barrett's Hymnal.
   These I know from constant use; others from casual use. Adventures at
   holiday times have made me almost too familiar with Worship Song; and a
   kinder fate, in remote Lincolnshire, often showed me the old
   Congregational Hymn-book. With Presbyterian and Baptist books I have
   but a conventional acquaintance; with Ancient and Modern and the
   English Hymnal a better but not exhaustive one.

   That, then, is my stock in trade. My method is this: to avoid wandering
   aimlessly in generalizations, I shall take the book that I know best --
   Dr. Barrett's -- and examine it in some detail. I shall notice the
   several elements of which it is composed. I shall notice how far Dr.
   Barrett modified these. I shall notice what changes have come over
   popular feeling for hymns since Dr. Barrett made his selection. By
   taking a firm stand on Dr. Barrett's book, we shall secure, at least, a
   point of vantage from which we can survey the wild scene that the title
   of my paper conjures up.

   But before I speak of Dr. Barrett's book, I propose to lay down two
   canons which govern all my thought and treatment of the subject.

   First, I think it improper to criticize hymns as if they were ordinary
   verses: to say of any hymn it is not poetry or it is poor poetry' is to
   say nothing. A hymn -- a good hymn -- is not necessarily poetry of any
   sort, good or bad: just as poetry, good or bad, is not necessarily a
   hymn. A hymn like Jesu, Lover of my soul', may be poor religious
   poetry: but, in face of its place in English religion, only imbecility
   will declare it a poor hymn. George Herbert wrote much excellent
   religious poetry, but it may be doubted if he wrote one tolerable hymn.
   Hymns do not form a subdivision of poetry. They are a distinct kind of
   composition, neither prose nor poetry: they are, in a word, hymns; and
   I refuse to be drawn any nearer than that to a definition. A hymn may
   be poetry as it may be theology. It is not, of necessity, either.

   Second, reverence is due to hymns as to any sacred object. The hymn
   that revolts me, if it has been a means of grace to Christian men, I
   must respect as I should respect a communion cup, however scratched its
   surface, however vulgar its decoration. The bad jokes about hymns which
   newspapers publish in chatty columns by Uncle Remus' or Everyman in
   Town' are, apart from their intrinsic feebleness, an offence against my
   second canon.

   Dr. Barrett's Hymnal, the Preface tells us, took its origin from a
   resolution of the Congregational Union, passed forty years ago. It was
   published in 1887. It held the field till 1916, when, as far as I can
   make out, the Congregational Hymnary appeared, though perhaps
   characteristically the Congregational Union Committee neglected to date
   their work. The epitaph which the Committee wrote for Dr. Barrett's
   book, was: It is not possible to form any adequate estimate of the
   great influence of this book.' It is rash to go farther than a
   Committee, but I will suggest that Dr. Barrett's book is eminent as an
   exposition of what is best in Congregationalism. It reflects purely and
   clearly that mind which we should like to think is the Congregational
   mind: in taste, catholic; in feeling, evangelical; in expression,
   scholarly; in doctrine, orthodox. It is a book free from fads, fancies,
   prejudices, party slogans; taking the best from whatever source; most
   Congregational in lacking the denominationally Congregational note; a
   simply Christian book. Sweet reasonableness, sweetness and light --
   these are its characteristics: and, if we must criticize, these are its
   weaknesses. You feel at times, when you are hypercritical (but only
   then), that it is too sweetly reasonable and that all the corners have
   been too carefully removed. The atmosphere is so undisturbed that you
   crave for almost any impurity, any smell of human kind, any passion,
   any flaring, roaring enthusiasm. The crooked has been made too
   straight, the rough places too plain. It is just a little too
   well-behaved, but the fault is hardly there; for, if you look again,
   you see that this same book, for all its good behaviour, contains the
   most passionate pleading of the evangelical revival, Stay, thou
   insulted Spirit, stay', and the agonized prayer of the Chartist, When
   wilt Thou save the people? O God of mercy, when?'

   Dr. Barrett achieved this result because he allowed no variety of
   religious experience known in 1887 to escape his notice. He laid under
   contribution every age, every nation, every communion.

   It is worth while to disentangle the threads which Dr. Barrett wove
   together; or, if we change the figure, to trace back to their sources
   separated in time and space the several streams that met in 1887. There
   were, to begin with, those two great movements of English religion, the
   Oxford and the Evangelical. Both Dr. Barrett boldly claimed for us; and
   he was so happily placed that he could draw from each its maximum
   contribution.

   For consider first the Oxford Movement. In 1887 the Oxford Movement had
   made almost all the valuable, original contributions it was to make to
   English religion. It was still a virile and scholarly movement; it had
   not yet sunk to sentimentality and fanaticism. How much of the Oxford
   Movement there is in the Hymnal, I doubt if most of you have noticed.
   The influence is twofold. There are, first, the hymns of the Oxford
   Movement men themselves. Keble gave us some of our best: O timely
   happy, timely wise', Sun of my soul', When God of old came down from
   heaven' (of which more later) and There is a book who runs may read'.
   Newman gave us two: Lead, kindly Light, and Praise to the Holiest'.
   Faber has more room than either Keble or Newman, and, of course, has
   too much: he passed from the sublime to the ridiculous too easily.
   Sweet Saviour, bless us ere we go', and O come and mourn with me
   awhile', and Was there ever kindest Shepherd' show us Faber at his
   best. Even in these there is a strain of weakness that develops in
   other hymns until it can hardly be borne. The pruning knife could be
   used nowhere with better effect than among the Faber hymns. We may set
   beside these writers W. C. Dix, with his As with gladness men of old'
   for Epiphany, To Thee, O Lord, our hearts we raise' for Harvest, and
   Come unto Me, ye weary', for all times. As with gladness men of old' is
   a model of straight, clear, clean verse.

   But beside these and other hymns written by the men of the Movement, we
   owe to it an even greater debt for its inspiration of translation. The
   translations in Barrett's book fall into two main classes: the pietist
   hymns of Germany and the Greek and Latin hymns recovered by the Oxford
   Movement. Greatest among translators is John Mason Neale, though his
   rugged verse gave much opportunity and some excuse for the art of the
   amender. The unimaginative editors of Ancient and Modern scattered his
   remains pitilessly over their pages. O come, O come, Emmanuel', All
   glory, laud, and honour', O happy band of pilgrims', Art thou weary',
   The day is past and over', The day of resurrection', and the
   magnificent poem of Bernard of Cluny on the heavenly Jerusalem which we
   know as Brief life is here our portion' and Jerusalem the golden';
   these and many others Barrett used. Barrett gave us so many that we are
   left gasping at his omission of one of Neale's best, glorious with the
   fresh triumph of Easter morning, The foe behind, the deep before'. We
   should have been only more surprised if the new Hymnary had repaired
   Barrett's mistake. Caswall, though a smaller man than Neale, did
   first-rate translations which Barrett used. Jesus, the very thought of
   Thee', and that moving Christmas hymn, adorable in its austere and
   primitive piety, Hark, an awful voice is sounding' -- these stand as
   types.

