THE
HYMN AS LITERATURE

CHAPTER I
THE HYMN

It is remarkable that English literary criticism has given so little attention to a form of literature that holds so large a place in the attention of the people as does the hymn. For the hymn is the most popular kind of English poetry. If this appear to be an immoderate statement, let the objector find and bring forward another type of poetry that is read so frequently by so many people and, at least apparently, with so much approval. If one should count the number of persons in any English-speaking town who had read epic poetry during the last week, or who had read dramatic poetry, or, excepting one book, who had read fifty lines of lyrical poetry, he would find the number relatively quite small. But last week in a small American city there were thirty-seven hundred persons who read or went over at least three hymns. That there were three times thirty-seven hundred readings of lyrical poetry by the people of a typical small community in the ordinary course of its affairs in one week is a fact of real significance to the student of American life and literature.

To remember that this popular esteem accorded the hymn extends throughout all countries where the English language is spoken, is to be assured that verse is alive and powerful in the world to-day.

It is a fact that the largest single edition of any merchantable book in the United States up to 1912 was the first edition of a volume of lyrical verse, a hymn-book. And the enormous first edition of that book was followed in the same year by two other printings. Between July, 1905, and December, 1920, it had passed through thirty-two printings. The sale of this book, according to a statement by the publishers, has been something over two million copies. It should be remarked that this is but one book of but one branch of the Christian church in the United States. In England there is a single collection of hymns that has far out-distanced this; before the beginning of the World War it had reached an output of no fewer than sixty million copies. These two collections, the English “Hymns Ancient and Modern” and the American “Methodist Hymnal,” are of course by no means all of the hymn-books; they are but two among hundreds of similar collections. In this country the “Methodist Hymnal,” although it is the largest in point of numbers issued, has many great companions in the field. The Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Protestant Episcopal hymn-books are notable for the extent of their circulation. There are many other hymnals issued by various branches of the church, as for example, the Friends and the Unitarians. The Roman Catholics have a number of good books of English hymns.

Besides these there are several standard hymnals issued by great publishing houses, which have wide circulation. The Anglican “Hymns Ancient and Modern,” vastly as it is distributed, is not an official hymn-book of the Church of England; there are scores of other Church of England hymn-books. In the British Isles, besides these, there are many great hymnals, great both in quality and in point of wide distribution, issued by the Irish, Scottish, Roman Catholic, and Non-Conforming churches. It is much the same in Canada, South Africa, and Australasia. The English hymn holds wide sway wherever the English language is spoken.

Of smaller general distribution than those just mentioned, yet mounting into enormous numbers, are the hymn-books of particular religious societies and minor independent organizations. One of the Mormon hymn-books, for example, is now in its twenty-fifth edition, the editions having been of ten thousand volumes each. There is a small religious body, made up originally from Swiss, German, and Dutch immigrants, called Mennonites. This comparatively minute branch of the church has issued, according to information received from its publishing house, about two hundred thousand copies. A collection of songs, mainly ephemeral and not always innocuous, is printed endlessly; this type of book would hardly be mentioned here did it not almost invariably include a number of the worthy hymns without which it could not well stand alone. Astonishingly large numbers of hymn-books are brought out by standard publishing houses. One of these, “The American Hymnal,” containing 726 hymns, has had a sale of nearly one hundred thousand copies; another, “The Army and Navy Hymnal,” is in use in every camp, on every ship, and in every naval station of the United States. Another, “Hymns of Worship and Service,” has had an output of well over half a million copies. Another, “Hymnal for American Youth,” sells at the rate of fifty thousand copies a year. This last is a book designed for young persons, containing 342 lyrics; it is but one of the twenty-two hymn-books published by a single publishing house. It should be noted, too, that none of these are pamphlets or anything less than standard full-cloth octavo books selling at standard prices. Details like these indicate a wide popularity for the hymn-book.

By the term “hymn-book” as it is used throughout this volume is meant no particular compilation of hymns, but that corpus of religious lyrical verse selected by a remarkably distinct consensus of taste, and constituting, with slight variations, the body of every good collection.

The hymn itself may be defined as a lyrical composition expressive of religious aspiration, petition, confession, communion, or praise; a song devoted to the fellowship of souls and the worship of God. In its broader sense the term includes canticles, psalms, carols, “spirituals,” and chants; in its more limited sense it includes only religious lyrics in rime and meter—in a style of very definite and narrow restrictions. The good hymn combines in quite remarkable effect the straitest simplicity, clarity, dignity, and melody, rich ideas about the basic matters of life and death, with strong emotion under sure control.

It seems safe to state without any reservations that this type, of all forms of English poetry to-day, stands first in popular favor. The hymn-book—the fairly uniform compilation of the standard hymns of the English language—is published and sold to an extent not approached by the publications of any other types of poetry.

And the hymn-book does not merely reach an enormous printing; it is actually opened and read more often than any other book of poetry. This fact becomes more apparent as one endeavors to call to mind other books of verse that begin to rival the hymn-book in this respect. Further, when verses from the hymn-books are being used it is not infrequent that two persons are reading the same page at the same time, while others may be repeating the lyric from memory without any book—as Lincoln and Roosevelt are said usually to have done. Of course many persons may read more often from Shakspere or Byron or Edgar Guest; some may never open a hymn-book. The statement here is that among English-speaking people generally, the sum of times that the hymn-book is taken up and read is larger than the sum of times that any other book of poetry is read.

This sway of the religious song in the lives of American people is not a new thing; the hymn has maintained a lyrical regnancy continuously and from the very first. And the hymn, though essentially deep-moving and intimate, has nevertheless exerted its power at times in a quite regal and dramatic manner.

It is with an outburst of religious song that the curtain goes up on the whole drama of America. American history opens with the singing of a Christian hymn. On the evening of September 25, 1492, one of the companions of Columbus saw what he thought to be land lying dimly in the west. Though it was not America yet, still, over those strange waters rang out the first greeting to America. From all three of the ships, as Columbus himself gives the account in his diary, there rose the sound of the old “Gloria in Excelsis Deo.” Then later, on Friday night, October 12, when they saw a light glimmering on the shore of the New World, the cry went up, and “Salve Regina” swept out over the water. The Old World was greeting the New World with a hymn.

Again, the first English book printed in the Western hemisphere was the old English hymnal, “The Bay Psalm Book.” Spanish Roman Catholic sailors had come singing hymns; and Anglo-Saxon Puritan settlers sent back a hymn-book, the first literary offering of the New World to the Old. It is worth noting that the offering was well received. It afterward went through many English editions. Of course the hymns sung on Columbus’s ships were in Latin, and the songs of the New England book were rough-hewn translations of the Psalms into English verse, but they were all, in the broader sense of the word, true hymns.

The great Northwest was opened to civilization and claimed for France with the singing of hymns. And La Salle, discovering the mouth of the Mississippi River, stood on the bank and claimed all the vast region for France in a ceremony marked by the singing of three hymns.

By the New Englanders’ firesides, at their social gatherings, and on their austere Sabbaths, the hymns, or metrical psalms, held a large place; and the emotions and ideals which these lyrics bore could not but enter into the fiber of the people’s lives.

Along the Atlantic coast the Indians could hear from the clearings of the white men, mingled with sounds of cattle and barn-yard fowl and busy ax, here and there from women at their work, from families in their cabins at night, from gatherings in groves and log meeting-houses, the sound of hymns. And there were Indians who learned to sing them. A letter, for example, to Sir William Ashurst from New England describes the Indians’ “excellent singing the Psalms with most ravishing melody.” It did not take the Southern slaves long to learn their masters’ hymns and to make sweet and plaintive ones of their own. No one can guess how much the American negro’s hymns have meant to him in making for consolation and piety and virtue. They have played, and still play, a large part in his life.

Scattered details here and there in the records of past American life indicate even to the casual reader how intimately religious lyrical verse entered into that life. “The Bay Psalm Book” was printed in the modest dwelling of the first president of Harvard. President Dwight of Yale, chaplain-general of the Revolutionary Army, edited and partly wrote what was for years the leading hymn- and psalm-book in the country. President Davies of Princeton was in his day a leading American hymn-writer.

In 1737, at Charlestown, South Carolina, a young Oxford graduate, John Wesley, Anglican priest, chaplain to Oglethorpe, and missionary to the Indians, published the first real hymn-book—as distinguished from the metrical psalm-book—of the Church of England. Thus in America began the sequence of great English hymn-books.

Among the earliest extant writing in the hand of George Washington is the transcription of a hymn.Jared Sparks, “Life and Writings of Washington,” Vol. XII, p. 299. Little, Brown, and Company, Boston, 1855. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were warmly interested in hymns. In their correspondence, after they had retired from Washington, the two old chieftains carried on a discussion of hymnody. They seemed to agree upon the Psalms as the greatest of all lyrical poetry. In a letter of advice to young Isaac Englebrecht, Jefferson transcribed Tate and Brady’s version of the fifteenth Psalm, “knowing,” he says, “nothing more moral, more sublime, more worthy of your preservation.”

Benjamin Franklin was particularly fond of the lyrics of Isaac Watts. The first book issued from Franklin’s press in Philadelphia was an edition of Watts’s “Psalms and Hymns.” To a friend, Mrs. Newsom, when she visited him during his last hours, he quoted several of the lyrics of Watts, “discoursing at length upon their sublimity.” Joel Barlow, poet of the Revolution, and later minister to France, was a writer of hymns and editor of a notable American hymn-book. John Quincy Adams translated the whole Book of Psalms into English verse, besides writing the large number of hymns in his “Poems of Religion and Society.”

The hymn is so much interwoven in the fabric of our past and present that it seems gratuitous to mention instances of the use of hymnody in familiar life. One must leave to the imagination, and to intimate recollections, evaluation of the worth of the hymn as a force in strengthening ties of fellowship and of sanctity, in giving voice to the otherwise unuttered grief or desire, and in bearing to those in need of it consolation and hope and courage.

One might go on with innumerable details indicating the influence of these lyrics in American life. For example, Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written in a dark hour of the Civil War, and spreading through the camps and marches like fire, was worth to the Northern cause possibly more than train-loads of corn and ammunition could have been in its place. Lincoln was so moved by it that he broke into tears at the public singing of it. Lee, on the other side, was finding in the old hymn, “How Firm a Foundation,” something of strength and comfort to help him. When Abraham Lincoln died, the people throughout the North sang the hymns that he had found helpful in his life. Nor is it without significance that many thousands of persons sang together all over the land as memorials to Garfield and McKinley, and later to Roosevelt, and to Harding, the hymns that these men had loved.