   Much as English hymn-singers owe to the Oxford Movement, they owe more
   to the Evangelical Revival. The Evangelical Revival was a religious
   movement not less deep than the Oxford Movement, and almost the whole
   of its artistic expression is to be found in hymns. Hymns, on the other
   hand, were but one of the interests of the Oxford Movement, and not its
   greatest. Liturgy, church furniture, and architecture drew off a part
   of its artistic energy; but hymns had no competitors among the
   Evangelicals. To take out of Barrett's book the hymns of the five men,
   John and Charles Wesley, Newton, Cowper, and Montgomery -- though it
   would not fully represent the contribution of the Evangelical Revival
   -- would at least show how huge and how valuable the contribution was.

   No selection of Wesley's hymns can satisfy (to say nothing of pleasing)
   any one who knows Wesley's own book, that little body of experimental
   and practical divinity', of which John Wesley might well inquire: In
   what other publication of the kind have you so distinct and full an
   account of scriptural Christianity? such a declaration of the heights
   and depths of religion, speculative and practical? so strong cautions
   against the most plausible errors, particularly those that are now most
   prevalent?' [Preface to the [3]Collection of Hymns for the People
   Called Methodists] To find a parallel, we must go to the Book of Common
   Prayer. Wesley's book, like the Prayer Book, is a unity.

   Though extracts may be useful and must be made, they are only
   fragments, and we want the whole. For a selection, Barrett's is good,
   and we leave it at that.

   Of Cowper and Newton, I have been told, and am willing to believe, that
   Barrett chose all that was valuable and most that was tolerable. He did
   not overdo either, as he overdid Faber. But it is when we come to
   Montgomery that we see our debt most plainly. The more Montgomery is
   read the more his solid merit appears. It is a merit that is easily
   missed, for it has no showiness to recommend it. Barrett has nowhere
   shown his genius more; he made no mistakes in selecting from
   Montgomery, and any one who compares his selection with that made by
   the Methodists in 1904 will see at once Barrett's superiority. They
   score only in one place: they add, what Barrett omitted, the exquisite
   Communion hymn, Be known to us in breaking bread'.

   The Evangelical Revival gave more than the hymns of the Wesleys,
   Cowper, Newton, and Montgomery, but we proceed to the third great
   stream that came out of the past. This is the school of the elder
   Dissent, drawing its origin from the metrical Psalms and versions of
   Scripture that arose in Reformation times. One of the best known is one
   of the earliest: All people that on earth do dwell' is the 100th Psalm
   in an Elizabethan version. In the times when every gentleman wrote
   verses, most divines wrote scriptural paraphrases and the energetic
   versified the whole Psalter. Here was the foundation of Doddridge's and
   Watts's hymns -- a metrical Psalter with other paraphrases first, and
   then hymns for several occasions. The peculiar genius of Watts and
   Doddridge displayed itself in allegorizing the Psalms and the Old
   Testament generally in a Christian fashion. Doddridge, for example,
   turned Malachi's account of the profaning of the Lord's Table into a
   Communion hymn, My God, and is Thy table spread?' and Watts made David
   speak like a Christian. Barrett broke away from the old Dissenting
   tradition of prefacing hymns proper by a metrical Psalter, and in his
   reaction from the tradition he used perhaps less of the paraphrases
   than will satisfy posterity. It is easy to forget that the Scottish
   Metrical Version is only one among many. That version approved by the
   Church of Scotland had many parallels in English Dissent until the
   Evangelical Revival, by suddenly enriching and enlarging the small
   section of hymns, made hymns first overshadow and then eject the
   metrical Psalms.

   Of the hymns written by Watts and Doddridge, Barrett preserved but a
   tiny number. But it is not possible to regret so acutely what is
   omitted from these two writers as we regret the Wesley omissions.
   Though Watts, at times, probably excels Charles Wesley's best, the
   general mass of verse falls well below Wesley's average; and Doddridge,
   in the mass, is rather worse than Watts. Doddridge and Watts present
   more flank for attack than Charles Wesley presents. They stick less
   closely to scriptural ideas and language, and more often deserve the
   censure of John Wesley's adjective, turgid'. But, when all is said,
   they are the crowning glory of Independent hymnology, and the
   suppression of the hymn, I'll praise my Maker while I've breath', by
   the Congregational Hymnary is not only a vice, but an unnatural vice.
   Congregationalists so disloyal to their spiritual progenitors deserve
   to be admitted at once to some reunion of Churches.

   These, then, were the three main contributions which history made to
   Dr. Barrett's book -- the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical Revival, and
   the elder Dissent. The fourth contribution came from the contemporary
   or almost contemporary mass of writers whose work was not specially or
   obviously stamped by any of these schools. By his contemporaries, Dr.
   Barrett, like the rest of us, was over-impressed. He took them too
   seriously and ranked them too highly, as we all do. And if the
   Congregational Union had to busy itself about hymns, the most useful
   revision of Barrett's book that it might have done was the elimination
   of the unfit of the nineteenth century, not the bowdlerization and
   decimation of the classics and the handing round of doles to doubtful
   contemporaries of our own.

   But although there is decidedly too much of it, contemporary hymnology
   provided Dr. Barrett with some good things. First we notice the
   honourable place taken by three of our own communion -- Josiah Conder,
   Thomas Hornblower Gill, and George Rawson. Conder was a true poet,
   himself an editor of hymn-books, who did in truth amend when he
   altered. One hymn of his, even if he had written nothing else, would
   place him in the first rank: I mean, of course, Bread of heaven, on
   Thee I feed'. Another Communion hymn, By Christ redeemed, in Christ
   restored', would do the same for Rawson. Gill wrote nothing quite so
   good; and both his fame and Rawson's would benefit by the suppression
   of not less than 50 per cent. of their Hymnal hymns.

   Less good than these, as he is even more voluble, is Horatius Bonar, a
   useful, pedestrian sort of man who is never very good and not often
   very bad. He badly needs the pruning knife, but we may be grateful for
   I heard the voice of Jesus say' and O Love of God, how strong and true'
   and Fill Thou my life, O Lord my God'. Of Lynch and Lyte (except for
   Abide with me') not much good is to be said. Bickersteth, Monsell,
   Ellerton are a sort of Anglican Horatius Bonars. Heber provides better
   things; Grant and Thring worse. Mrs. Alexander is to be spoken of with
   affection as one of the simplest and purest of writers, but most of all
   because she wrote There is a green hill' and Once in royal David's
   city'. Much of Charlotte Elliott's verse has had its day, but some of
   us owe her eternal gratitude for Just as I am'. One great and typical
   Anglican hymnwriter in the last century was Bishop Walsham How. It
   might be respectably if not successfully maintained that he was, taking
   quantity and quality into consideration' (as the Methodist Index says
   of Charles Wesley), the greatest hymn-writer of the nineteenth century.
   Barrett used him much, but hardly too much. In Barrett's hands he is
   never bad, yet the Methodists contrived to find and print much rubbish
   by him. In O Word of God Incarnate', We give Thee but Thine own', O
   Jesus, Thou art standing', It is a thing most wonderful', he is almost
   great. That other voluminous episcopal composer, Bishop Wordsworth,
   Barrett sifted and winnowed many times, we may be sure, before he was
   able to present such good grain and so little chaff as his book
   contains.