Such glimpses as the foregoing indicate that the small type of lyrical poetry called the hymn has had a good deal to do, first and last, with the ideas and emotions of the people of the continent.

The same may be said of the hymns in English life. The first literature written on English soil is, so far as we know, a religious lyric, Cædmon’s Hymn. The missionaries who went to England with St. Augustine marched in a procession, singing hymns, up the strand to where King Ethelbert sat waiting to receive them. The king gave them a home in Canterbury, which town they entered, according to Bede, singing a litany. St. Patrick and his followers approached the old druids and hostile chiefs singing hymns. Among the works of Bede was “A Book of Hymns in Divers Sorts of Meter and Rhythm.” There are throngs of incidents in early English lore indicating the part of hymnody in the life of the people. Bede tells, for example, of the famous “Halleluiah victory” of Germanicus over the Saxons and Picts wherein by a “universal shouting of Halleluiah” they put the enemy to rout. King Alfred was so attached to his hymn-book that he would go nowhere, not even hunting, without it. Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, and James I were authors of hymns. So we may glance down over the hymns of the Wesleys and the hymns of the Oxford Movement and on down to the singing of “O God Our Help in Ages Past” by the English at the burial of their Unknown Soldier at the close of the World War.

An indication of the influence of the hymn in Scottish life may be found in Burns’s portrayal in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”; and Robert Burns knew the heart of Scotland.

Hymnody constitutes a part, not only of English literature, but of all literature. Rich as the English language is in hymns, it can claim no preëminence or priority in the devotional lyric. There were hymns before there were hieroglyphics. Historically, the human race was up and singing before sunrise. Literature itself first appears coming up out of the old forests with priestly chants. Practically every literature seems to have had its beginning in hymnic song and chant. The first piece of French writing extant, except for a bit of tabulation, the “Sentiments de Strasbourg,” is a hymn. Charlemagne, like Ambrose and Gregory and Alfred the Great, established schools for the teaching of hymn singing. The first trace of Greek literature is hymnic. The story of Tyrtæus, whether one reads it as myth or fact, gives a glimpse of the early Grecian hymn, and its lyric power to awaken and transfigure popular sentiment. The Athenians, bidden by the oracle to send a leader to the Spartans, sent in guile, as the one man of Athens likely to be of least service to the rival city, Tyrtæus, a crippled school-teacher. But their guile misled them: the crippled school-teacher taught the Spartans and their children hymns of the gods and songs of human duty and destiny which so filled their minds with just ideas and fired their souls with brave and noble purpose as to reform the state of Sparta.

The type reached a marvelous state of perfection early in the life of the Hebrew people. Their greatest artistic expression was their lyrics of religion. And they sang them with a will. The hymn singing of Mount Zion could be heard twelve miles away. Their collections of psalms, begun in their early recorded life, enjoy to-day an enormous popular favor even translated into modern languages, and they have been an incalculably powerful influence in forming the taste and ideals of the Western nations. “With a psalm,” says Prothero, in his “Psalms in Human Life,” “we are baptized, married, and buried.” In this connection he quotes Heine as saying that in the Book of Psalms are collected the “sunrise and sunset, birth and death, promise and fulfillment—the whole drama of humanity.” These early hymns have strangely permeated European civilized life since Christianity brought them into Europe. To-day the English-speaking school-boy who does not know by heart some of this ancient hymnic poetry is rightly considered ignorant and neglected.

The early Christian centuries echo with Greek and Latin hymns. Medieval literature comes to its flower in its religious songs. Some of them are vigorously alive to-day. The “Dies Iræ” is an example; Philip Schaff thought it beyond doubt the greatest song in the world. Lockhart says that Sir Walter Scott was murmuring its lines as he lay dying. Dr. Samuel Johnson could never repeat it, Mrs. Thrale says, without tears. This medieval hymn has been published, up to 1910, in more than 137 modern English translations. Few other productions of the Latin language have seen so many published English renderings.

If hymnody flourished in medieval Latin, it has found even more genial and fertile soil in the Teutonic languages. The German hymn is a form of poetry deeply rooted in popular favor, noble in its aim, and soundly artistic within its scope.

It is true that only in late years has the indigenous religious lyric reached the established place in English poetry that it holds in the German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew literatures. It had to struggle against the strongly intrenched “Psalms in Meter” and to overcome some very strong and peculiar prejudices before it came fully to its own. Yet from the time that English literature, like most other literatures, opens its story with a hymn, the type of poem has held its place and performed its incalculably useful service in English life and literature.

A book of hymns issued in 1549, and revised and added to, saw by 1828 more than six hundred editions. This book, entitled originally “Certayne Psalms chosen out of the Ebrewe by Thomas Sternhold,” later known as “Sternhold and Hopkins,” far surpassed in circulation all other English books except the Bible and the Prayer-Book. The translation, made conjointly by thirty American scholars, of the Psalms from Hebrew into verse—“The Bay Psalm Book,” Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1640—was reprinted in 1647 and saw at least twenty printings in England and six in Scotland. These hymns, however, were translations. As has been said, English literature was late in producing its own indigenous hymnody. The English people were long content with Latin hymns and the various translations of the Hebrew hymnody. But since the eighteenth century the writing and appreciation of hymns has grown till the type has become more and more an element of our poetic wealth. Its recognition as a province of the great poetry of the language was for natural reasons slow in coming; but it has come.

Yet to call the hymn poetry is to many minds a new and bold assumption. That this expression of the human spirit has no right to the name of literature is a judgment not confined entirely to persons of a light way of thinking. Certain graver critics, even as they point out that the crowning glory of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was their great, surging hymns, seem to be unaware of the rich strain of religious lyrical poetry in our literature to-day. There is an inclination to fence in what is called “literary lyrics” as if to fence out “singing lyrics.” Now there is, of course, a distinction between poems meant to be sung and poems written in the pattern of lyrical poetry but never meant to be sung; but the terminology which classes one kind as literary, thereby implying that the other kind is not of the realm of literature, is inaccurate and unhappy. There may be no objection to saying that lyric poetry not meant to be sung is literature, but objection there is to saying that verses meant to be sung—the true lyrics of the language—are not literature. The religious lyric belongs to the province of poetry none the less because it sets itself to music and is taken up and sung by most of the people. The literature of the people is not an alien thing, apart from them; it is of course expressed at first by a few elect spokesmen, but after all it is of and for the many. It cannot be deemed estranged and aloof. If to be literary is to be cabined, cribbed, apart from the common mind and heart of the age, the hymn is not literary. But literature is not thus penned up away from the people. It springs forth from the general consciousness as a spring of water issues from the hillside. And it is assigned to its place by the social mind. A single wave of popular favor will not and should not establish any form of expression as literature; but a general and continuous acceptance will establish it. A general and continuous acceptance the hymn has had. True, the fact may indicate to some persons nothing more than an innate religiosity in the Anglo-Saxon mind. However that may be, and however we may limit the term “literature,” the English-speaking people do produce largely, read widely, and love profoundly a form of expression called the hymn. If the form does in one way or another sing itself into the consciousness of most people, it may justly be termed lyrical. And if, expressing grave and noble sentiment in a style of marked chasteness and decorum, it is gratifying to the people generally at their more earnest and most elevated moments, there is little gain in arguing that it is not literature.

Still there remains something of a critical tradition that while the hymn in Greek, Latin, and German is excellent poetry, it is in English a poor and stunted thing. This judgment was virtually true when Addison stated it and himself wrote three good hymns as his contribution to modern English hymnody. It was less true when Johnson repeated the statement. Addison and Johnson themselves differed diametrically in their opinions as to hymnody. Devoted as Addison was to the literature and lore of Greece and Rome, he nevertheless held, in “The Spectator,” that the greatest lyrical poetry of ancient times was that of the Psalms. He urged that English poets should turn their efforts more to hymnody. He says:

Most of the works of the pagan poets were either direct hymns to their deities or tended indirectly to the celebration of their respective attributes and perfections. Those who are acquainted with the works of Greek and Latin poets which are still extant will upon reflection find this observation so true that I shall not enlarge upon it. One would wonder that more of our Christian poets have not turned their thoughts this way, especially if we consider that our idea of the Supreme Being is not only infinitely more great and noble than what could possibly enter into the heart of a heathen, but filled with everything that can raise the imagination and give an opportunity for the sublimest thoughts and conceptions.

Johnson, to the contrary, held that it was impossible to write good hymnody. He says in his “Life of Waller”:

It has been the frequent lamentation of good men that verse has been too little applied to the purposes of worship, and many attempts have been made to animate devotion by pious poetry; that they have very seldom attained their end is sufficiently known, and it may not be improper to inquire why they have miscarried. Let no pious ear be offended if I advance, in opposition to many authorities, that poetical devotion cannot often please. The doctrines of religion may indeed be defined in a didactic poem; and he who has the happy power of arguing in verse, will not lose it because his subject is sacred. A poet may describe the beauty and grandeur of nature, the flowers of the spring, and the harvests of autumn, the vicissitudes of the tide, and the revolutions of the sky, and praise his Maker in lines which no reader shall lay aside. The subject of the disputation is not piety, but the motives to piety; that of the description is not God, but the works of God. Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.

The true path lies somewhere between these extremes. We know that Addison was out of the path if he meant that Poetry must sit in a pew or wear a cowl in order to be in the service and praise of God. All good verses following after truth and beauty are in the service and honor of God. Addison seems to imply that hymns exclusively are “sacred” and the rest of poetry “profane.” The world knows better now than to say that all outside the temple gate is profane. Who will say that “Rescue the Perishing” is more to the glory of God than “Lycidas”? But however Addison may argue over this point, he proves very splendidly part of his contention, that the English language has not enough hymns; he wrote two hymns which still supply an insistent want. He shows that Johnson is wrong, by the best of proof, by doing eminently well what Johnson argued could not be done at all. In the hymn beginning, “The spacious firmament on high,” he does “make contemplative piety poetical.” And in the hymn, “When All Thy Mercies, O My God,” he illustrates how that “poetical” and that “thanksgiving” may be even best in the form of poetry. The Psalms are devoted to “faith, thanksgiving, repentance, and supplication,” and they are poetical. It is possible to write good hymns; though it is difficult, and comparatively few have done it.

“Scarcely any one of us ever judges our hymns fairly,” said Matthew Arnold in his Oxford lectures on Celtic literature. And in the same paragraph, as if to exemplify this saying, he goes on to say that “so far as poetry is concerned, while ‘The Golden Treasury’ is a monument of a nation’s poetic strength, the ‘Book of Praise’ [Sir Roundell Palmer’s collection of hymns] is a monument to a nation’s weakness.”