   Barrett, I said, had no fads. He did not, therefore, in the manner of
   modern compilers, scour the ends of the earth for heretical and pagan
   productions, but when a Quaker like Whittier, Unitarians like Oliver
   Wendell Holmes and Bowring, and heroes like Carlyle offered hymns, he
   took them.

   Though I am sure it has been tedious, I am not sure that this part of
   my paper has been irrelevant, because it at least reminds you of the
   vastness and variety of the corpus of hymns with which modern
   Christendom has endowed itself; and it brings before us the material on
   which we may exercise our critical, appreciative, and discriminating
   faculties. Having made this outline survey of the result of Dr.
   Barrett's work, I want next to notice the principles on which the hymns
   were selected, rejected, and altered in 1887, and then to consider the
   change in principles which forty years have brought. Dr. Barrett gave
   out as some of his principles that his book should include some hymns
   which, though defective when tried by modern standards of taste and
   literary form, are yet closely connected with the history of the
   Evangelical faith in England, and with the spiritual experience of a
   large number of the members of Congregational churches; that it should
   give, wherever practicable, the original text of the hymns introduced.
   Some alterations have been admitted on the ground that they have been
   sanctioned by long and general use, and form part of the compositions
   in which they occur as generally known; and others (very few in number)
   in correction of minor irregularities of metre, offences against taste,
   or suggestions of questionable doctrine in the original text.'

   As a general statement, that seems to me to contain correct doctrine.
   You must be preserved from the antiquarian peril. Hymns are for
   Christians, not for poets nor for antiquarians. One persistent trouble
   is that, having shut the door against the poet, you find the
   antiquarian flying in at the window -- the antiquarian who demands the
   original text whatever the cost in taste or style (which are small
   matters) or in power to express real religious faith (which is a great
   matter). A hymn's business is to strengthen the faith of today, not to
   present an historical record of the faith of the day before yesterday.
   That is not to say that hymns should express only the sentiment and
   aspirations of the moment; they should educate and purify faith, as
   well as record it; they should be better than the singer. It is not,
   therefore, a sufficient reason for scrapping a hymn that it is not
   written in the language which the butcher, the baker, the
   candlestick-maker, or the undergraduate would use today; its object is
   to make these people speak and think differently. But to do this,
   though removed from their vocabulary, it must be not too far removed.
   It must not be out of reach, and mere antiquarianism must not preserve
   what puts a hymn out of reach. Charles Wesley's amazing verse may he
   criticized, for instance, as near the boundary of pedantry and
   usefulness:


   Those amaranthine bowers

   (Unalienably ours)

   Bloom, our infinite reward,

   Rise, our permanent abode;

   From the founded world prepared;

   Purchased by the blood of God.

   The founded world' is indeed a pleasing Latinism, and congregations
   bred on such stuff should not suffer from flabbiness of thought.

   We now approach the problem of alterations. Let it be said at once that
   Barrett was of all alterers the most honest: usually, but not (I fear)
   always, he tells us the very line in which an alteration occurs. His
   example did not suffice to maintain this high standard in his
   successors. The editors of the Hymnary say Altered' at the foot of the
   hymn, and try to hide their footprints.

   High doctrine about the text of hymns has been set out by John Wesley
   in a paragraph of his immortal Preface. I shall not deny myself the
   pleasure of quoting it:

   Many gentlemen have done my brother and me (though without naming us)
   the honour to reprint many of our hymns. Now they are perfectly welcome
   so to do, provided they print them just as they are. But I desire they
   would not attempt to mend them; for they really are not able. None of
   them is able to mend either the sense or the verse. Therefore, I must
   beg of them one of these two favours: either to let them stand just as
   they are, to take them for better for worse; or to add the true reading
   in the margin, or at the bottom of the page; that we may no longer be
   accountable either for the nonsense or for the doggerel of other men.'

   Wesley's is high doctrine, and it is a pity that we cannot all attain
   to it; but we cannot. Barrett, you will notice, does almost all that
   Wesley asks. The advantage of some modification appears in one
   classical place: Rock of ages'. Toplady, I think, wrote While I draw
   this fleeting breath, When my eyestrings crack in death', and although
   we should not have complained, I imagine, if we had been brought up on
   that, it is difficult to believe that the now familiar When my eyes
   shall close in death' is not an improvement. Between this and Wesley's
   Preface the great mass of alterations falls. Besides this change in
   Rock of ages', Barrett could justify his version of When I survey the
   wondrous Cross' by his doctrine that the hymn is the composition as
   generally known'. On which the Prince of glory died' has so long
   displaced Where the young Prince of glory died' that the change cannot
   be called Barrett's. Yet we may doubt if it was a change originally
   worth making.

   It is when we come to alterations -- or, what is almost as bad,
   omissions because of offences against taste' -- that we begin to
   breathe an electric atmosphere. The real objection to alterations in
   the interest of taste -- taste of the 1880's or any time else -- is
   this: alterations of that sort are all on the principle of the lowest
   common denominator; they resemble the process of attrition; corners are
   rubbed off; peculiarities disappear; piquancy fails; one dead level is
   more and more approached. The good hymn as originally written could
   have been written by no one but its author. No one but Carlyle could
   write:


   With force of arms we nothing can,

   Full soon were we down-ridden.

   But for us fights the Proper Man,

   Whom God Himself hath bidden.

   No one but Watts could write:


   What though we go the world around

   And search from Britain to Japan,

   There shall be no religion found

   So just to God, so safe for man.

   No one but Charles Wesley could write:


   Adam, descended from above!

   Federal Head of all mankind,

   The covenant of redeeming love

   In Thee let every sinner find.

   Me, me, who still in darkness sit,

   Shut up in sin and unbelief,

   Bring forth out of this hellish pit,

   This dungeon of despairing grief.

   No one but a scholastic Doctor or a most able imitator of a scholastic
   Doctor could write:


   True God of true God,

   Light of Light Eternal,

   Lo He abhors not the Virgin's womb,

   Son of the Father, Begotten not created.

   These are the words that contain and convey character; they make the
   hymn itself. They are peculiar, piquant, characteristic. They are the
   enemies of taste. Taste omits, if it cannot prune them. Carlyle, says
   the man of taste, is too German, Watts too grotesque, Wesley too
   violent; the scholastic Doctor (or his imitator) too dogmatic. Let us
   have Mr. Symonds rather; not German nor grotesque nor violent nor
   dogmatic, not anything in fact.


   These things shall be! a loftier race

   Than e'er the world hath known shall rise

   With flame of freedom in their souls

   And light of knowledge in their eyes.

   They shall be gentle, brave and strong

   To spill no drop of blood, but dare

   All that may plant man's lordship firm

   On earth and fire and sea and air.

   Or let us take refuge in Lord Houghton:


   Our lives enriched with gentle thoughts

   And loving deeds may be,

   A stream that still the nobler grows

   The nearer to the sea.

   Nothing to offend taste there, because there is nothing that can be
   tasted. It is salt almost without savour; the L.C.D. of all good men;
   the religion of all sensible men; the very gospel of the men of
   goodwill.