Arnold was here speaking at the climax of his thesis that the Anglo-Saxon spirit is unlawfully married to the Semitic spirit, being divorced from the Indo-European, and specifically, the poetic Celtic spirit.

CHAPTER II
HYMNS ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL

The congregational singing of hymns came into the Christian church by unbroken tradition from the old Hebrew worship. Both the hymns and the manner of singing them were continued, clearly, by the primitive Christians without any sense of change. The compilation of the old Hebrew book of religious lyrical poems, it seems, was begun for the Temple by that marvelous figure, David, who stands a towering figure as musician, statesman, warrior, athlete, economist, king, deep sinner, great man of God, and world’s greatest hymnist; and it not only continued to be the hymn-book of the primitive church but is to-day still unaltered—except as translations necessarily alter poetry—a treasury of hymnody for general Christendom. The various branches of the church have various hymnals, official and unofficial, but the Book of Psalms is the book of lyrics that all agree upon and use. There is no good book of worship of any kind used by any section of Christianity in which the Psalms do not hold an important place. It is perhaps not going too far to name this old book of hymns as the most often quoted and generally the most familiar single book in the possession of Occidental civilization. It is not strange, therefore, considering the place it holds to-day and considering the peculiar intimacy of the early Christians with it, that they quite naturally retained it as their own. One may not read the records far and fail to perceive indications of its continuous presence in the thought and affection of these people; that is, if one is at all familiar with the spirit and poetical manner of the Psalms. How near this book of poetry is to the heart of Christianity is indicated by its intimate connection with the life of Christ himself, from the story of the Annunciation on. His last words from the cross are quotations from the hymns of his people, Psalms 32:1 and 31:5.

The writers of the gospel and the epistles, concise and swift-moving as their style generally is, find time and occasion, according to a careful study made by Professor Crawford H. Toy, of Harvard, in his “Quotations in the New Testament,” for 137 quotations from the Psalms. That the writers of the New Testament in their stupendous earnestness quote verses of lyrical poetry to so large an extent has its significance. It shows surely that this poetry was not only deeply based in the common popular affection but it stood in a place of highest intellectual power and literary dignity. The early Christians continued to sing, as their forefathers had done, from their most familiar and best beloved book.

But while this was the main source of its hymns, the church did not confine itself, even from the very early days, entirely to the Psalms. In the Book of Luke, Chapters I and II, are recorded four new hymns; the song of Elisabeth, mother of John the Baptist, beginning, “Blessed art thou among women”; the song of the Virgin Mary, “My soul doth magnify the Lord”; the song of Zacharias, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel”; and the song of Simeon, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” It is not certain when these particular new songs were first sung in primitive places of worship.

The office of hymn singing in the early Christian church was much the same as it is found over the world to-day, especially among what are known as the more liberal branches of the church. This is evident from the descriptions we have of the singing of the time; few and concise descriptions they are, but quite clear. The first account of the singing of a hymn by an assemblage of Christians is given by both Matthew and Mark in identical words. The story is told with characteristic brevity and impressiveness. “And when they had sung an hymn [καὶ ὑμνάσαντες] they went out into the Mount of Olives.”

It was at a meeting which took place in a large upper room, the guest-chamber of a house in Jerusalem. There were thirteen persons present, Christ and his twelve disciples. They had supper together, the last, a final solemn conference or communion. Church historians believe they can say with certainty that the hymn sung here was a part of the “Hallel,” beginning with the ninety-fifth Psalm, “O come let us sing,” and closing with the one hundred and eighteenth, “O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good.” The occasion was the feast of the Passover; it was the custom to sing all or part of these psalms at that time. Whether it was one of these, or whatever the hymn was, we have a very definite account of hymn singing at the beginning of the Christian era. And it is significant that at the close of this highest feast in the history of mankind they should have sung a hymn.

It is not surprising that we do not find in the early records any detailed description of the manner of the religious exercise of singing. One might take the records of yesterday or of last year, and though he would find abundant mention of hymns even in the daily newspapers, he might search far without finding any detailed description of the singing. Still, in the comparatively few records of early days there are glimpses such as the one given above, which shows beyond a doubt that what is known familiarly to-day as congregational singing was a very prominent feature in the worship of the primitive church. The epistles make frequent mention of religious song, and urge the people to sing. St. Paul, writing to “the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colosse,” says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts unto the Lord.” (Colossians 3:16.) That Paul was not writing merely an abstract theory about the socially and individually elevating effect of music and lyrical poetry is made evident by a dramatic glimpse of him and his companion Silas, in jail at Philippi, given by St. Luke in the Acts. St. Paul is putting his theory of poetry into very definite practice. “And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God, and the prisoners heard them.” (Acts 16:25.)

The Epistle of James, “to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad,” has this admonition in regard to hymns: “Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms.” (James 5:13.) It may be mentioned here that the words “psalm” and “hymn” seem to have been used almost interchangeably. The distinction in our use of the words seems to have been made arbitrarily and much later. The Hebrew name for the Book of Psalms was “Book of Praise”; the Greek term is in some manuscripts ψαλμοί, and in others ψαλτήριον, both from ψάλλειν, which meant the twanging of strings. It is significant that the Hebrew title-word for the book looked toward the poetry, and the Greek toward the music. The Latin and modern languages have followed the Greek in nomenclature, but the Hebrew in idea. “Psalm” and “psalter” come from “psaltery,” a stringed instrument, as “lyric” from “lyre.”

The Latin hymnus is from the Greek ὕμνος, a song of praise. “Psalms,” as St. James used the word, perhaps did not differentiate the one hundred and fifty lyrics which we call the Psalms from the other religious lyrics, such as the Song of Miriam or the “Magnificat” or the “Nunc Dimittis.”

CHAPTER III
THE NATIVE ENGLISH HYMN

With the coming of the Renaissance, Latin hymnody became one of the old things that must pass away. Its heavy surges, sounding so powerfully through the age that created it, now began to recede and to become an echo. Its art had finally overdone itself and had become an empty exercise, the expression not of aspiring faith but rather of ingenuity in making words tumble like jugglers’ balls in astonishing feats of rhythm and rime. The new classical taste, moreover, rejected its Gothic exuberance of form. The church, under order of the pope, made a sweeping reformation of the words and music of its song. “Hymnody then,” says Clement Blume, S. J., co-editor of the monumental “Analecta Hymnica Medii Ævi,” “received its death blow, as under the revision of the breviary under Pope Urban VIII the medieval rhythmical hymns were forced into more classical forms by means of so-called corrections. The hymnody of the Middle Ages is now only an historical monument which bears witness to the artistic skill, the joyful singing, and the deep religious life of our forefathers.”

But the Christian hymn was not to pass away; Christianity is a singing religion sprung out of another singing religion whose ancient admonitions said, “Let all the people praise thee,” “Praise the Lord with a harp,” “Sing unto him a new song,” “Enter into his courts with song,” “Sing ye praises with understanding,” “Praise him all ye people.” The early church rose with singing and made its progress westward with ever increasing sweep of song. And when the mighty harmonies of the Middle Ages died away there was still singing.

Native vernacular hymns had always existed in England along with the Latin. The Latin hymns which the first missionary band sang as they landed and marched up the shore of Britain were not long in finding echoes in the language of the island. The first song of her first poet was a hymn. The uppermost spring of the stream of England’s literature is a clear-flowing lyric, a hymn of praise to God. This poem of the first known writer of English gives forecast of a sturdy quality of the literature to consider duty and decorum of life, and “to assert eternal Providence.” The legend of the shy lad, Cædmon, is not likely to be too often called to mind.

As he slept in the hay in the stable at Whitby, one stood by him and said, “Cædmon, sing me something.”

Cædmon said, “I do not know how to sing; that is why I left the feast and came out here.”

“Still, you might sing.”

“What shall I sing?”

“Sing the beginnings of all created things.”

CHAPTER IV
ENGLISH PSALMODY

In that strange poetical manifestation called psalmody the Psalms went through a test by way of translation into the English tongue that no other book of poetry ever experienced, and that none other could have stood, attesting in a hundred ways the perpetual vitality of those ancient lyrics and their inextinguishable beauty. In translations, many of which were crude to the extent of grotesqueness, their lyric beauty and their spiritual power still moved deeply the hearts of a whole nation for generations. There were exquisite translations of many of the Psalms; but the translation in which they caught the ear of the English people, that of Sternhold and Hopkins, was not exquisite. Yet no other book except the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer ever went through so many editions and printings as did the Sternhold and Hopkins’s “Psalms in Meter.” Probably no other book was ever so roughly—although devoutly—handled in translation as the Psalms; surely no other book of songs ever so went to the heart of the nation.

The Psalms in meter first sprang into prominence not in England nor in Germany but in France, at the court of Francis I. The gallant and facile court poet, Clement Marot, was once urged by some one that in place of his “profane” verses he should turn the Psalms into the sprightly verse form of which he was so clearly a master. In 1533 that “poet of princes and prince of poets” began his versification. Within a few years he had published fifty-two of the Psalms constructed after the manner of his songs. And they caught the French ear as quickly as his songs had done. Printed without tunes, they were set to popular ballad airs and became enormously fashionable and popular. Soon the king and queen and notables of the realm had each selected a favorite psalm and set it to a favorite air. Prince Henry the Dauphin chose one for himself beginning,

to sing as he rode hunting. This is the forty-second Psalm, rendered a century and a half later by Tate and Brady in England,

The king of Navarre selected the psalm beginning,

Catharine de’ Medici chose one for herself, and also procured a copy of the Bible. The king of Spain sent gifts to the poet requesting a special versification of his favorite Psalm. The austere John Calvin was charmed by the songs, and Marot’s wish came true, that the boatmen and wagoners and harvesters might make France ring with the pious ditties. Calvin at Geneva employed the best musical talent he could find and set Marot’s verses to better music. D’Israeli in his “Curiosities of Literature” describes the consternation among orthodox leaders of France when these Psalms appeared in the “Geneva Hymn Book”:

Now the Cardinal of Lorraine found that the reigning court beauty, Diane de Poictiers, not only was singing them but following the lead of Catherine de Medici, had got a Bible. Having thrown the Bible down and condemned it, he (the cardinal) remonstrated with the fair penitent that it was a kind of reading not adapted to her sex, containing dangerous matters: if she is uneasy in her mind she should hear two masses instead of one and rest contented with her Pater Nosters and her Primer, which were not only devotional but ornamented with a variety of elegant forms, from the most exquisite pencils of France.