   This, then, being the pitfall of all who consider taste, let us see how
   well Dr. Barrett escaped it; and let us compare his performance with
   that of his successors. Barrett said no more than the truth when he
   said that he had been moderate in altering hymns in the cause of taste.
   Like Warren Hastings, he had cause to be astonished at his own
   moderation. He omitted a great many hymns, no doubt because he thought
   them in bad taste (many of Wesley's), but if he thought a hymn good, as
   a rule he let it stand unaltered. Taste, I am sure, made him omit that
   noble hymn on the Name of Jesus which should stand everywhere beside
   Newton's How sweet the name of Jesus sounds'. I mean


   Jesus, the Name high over all

   In hell, or earth, or sky,

   Angels and men before it fall,

   And devils fear and fly.


   Jesus, the Name to sinners dear,

   The name to sinners given;

   It scatters all their guilty fear,

   It turns their hell to heaven.

   Devils fearing and flying', I make no doubt, struck Dr. Barrett as bad
   taste. Even the mention of devils he seems generally to have disliked,
   and the state of taste in the 1880's certainly would not have allowed
   him to put baldly over a section of his book, as the Methodists had
   done, Describing Hell'. Before you smile, ponder this: Dr. Barrett's
   successors have carried his prejudices farther and, unless extremely
   pressed, consider the mention of angels and heaven in almost as bad
   taste as the mention of devils and hell. I must pause here to deplore
   our subservience to a fashion that has banished those splendidly
   truculent hymns which heartened our predecessors in hard times. As a
   change from our constant wail about the failure of the Church, I turn
   at times with satisfaction to the brave words of the men of old.


   Into a world of ruffians sent

   I walk on hostile ground;

   While human bears on slaughter bent

   And ravening wolves surround.


   Watched by the world's malignant eye,

   Who load us with reproach and shame,

   As servants of the Lord Most high,

   As zealous for His glorious Name,

   We ought in all His paths to move

   With holy fear and humble love.


   Only have faith in God;

   In faith your foes assail;

   Not wrestling against flesh and blood

   But all the powers of hell;

   From thrones of glory driven,

   By flaming vengeance hurled,

   They throng the air and darken heaven

   And rule the lower world.


   On earth th' usurpers reign,

   Exert their baneful power;

   O'er the poor fallen souls of men

   They tyrannize their hour.

   But shall believers fear?

   But shall believers fly?

   Or see the bloody cross appear

   And all their powers defy?


   Jesu's tremendous name

   Puts all our foes to flight;

   Jesus, the meek, the angry Lamb,

   A Lion is in fight.

   By all hell's host withstood,

   We all hell's host o'erthrow,

   And conquering them, through Jesu's blood,

   We still to conquer go.

   One good example of the working of taste Dr. Barrett provided. He
   confesses that he altered Neale's version of Andrew of Crete's hymn
   Christian, dost thou see them'.


   Christian! dost thou see them

   On the holy ground,

   How the troops of Midian

   Prowl and prowl around?

   So wrote Neale. Barrett found the reference to Midian, and (we may
   suspect) the word prowl', rather grotesque. The troops of Midian'
   become the less unfamiliar powers of darkness', who compass thee
   around' instead of prowling.


   How the powers of darkness

   Compass thee around.

   A respectable couplet of which no one need be ashamed; but it lacks the
   grip, I think, of the ruder original.

   The alteration of the second verse illustrates a change due to the
   doctrine, not taste. Neale wrote:


   Christian, dost thou feel them,

   How they work within,

   Striving, tempting, luring,

   Goading into sin?

   Christian, never tremble;

   Never be down-cast;

   Smite them by the virtue

   Of the Lenten fast.

   Clearly this would never do; the virtue of the Lenten fast' must be
   generalized for Dr. Barrett's constituency.


   Gird thee for the conflict;

   Watch and pray and fast

   does the trick So used, the word fast' gives the rhyme and is
   doctrinally innocuous.

   With this compare the treatment by Dr. Barrett and by the Methodists of
   Mrs. Alexander's hymn which was written for St. Andrew's Day and is
   inspired by the narrative of his call:


   Jesus calls us; o'er the tumult

   Of our life's wild, restless sea.

   Day by day His sweet voice soundeth,

   Saying, Christian, follow me.'


   As of old St. Andrew heard it,

   By the Galilean lake,

   Turned from home, and friends, and kindred,

   Leaving all for His dear sake.

   Whether Dr. Barrett thought that the mention of St Andrew might lead to
   invocation of saints among modern Congregationalists, or that a hymn
   naming him could not be conveniently sung on any day but St. Andrew's
   Day, I do not know. For some reason he cut the verse out. He left the
   hymn perhaps better balanced without it, with its four verses now all
   built on one pattern, yet poorer (I think) by the loss of a personal
   allusion. The Methodists, ever diplomatic, have found a formula to
   appease all parties:


   As, of old, apostles heard it by the Galilean lake.

   Dr. Barrett had warned people in advance that they would find in his
   book some hymns which were defective when tried by modern standards of
   taste, because they were closely connected with the experience of
   evangelical religion. He was as good as his word. He gave them
   unaltered what his successors have been too feeble to give, Cowper's
   noble and historic hymn, There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn
   from Immanuel's veins'. He did more. It might have been hard in 1883,
   though it was too easy in 1916, to suppress that well-loved hymn, but
   Barrett was under no definite obligation to add another hymn open to
   most of the objections that assail Cowper's, even to the use of the
   word veins'. Yet Barrett added Caswall's version of an Italian hymn:


   Glory be to Jesus,

   Who, in bitter pains,

   Poured for me His Life-blood

   From His sacred veins.


   Grace and life eternal

   In that Blood I find;

   Blest be His compassion

   Infinitely kind.


   Blest through endless ages

   Be the precious stream,

   Which from endless torments

   Doth the world redeem.

   This proves Barrett's courage. He went against the taste of his time
   and added to the rock of offence because he knew that this hymn,
   charged with a simple childlike piety, was too good to be unknown among
   Congregationalists.

   Why, then, if we grant his courage -- as we must -- why did he suppress
   that verse of When I survey the wondrous Cross' which has now almost
   passed from memory?


   His dying crimson like a robe

   Spreads o'er His body on the tree;

   Then am I dead to all the globe;

   And all the globe is dead to me.

   It is strange and inexcusable, the worst blot on Barrett's fame.

   In Barrett, then, in 1883 we can see the beginnings of that painful
   bowdlerization of hymns that still continues. Barrett is struggling
   with the tendency new in his times, now giving way unexpectedly, now
   carrying reprisals into the enemy's camp. His successors have not
   usually altered this sort of expression: they simply drop the hymn.
   Even the Methodists, we note in passing, are guilty. They had enriched
   hymnology beyond all others by hymns on the death of Christ, but their
   glory is become their shame. I do not speak of hymns which were perhaps
   needlessly and unscripturally trying to modern taste:


   My Jesus to know and to feel His Blood flow,

   'Tis life everlasting, 'tis heaven below.

   I speak of the fanatical prejudice against solemn words.


   O Thou eternal Victim, slain

   A sacrifice for guilty man,

   By the eternal Spirit made

   An offering in the sinner's stead;

   Our everlasting Priest art Thou

   And plead'st Thy death for sinners now.