Marot under the persecution of the church fled to Geneva, where he continued his translations. He died in 1544. Theodore de Beza continued the work, removing from Marot’s songs any unseemly gaieties and fashionable allusions. This book, “Les Psaumes mis en rime françois par Clement Marot et Theodore de Beza,” became one of the most famous books of the age. It was translated into nine different languages, including the Hebrew. David Breed, in his “History and Use of Hymns,” states that it passed through at least one thousand editions.

CHAPTER V
ISAAC WATTS

The great hymns of the world have appeared in time of religious turmoil and struggle. The rule would seem to have an exception in the case of Isaac Watts, one of the two greatest of English hymnists, and the man who more than any other established the hymn as a type of English poetry; for the most of Watts’s mature life was spent in scholarly quiet at the country home of Sir Thomas Abney. But most of his hymns sprang out of the days of stress and struggle while he was yet a young man. Isaac Watts was a child of religious strife and sacrifice. He lived in strenuous times and came of stalwart stock. His grandfather, a commander in the British fleet, once killed a tiger in a fight, with his bare hands. Leaping into a river, he turned upon the tiger, which had sprung out of the jungle upon him, seized it by the head, and drowned it. That was the same kind of courage and clearness of head that the grandson in his day was called upon to exercise in battles of ideas and principles. Watts’s maternal grandfather, a French Protestant, had clung to his religious convictions under persecution, and had taken refuge with his family in England. As a baby Isaac Watts was nursed and sung to sleep by his gentle yet stout-hearted mother sitting on a horse-block under a window of the Southampton jail, where her husband was imprisoned for loyalty to his faith. Something of the quality of the soul of the elder Watts is shown by a letter written under banishment a few years later to his children. Not a word is said about shelter, food, or safety, but, “My children pray God to give you a knowledge of his truth, for it is a very dangerous time you are like to live in.” Mr. Thomas Wright in his “Life of Isaac Watts” tells a story of Isaac’s childhood which gives a glimpse of an English fireside of the time, as well as of an unusual child. Little Isaac tittered out once during family prayer. The grave household later heard his confession that, seeing a mouse run up a bell-rope which hung by the fireplace, he made the rime:

Isaac’s youth was strenuous. The young Non-Conformist was learning Greek and Hebrew at eight years old. He was of frail physique and had to battle not only for his religious and intellectual life but for physical life as well.

His experience was no exception to the rule that hymns grow best in soil that is much and deeply stirred. At that time when Puritan strictness and rigor were increasing without the deep Puritan piety, Watts stood for gentleness, charity, and freedom. In that age of conformity, he was vigorously independent, stanchly loyal to his own opinions. In the age of Congreve, Wycherley, Butler, Gay, and Swift, Watts was developing a warm and devout religious life. It is a curious fact and an added honor to him that out of the most unideal period of English history came one of the most beautiful child-songs of the world, his “Hush, My Child, Lie Still and Slumber.” He stands out as a loyal figure in times of very lax ideas, and a gentle and kindly man in an age of cold cynicism.

As a Puritan he is somewhat between the scholarly Milton and the untutored Bunyan. Watts was an eminent scholar and man of letters in his time and a philosopher and theologian of large following; his “Improvement of the Mind” and his “Speculation on the Human Nature of the Logos” were famous books. His “Logic” and his text-books on geography and astronomy were being used at the close of the seventeenth century in the universities of England and at Harvard and Yale. Julian in his “Dictionary of Hymnology” says that the “Logic” “was still a valued textbook at Oxford within living memory.” But his permanent literary appeal is of a very simple, if very fundamental, nature. As a poet, he might unloose the latchet of Milton’s shoe; for sustained literary power, he is a very long way behind Bunyan. But because of the simplicity and universality of his appeal and the sweet and clear soundness of it, he stands out as a very influential figure. It is a great thing to have written a nation’s hymns.

Personally one of the gentlest and kindest of men, he was nevertheless a bold, sturdy figure and an incalculably useful liberal of eighteenth-century England. He was the object of great veneration as well as fierce attack. “A moderate man,” he once said, “must expect a box on both ears.”

Judging by the following stanzas for his poem, “On the Sight of Queen Mary in the Year 1694,” he was no inconsiderable courtier:

CHAPTER VI
THE PERIOD OF THE WESLEYS

Charles Wesley may be said to have taken up the tradition of English hymnody where Watts gave over his labor. Wesley was born in 1707, the year of the publication of Watts’s first hymn-book, and lived till 1788. A large part of the eighty-one years of his life he devoted to the writing of hymns; he wrote more than six thousand. He was the poet, par excellence, of the great religious revival, which, hand and hand with the romantic movement in literature and the democratic movement in politics, swept through Europe and America and left a new world for men to live in. It became a common saying then, as in the time of Chrysostom, of Augustine, and of Luther, that more converts were made through hymns than through any other means.

Hymnody was a part of the new springtime of popular enlightenment and self-realization that was stirring through the world. In America Thomas Jefferson had said that he had rather have no government at all, with newspapers for the people to read, than to have any sort of government with no newspapers. Edmund Burke remarked significantly the prodigious sale of Blackstone’s Commentary in this country. Much the same service that Jefferson and Burke saw the newspapers and popular law-books rendering in the field of politics, Wesley’s hymns rendered in the field of religion. And the office of the hymns was that of popular information as well as inspiration; they were as Wesley planned them to be, “a body of divinity.”