   Thy offering still continues new;

   Thy vesture keeps its bloody hue;

   Thou stand'st the ever-slaughtered Lamb;

   Thy priesthood still remains the same;

   Thy years, O God, can never fail;

   Thy goodness is unchangeable.

   That, one of the greatest Communion hymns written by Wesley, cannot be
   made other than it is: a hymn about life by death and healing by blood.
   If the idea is repugnant to modern taste, there is a case for allowing
   modern taste to starve itself still further by banishing the hymn
   entirely. There is no case for doing what the modern Methodists do:
   they rewrite one line. Thy vesture keeps its bloody hue' becomes Thy
   vesture keeps its crimson hue'. You cannot tinker with the stupendous
   things: you must take them or leave them. If the catholic and
   Evangelical doctrine of atonement by the blood of Christ be true, no
   expression of it can be too strong; all, on the contrary, must be too
   weak. And if it is not true, you want not dilution of it, but
   abandonment. This is what our modern editors will not see.

   Their blindness does not depart when they pass from the Atonement. An
   example, peculiarly flagrant, occurs in the Congregational Hymnary
   among the Pentecost hymns. For this festival, Keble wrote his classical
   When God of old came down from heaven'. Not even our modernists could
   ignore this; they had, anyhow, a feeling for Pentecost as one of the
   vaguer feasts. Nor could they claim that the hymn was too long to be
   printed -- at least as Barrett had printed it; they had themselves
   printed far worse hymns at infinitely greater length. And yet -- and
   yet, they could not keep their bungling hands off Keble. That second
   verse:


   Around the trembling mountain's base

   The prostrate people lay,

   A day of wrath and not of grace,

   A dim and dreadful day.

   It gave a horrid notion of God; that was indeed very unpleasant. To be
   sure, it is exactly what the Bible says happened at Sinai, and, after
   all, it is about Sinai that Keble writes. But it is not the modernist's
   notion of God; and since by his nature he cannot be honest and say,
   Scrap Sinai; scrap Moses; scrap this O.T. revelation; it is not true',
   he says, I will keep just enough of Keble to flatter myself that there
   is no break with the tradition (that is bad form -- like the old
   Dissenters), but not enough to convey any particular meaning. Keble's
   aim, it is true, was to contrast Sinai and Pentecost and yet to connect
   them. I will keep both, cutting out both contrast and connexion. I will
   so make the best (or worst) of both worlds'. Encouraged, he proceeds
   and reads next:


   The fires, that rushed on Sinai down

   In sudden torrents dread,

   Now gently light, a glorious crown,

   On every sainted head.


   And as on Israel's awe-struck ear

   The voice exceeding loud,

   The trump, that angels quake to hear,

   Thrilled from the deep, dark cloud;


   So, when the Spirit of our God

   Came down His flock to find,

   A voice from Heav'n was heard abroad,

   A rushing, mighty wind.

   Here we have two signs of Pentecost, the fire and wind, with their
   types at Sinai. The editors of the Hymnary leave us the wind, but cut
   out the flames of fire. To the plain man they stand or fall together.
   Either something unusual happened at Pentecost or nothing unusual
   happened. If nothing -- well, why waste a breezy Whitsunday morning by
   singing about it at all? You had better be at golf. If something worth
   singing about happened, why strain out the flame and swallow the wind,
   as the editors of the Hymnary do? Well, for this reason. If you are
   ingenious you can believe that that first Whitsunday was a very windy
   day and that the early Christians, not being ingenious, but simple,
   thought the wind had some connexion with a spiritual experience which
   they agreed to call the Holy Ghost. You can retain the verse about the
   wind and so preserve the tradition of Keble's verses and your
   self-respecting intellect. But the verse about the flame is more
   difficult. To retain it commits one (if pressed) to more than a windy
   day at Pentecost. A thunderstorm with lightning seems the obvious way
   out, but to ask for a combination of both wind and fire on the same day
   as the Christians had their experience of the Holy Ghost is asking
   perhaps a little too much of historical coincidence, generous though
   that goddess of the critic may be. It reduces the risks to cut out the
   flame; and, anyhow, tradition and our face are saved without it. I do
   not suggest that this form of argument was openly followed on the
   editorial board which produced the Hymnary: but, though unexpressed,
   that state of mind underlay the choice of certain verses and the
   omission of others. And it is of all states of mind in which hymns can
   be selected and altered the most dangerous, dishonest, and damnable. It
   is ludicrous, too; but that is nothing.

   This same unwillingness to face certain simple facts and make up one's
   mind one way or the other about them has in the last. Forty years
   wrought another set of weakening changes in what were sturdy hymns.
   Barrett sometimes shrank from calling a spade a spade; but his
   successors shrink more often. If you open a book like Worship Song, you
   detect the faint odour of a literary Keating's Powder: a sort of
   spiritual insect killer -- fatal to worms. The elder hymn-writers
   delighted in worms. Doddridge even wrote of our Lord that


   Sinful worms to Him are given,

   A colony to people heaven.

   The elder hymn-writers overdid it. We weary of the metaphor, exact and
   scriptural as it is. But our delicate-souled editors pursue the worm
   with a cruelty and diligence altogether beyond its deserts. You would
   suppose, would you not? that among decent men the writer of such
   princely stuff as this might be allowed one metaphor of his own
   choosing:


   Angels and men, resign your claim

   To pity, mercy, love, and grace;

   These glories crown Jehovah's name

   With an incomparable blaze.

   Who is a pardoning God like Thee

   Or who has grace so rich and free?

   But he also wrote:


   Crimes of such horror to forgive,

   Such guilty daring worms to spare.

   Where is the Keating's Powder? The Congregational Union's Committee did
   not fail to extirpate the worms.


   Such dire offences to forgive,

   Such guilty daring souls to spare.

   That is less offensive in several ways. Dire offences', if you come to
   think of it, is quite a non-committal phrase. Dire' -- no one in
   ordinary life uses that word, so no one minds it being attached to his
   offences'. Yet the people to whom much is forgiven love much. It was
   the forgiveness of crimes of such horror' (not of these dire offences')
   that provoked the ecstatic cry :


   In wonder lost, with trembling joy

   We take our pardon from our God,

   Pardon for crimes of deepest dye,

   A pardon bought with Jesu's blood.

   No one is going to be lost in wonder about dire offences': make no
   mistake about that. It is the same pettifogging spirit that is at work
   in Prayer Book revision. The modern Anglican does not wish to call
   himself a miserable sinner, a miserable offender, to say that the
   burden of his sins is intolerable. He is not a miserable sinner, but an
   honest seeker after truth: the burden of his sins is not intolerable,
   imperceptible rather. Very well, but don't expect to be able to pass on
   to what the Methodists used to call The Pleasantness and Excellence of
   Religion' unless you have known the section For Mourners convinced of
   Sin'. Our editors are in the same state of mind as Mr. Chesterton's mob
   which shouted not No Popery', but Not quite so much Popery'. Well, the
   Pope cares little for such mobs; and Satan, who


   Trembles when he sees

   The weakest saint upon his knees,

   trembles little before congregations that are too discreet to call
   themselves saints and too genteel to call themselves sinners.

   One example of a change for doctrinal reasons, and I end this part of
   my paper. Doddridge, as good a Dissenter as most of us need wish to be,
   wrote a Communion hymn. He wrote it in the eighteenth century. He wrote
   it, that is to say, before people had begun to suppose that the only
   proper doctrine for Dissenters is the so-called Zwinglian doctrine, the
   doctrine that the Lord's Supper is a memorial feast and nothing more.
   He wrote, therefore:


   Hail sacred feast which Jesus makes,

   Rich banquet of His flesh and blood.

   Thrice happy he who here partakes

   That sacred stream, that heavenly food.

   Barrett, since he printed Keble's communion hymn,


   Fresh from the atoning sacrifice

   The world's Redeemer bleeding lies,

   That man His foe for whom He bled

   May take Him as his daily bread,

   could hardly complain of Doddridge's; and he let it stand. But it
   offends some; and you will find elsewhere the meaning weakened and
   watered down:


   Rich banquet of His flesh and blood.

   Even that is too much and it becomes:


   Sweet emblems of His flesh and blood.

   Poor Doddridge is suspected of Popery by our lovers of the feeble. One
   change in this hymn Barrett did make lower down.


   Why are these dainties still in vain

   Before unwilling hearts displayed?

   wrote the unblushing Doddridge. But dainties', we must agree, is too
   much; especially if your memory of the Methodist hymn reinforces the
   objection:


   O bid the wretched sons of need

   On soul-reviving dainties feed.

   For dainties' read emblems', says Barrett. Since emblems' is distinctly
   out of harmony with the thought of the hymn it would probably be better
   simply to respect Doddridge's own word, banquet' -- Why is the banquet
   still in vain?'

   This same hymn introduces what I want to say about the place we
   Dissenters give to hymns in divine service. You remember that the hymn
   contains an interesting, startling word:


   Was not for you the victim slain?

   Are you forbid the children's bread?

   Victim': that is hardly the expression that conventional notions lead
   us to expect a Protestant Dissenter, writing in the basest of
   Latitudinarian times, to use at the Lord's Table? Victim': it is the
   word of the Roman Mass, too strong for the Book of Common Prayer. It is
   the highest of high sacrificial doctrine. Yes, but it is there.
   Doddridge said it.

   Now hear Wesley. There is between the Wolds and the sea in Wesley's
   county (and mine) within tolerable distance of Lincoln Cathedral, the
   pitiful ruin of Bardney Abbey, left as Henry VIII and his followers
   left it, when they had no more use for it. They had melted down the
   bells and the lead on the roof and had stolen the sacred vessels. You
   may see the place in the centre of the nave of the abbey church where
   they lit their fire and melted the lead; and you may see more. You may
   see close by, unharmed because it was only of use to pious men, the
   altar of the five wounds of Christ, with its five signs of the Cross;
   one in each corner and one in the centre. Who thought of this or the
   five wounds in eighteenth-century England? Who preserved the continuity
   of Christian devotion in Bardney? Not those Anglican farmers of Bardney
   who carted away the abbey stones to build their cowsheds. But Wesley
   was teaching their Methodist labourers that same catholic and
   evangelical faith, that Enthusiasm', hateful to bishops and scorned by
   modernists, in almost the same accents as the Bardney monks had known.
   Within a stone's-throw of the altar of the five wounds, the Methodists
   were singing:


   Weary souls, that wander wide

   From the central point of bliss,

   Turn to Jesus crucified,

   Fly to those dear wounds of His.


   Five bleeding wounds He bears,

   Received on Calvary;

   They pour effectual prayers,

   They strongly plead for me.

   It is odd, is it not? to find the language of medieval devotion coming
   back on the lips, not of archbishops and deans in apostolic succession,
   but of Doddridge and Wesley. This language, these images of


   The Master's marred and wounded mien,

   His hands, His feet, His side

   (to use Montgomery's words), I am aware, have come once again to be
   familiar in the thoughts and speech of all English Christians, Anglican
   and Nonconformist. They could not indeed be lost permanently unless
   Christian emotion was itself to perish. They had been wrongfully
   suppressed by the Arianism and Latitudinarianism of the eighteenth
   century. But the way of their return: that it is that interests me,
   first by hymns and afterwards by catholic ornaments. It reminds us of
   the possibility (or is it a probability?) that the modern Romish
   worship of the Sacred Heart of Jesus owes something to a devotional
   book by Oliver Cromwell's Congregational chaplain, Thomas Goodwin, The
   Heart of Christ in Heaven towards Sinners on Earth.

   So, in piety, do extremes agree: Catholic and Evangelical meet, and
   kiss one another at the Cross.

   Hymns are for us Dissenters what the liturgy is for the Anglican. They
   are the framework, the setting, the conventional, the traditional part
   of divine service as we use it. They are, to adopt the language of the
   liturgiologists, the Dissenting Use. That is why we understand and love
   them as no one else does. You have only to attend Anglican services to
   discover that the Anglican, though he can write a hymn, cannot use it.
   It does not fit the Prayer Book service. The Anglican, because he has
   what Borrow justly called England's sublime liturgy', has been careless
   of other liturgies, like the liturgy of hymns. He has about as much
   feeling for the correct liturgical use of hymns as Dr. Orchard has for
   the correct liturgical use of collects; I cannot put it stronger or
   fairer. It is with hymns and collects as (they say) it is with hands'
   in riding -- you must be born with them. An Anglican clergyman to whom
   in other respects no one could deny the adjective educated' will choose
   as a hymn before a sermon:


   O worship the King

   All glorious above.

   This is a tolerable rhyme, useful to usher in late-comers, but a most
   inadequate preparation for the Preaching of the Word. What that august
   occasion demands a Methodist local preacher knows by instinct:


   Come, Holy Ghost, for moved by Thee

   The Prophets wrote and spoke.

   Unlock the Truth, Thyself the key,

   Unseal the sacred Book.

   Or:


   Inspirer of the Ancient Seers

   Who wrote from Thee the sacred page,

   The same through all succeeding years

   To us in our degenerate age,

   The Spirit of Thy word impart

   And breathe the life into our heart.

   And what is true of Anglicans is almost as true of Presbyterians. They
   have their metrical psalms. They can use them; we cannot. Nor do we
   understand the use of paraphrases as the Presbyterians do. How terrible
   a loss this is a very little experience of Presbyterian worship will
   soon teach us. On the other hand, we English Free Churchmen have little
   to learn from Anglicans or from Scotland about the use of hymns. We
   mark times and seasons, celebrate festivals, express experiences, and
   expound doctrines by hymns. {The two village services which I attended
   on Easter Day perfectly illustrate this -- contrast between the
   Anglicans and ourselves. In the Parish Church there was Appropriate
   liturgical celebration of the Resurrection: the Proper Preface in the
   Communion, the Easter Collect, and in place of the Venite commonly sung
   at Matins the special Anthem, Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,
   therefore let us keep the feast'. Those things any person familiar with
   the Prayer Book could prophesy would come; but the hymns were a gamble.
   One could not be sure what the Vicar would choose. I feared the worst
   and I was right. But in the evening at the chapel, though I was
   uncertain about the prayers, there was no gamble about the hymns. I
   knew we should have Charles Wesley's Easter hymn, Christ the Lord is
   risen today', with its twenty-four Alleluias'; and we did have it.
   Among any Dissenters worth the name that hymn is as certain to come on
   Easter Day as the Easter Collect in the Established Church. And mark
   this further -- those twenty-four Alleluias' are not there for nothing:
   the special use of Alleluia' at Easter comes down to us from the most
   venerable liturgies. Our hymns are our liturgy, an excellent liturgy.
   Let us study it respect it, use it, develop it, and boast of it}. There
   is, I believe, but one hymn with which the Wesleyan Conference can open
   its annual session, For the Society on meeting':


   And are we yet alive

   And see each other's face?

   Glory and praise to Jesus give

   For His redeeming grace.


   What troubles have we seen,

   What conflicts have we past,

   Fightings without and fears within

   Since we assembled last.

   There is one hymn without which no Watch-Night service is complete:


   Come, let us anew

   Our journey pursue,

   Roll round with the year,

   And never stand still till the Master appear.

   We recite no Creed, because our hymns are full of the form of sound
   words:


   Let earth and heaven combine,

   Angels and men agree,

   To praise in songs Divine

   The Incarnate Deity,

   Our God contracted to a span,

   Incomprehensibly made man.

   The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost
   incomprehensible': it is the word of the Athanasian Creed. Every clause
   in the Nicene and in the Athanasian Creed has its parallel in our
   hymn-books; and if we use no crucifix, no stations of the Cross, no
   processions, no banners, no incense, you must attribute it not to the
   fancy that we have neither need nor understanding of what these things
   represent. We do not use these things because our hymns revive the
   sacred scenes and stir the holy emotions with a power and a purity
   denied to all but the greatest craftsmen. There are pictures of the
   Crucifixion that rival, and perhaps excel, the passion hymns of Watts
   and Wesley; but those pictures are to be sought in distant lands by the
   few and the wealthy for a few moments only. The hymn-book offers
   masterpieces for all who have an ear to hear, every day and in every
   place, to every worshipper. When I am informed that Dissenting worship
   is bare and cold, making no appeal to the emotions because it does not
   employ the tawdry and flashy productions of fifth-rate ecclesiastical
   art-mongers, I am at no loss for an answer. I am only at a loss when I
   am asked to explain why, holding these treasures, we turn so often from
   them -- the great passionate, doctrinal, emotional hymns -- to the
   pedestrian rhymers of ethical commonplaces.

   Out of all this come two sets of general observations. If you grant
   that this is, at least among us Dissenters, the true place of the hymn
   in worship, it follows, first, that the selection of the hymns, the
   setting of the framework upon which the whole service is to hang, the
   choice of the liturgy for the day, this goes, of right and of duty, to
   the minister. The selection of hymns by organists and choirmasters, or
   the gambling of them between the organist and the minister in the
   vestry ten minutes before the service begins -- these are abuses that
   explain the confusion of thought that marks the progress of our
   services. You cannot tell where you will be next, what has been done,
   what is still to come. The separate parts of the service are not
   distinct, not articulated. There are two prayers. But what is the
   difference except the difference of length? It is often hard to tell.
   The same ground is traversed in each; too hurriedly first and
   afterwards at too leisurely a pace. And the hymns, if chosen at random,
   traverse the same ground. I take an extreme example: if a minister
   chooses (as he never should) that general jail-delivery hymn of Bonar,
   When the weary, seeking rest, to Thy goodness flee', he has clearly
   provided for general intercessions at that service with more than ample
   adequacy. He ought not to do it all over again in his prayer, and (if
   he thinks of what he is doing) he will not. But if Bonar's hymn is let
   off at him at the last minute by an organist who likes the tune (and
   such there be) and if the minister has provided for intercession on the
   same lines in his prayer, then either he must improvise a fresh plan of
   service and prayer or he must repeat the same feature of service -- two
   very bad things. Don't tell me that I have forgotten the tune problem.
   I have not. I allow the organist all his rights there; and I will not
   bar him from the absolute choice of some few hymns, if he selects them
   well in advance, and informs the minister before the minister plans his
   service. But as I protected the text of the hymns from the antiquarian,
   so I would protect their tunes from the mere musician. The glory of
   God, not of composers or even of organ-builders, is the end of divine
   service.

   My second observation turns on this question, which, having suffered so
   much, you have a right to put to me: What do you think makes a good
   hymn? And, as some would go on, Why cannot we write good hymns today?
   In answer to the second part of that question I should reply that we
   both can and do write good hymns today. They are, no doubt, difficult
   to discover; but at all times people have found it difficult to
   discover good things in their contemporaries. Good things have always
   been easily smothered by rubbish, as they are today; and you must give
   the rubbish time to die down. The nineteenth century, as I have tried
   to show, produced some great hymns, some of the greatest; but it is not
   until the Havergals and the Fabers begin to droop and wither that we
   can see what is truly good. I make no question but that it is the same
   today. Wait and see' is the only wise, as it is the only liberal,
   policy.

   We return to the other part of the inquiry: What makes a good hymn? Two
   groups of hymns -- the evangelical hymns of the eighteenth century and
   the medieval hymns of the Latin Church -- may supply the answer. These
   seem to me to be our best hymns. No competent critic, I think, will
   deny that they are very good. Now, if you look at the evangelical
   group, you notice two things. First, these hymns combine personal
   experience with a presentation of historic events and doctrines. Full
   of the intensest and most individual passion as they are, they contain
   more than that: the writers look back from their own experience to
   those experiences of the Incarnate Son of God on which their faith was
   built. This gives them a steadiness, a firmness, a security against
   mere emotionalism and sentimentality which more recent writers, trying
   to lay bare their souls, have found it difficult to avoid. Look first,
   for instance, at this nineteenth-century hymn:


   I lift my heart to Thee,

   Saviour Divine;

   For Thou art all to me,

   And I am Thine.

   Is there on earth a closer bond than this,

   That My Beloved's mine and I am His'?


   To Thee, Thou bleeding Lamb,

   I all things owe;

   All that I have and am,

   And all I know.

   All that I have is now no longer mine,

   And I am not mine own; Lord, I am Thine.

   I choose purposely a hymn of unquestionable sincerity and of doctrine
   as like as may be to that of the eighteenth-century evangelical so that
   no extraneous differences may confuse the issue. But, though the hymn
   is not without merit, you notice the almost morbid self-consciousness
   of the writer. Throughout five verses he ploughs through his own hopes
   and experiences and emotions and has hardly time to make even an
   indirect reference to anything outside his own feelings. {The same is
   almost true of O Love, that will not let me go'.}

   A great hymn of the eighteenth century describing a similar frame of
   mind and heart is familiar enough to us all. Notice how rapidly it
   glances from the writer's experience to the divine experience and
   passion that is the very foundation of the writer's hope:


   And can it be, that I should gain

   An interest in the Saviour's blood?

   Died He for me who caused His pain?

   For me who Him to death pursued?

   Amazing love! how can it be

   That Thou, my God, should'st die for me!


   He left His Father's throne above,

   So free, so infinite His grace,

   Emptied Himself of all but love

   And bled for Adam's helpless race;

   'Tis mercy all, immense and free;

   For O my God it found out me.


   Long my imprisoned spirit lay

   Fast bound in sin and nature's night;

   Thine eye diffused a quick'ning ray;

   I woke; the dungeon flamed with light;

   My chains fell off; my heart was free,

   I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

   It is not less personal than the other hymn but it is less
   introspective and has more of a godward quality. And notice how
   carefully the writer expresses his experience of liberation in the
   words of St. Peter's deliverance from prison. It is as if, knowing how
   difficult it is to express religious emotion without nauseating
   sentimentality, he were timid about going outside the language already
   well tested for the expression of religious emotion, individual as his
   emotion may be. {Contrast in the same way consecutive hymns in the
   Hymnal, the nineteenth-century Bubier's I would commune with Thee, my
   God' with Wesley's Talk with us, Lord, Thyself reveal'.}

   You have the supreme example of this transmuting our own experience
   into a classical, scriptural, authorized form, purging out all unworthy
   self-centredness and yet keeping expression all the more alive for the
   change, in the greatest of Charles Wesley's hymns, Come, O Thou
   Traveller unknown'. Here, under the form of Jacob wrestling with the
   angel, Wesley tells of his own spiritual conversion.

   It is this quality, I am persuaded, that John Wesley had in mind when
   he commended his brother's hymns as Scriptural. [Preface to the
   [4]Collection of Hymns for the People Called Methodists] It was a merit
   in Wesley's eyes, not because of any rigidly bibliolatrous notions, but
   partly because, as a scholar and a gentleman, he liked to see great
   things clothed in great language.

   And this brings us to the other quality of these eighteenth-century
   hymn-writers. They were trained in the school of the Greek and Latin
   classics. This gave them, not only a knowledge of metre and a facility
   in verse-making that no other training can give, but also a mastery of
   the art of allusion -- deft, relevant, and appropriate. What he had
   done at Westminster and Oxford to the mythology, the poets, and the
   orators of Greece and Rome Charles Wesley in later life continued to do
   to the Scriptures. That is one of the reasons why almost every verse of
   his 2,000 hymns contains a scriptural allusion.

   You see what this meant, not only for Charles Wesley, but for all that
   antiquity-ridden century. It had, because of the form of its secular
   education, a training in expressing its own experience in conventional
   images which few recent writers have had. The age of the romantic poets
   that followed produced greater poetry, but lesser hymns. Hymn-writers
   follow, at a distance, the fashions of writing prevalent in the highest
   circles; and as long as poetic thought of all sorts found a strictly
   metrical expression, the hymn-writers (who must use rather rigid
   metres) could work easily because they were swimming with the current
   of their day. After the romantic poets had burst the bonds of metre and
   no self-respecting person wrote verses' any more, the hymn-writer found
   himself fighting against the current of poetic fashion or left in a
   backwater. The best people no longer wrote L.M. or S.M. or C.M. or 6
   8s, but only P.M. (peculiar metre). The classical art of allusion to
   well-known events and the use of conventional metaphors were now taken
   to be the sign of an inferior mind; and if there be anything in my
   contention about the value of a union of personal experience with
   references to the historic events on which the Faith is built, it is
   clear that the nineteenth-century hymn-writers were at a disadvantage.
   They tried to express themselves in language mostly their own. They
   borrowed less from the rich treasury of the Christian classics -- the
   Scriptures.

   The other class of the greatest hymns that I mentioned -- the medieval
   Latin and Greek hymns -- illustrates a similar thesis. What is the
   almost magical charm of hymns like All glory, laud, and honour' and O
   happy band of pilgrims'? No one can say with certainty, but simplicity
   -- simplicity of thought and of expression, the simplicity of children
   and the Kingdom of Heaven -- is an element in it. And the simplicity,
   if you look closely at it, consists in this: the writer takes an event
   in the life of our Lord and after the plainest mention of it joins with
   it some petition or reflexion which concerns his own life.


   The people of the Hebrews

   With palms before Thee went;

   Our praise and prayer and anthems

   Before Thee we present.

   To Thee before Thy Passion

   They sang their hymns of praise;

   To Thee now high exalted

   Our melody we raise.


   The Cross that Jesus carried

   He carried as your due;

   The Crown that Jesus weareth

   He weareth it for you.

   It is the art that conceals art; but I believe the elements are the
   same as in the great eighteenth-century hymns.

   And, lastly, the greatest hymns are Christian, thoroughly and
   irrevocably Christian; and when I say Christian I mean that they
   concern Christ, not that they are what is called Christian in spirit,
   or indirectly or unconsciously Christian:


   My heart is full of Christ, and longs

   Its glorious matter to declare.

   Of Him I make my loftier songs ...

   That is the confession of the greatest hymn-writers. They go back to
   the New Testament, and especially to the Gospels. They are not merely
   theistic, like the psalm paraphrases: great as some of those are, they
   miss the highest note. Even O God of Bethel' or Through all the
   changing scenes of life' strikes with a faint chill of Old Testament
   theology the disciple who has sat at the feet of Jesus. Still less are
   the greatest hymn-songs of human aspiration or of human fellowship.
   Dare I say it? Bunyan's pilgrim song is not among the greatest hymns
   for precisely this reason. I know its excellencies; I yield to no one
   in love of Bunyan; but there, at any rate, he does not go deep enough.
   Not good fellowship, but Christ, is the subject of the greatest hymns.

   That is why all the greatest hymns are orthodox, and why we Dissenters
   have preserved intact (even better than Churches with more elaborate
   safeguards) the full catholic and evangelical faith. Hymns are the
   safest protection and the surest vehicle of orthodoxy. The language of
   the sublimest hymns in all ages and in all communions is the same:


   Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ;

   Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.

   When Thou tookest upon Thee to deliver man

   Thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.

   When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death

   Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.

   So says the Te Deum and Charles Wesley goes on:


   Then let us sit beneath His cross

   And gladly catch the healing stream:

   All things for Him account but loss

   And give up all our hearts to Him.

   Of nothing think or speak beside,

   My Lord, my love, is crucified.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture References

   Deuteronomy

   [5]33:27

   Isaiah

   [6]9

   Romans

   [7]8   [8]8:28
     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

References

   1. file:///ccel/m/manning/wesleyhymns/cache/iii.htm
   2. file:///w/wesley/hymn/jw.html#contents
   3. file:///w/wesley/hymn/jw.html
   4. file:///w/wesley/hymn/jw.html
   5. file:///ccel/m/manning/wesleyhymns/cache/wesleyhymns.html3?scrBook=Deut&scrCh=33&scrV=27#P3-p26.1
   6. file:///ccel/m/manning/wesleyhymns/cache/wesleyhymns.html3?scrBook=Isa&scrCh=9&scrV=0#P3-p47.1
   7. file:///ccel/m/manning/wesleyhymns/cache/wesleyhymns.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=8&scrV=0#P1-p12.1
   8. file:///ccel/m/manning/wesleyhymns/cache/wesleyhymns.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=8&scrV=28#P3-p89.1