These hymns came as if at a time appointed, the lyric call of a new dawn. Markedly individual, subjective, and, to use a word over-worn but particularly descriptive of their spirit, “democratic,” they are a voice of the age. They ring out enthusiastically in the first person singular. To them the Divine Personality is not the distant king on his awful throne so much as a spirit dwelling in the believer’s heart, the immediate present helper, guide, and friend. Their qualities of individuality, social warmth, and joyful belief appealed to the changing England.

A high place among the makers of the world’s art must be given to those who have brought into common possession great vital ideas and emotions by way of song. Probably none will say that the art of Robert Burns has been less powerful than that of Joshua Reynolds or Christopher Wren, or that the gift to the world from the Acropolis or even from Parnassus has proved more genuine and vital art than the art of a book of songs from the hill called Zion. This book of hymns has lived not merely because men called it sacred but because it has embodied and inspired lofty ideas, just feelings, and pure motives; its influence has permeated general human consciousness and colored human thought as no other single work of art has ever done. The maker of any people’s song, if it is good song, deserves to be and will be numbered high among the people’s great and beneficent souls.

The artists have found great opportunity and great satisfactions in the service of religion, witness the Taj Mahal, the temple of Neptune at Tarentum, the cathedrals of the thirteenth century, the paintings of the masters, and the religious drama of various ages. But the church generally and the Protestant side in particular has laid much stress on the idea that all other forms of art are insignificant compared with the inclusive artistry of well ordered and harmonious living. Architecture is patently one form of art constantly called into the service of the church; yet for two hundred years there have not been any very original contributions made to the glory of God and the edification of man in the form of architecture. But in the form of the popular lyric a good deal has been achieved. With the great temples and cathedrals in mind, or with some lovely small church in rural England before one’s eyes, one might say that architecture has done more for religion than the other arts; but considering religious songs heard in the world clear back to the dawn of civilization, or hearing majestic hymns rolling out from great choirs and congregations or holy lays from simple folk at close of day, one might make the claim for song. A single song is very small and intangible compared to a mighty temple, but the temple is stone, and anchored to one place. The song may be as intimate as breath and volant as the wind to go anywhere. The temple of Solomon has vanished, but the psalms of David are still with us. As masters of the church lyric, Watts and Wesley and Heber are very important figures in the history of English religious art and of English life.

Charles Wesley, if he had not done so, ought to have written great hymns. With his undoubted gift, he had before him the example of Watts and the newly discovered treasury of German hymnody. Besides this there was an insistent public demand for new hymns with which to express the newly aroused religious emotions of an age awakening, politically and socially, industrially, artistically, religiously. He lived in the stirring morning of the day that brought the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, the new freedom for English and French peasantry, the steam-engine, the poetry of Burns and Wordsworth, the political philosophy and practice of Edmund Burke, and the religious renaissance led by John Wesley.

A strong influence upon Wesley besides the work of Watts and the other earlier hymn-writers was that of German hymnody. On their trip to America the Wesleys had met a party of Moravian emigrants and had heard their hymns on board the ship. Later in London the Wesleys again were much influenced by another group of devout Moravians. It was through these associations that the hymns which had sounded so powerfully through the German people’s history since the Reformation, and which had been known and loved long before the Reformation, now reached England. Nor was the deep personal stirring of spirit, necessary for the production of hymns, lacking with Charles Wesley. The sensitive scholar of Christ Church, Oxford, soon came to know what it was to be hailed and blessed by one eager throng and cursed and stoned by another. A High Church Anglican, by nature and training conservative and aristocratic, he was yet charged with the broad democratic spirit of the time, and by his deep poetic impulse, to be the singer of new freedom and new life for individual and common mankind.

Another good reason for his writing hymns was that he was a member of the Wesley family. His mother, Susannah Annesley Wesley, was a product of the best Puritan culture and tradition. Remarkable for her learning, her common sense, her piety, and the great force and beauty of her character, she was one of the noblest and best of England’s famous women. His grandfather, John Wesley, was a poet and divine of note in his day. His father, Samuel Wesley, a great-nephew of the author of “Religio Medici,” was also a clergyman and the author of six volumes of poetry besides a number of prose works. The father and three sons, Samuel, John, and Charles, are represented in the English hymn-book to-day. Mehitabel, whose sad story has been retold by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch,“Hetty Wesley,” London, 1907. was remarkable for her classical learning and for unusual poetical gift. Charles Wesley’s sons, Samuel and Charles, both became eminent men; the latter at the age of eight had written an oratorio, “Ruth,” described by his biographer in the “Dictionary of National Biography” as “not a child’s performance, but a musicianly work.” Samuel became a leading musician of England. Samuel Sebastian Wesley, a grandson, was a musician of high rank, known over the world as one of the foremost English composers of church music. Thus seven of Charles Wesley’s family from four generations have contributed directly to the making of the English hymn-book.

Yet another influence was that exerted by his publisher, who was none other than that tremendous character, John Wesley. Surely no verse-writer ever had a more enthusiastic and energetic Mæcenas than he.

With all his inherited genius and with all the inspiration that came to him from without, Charles Wesley had the gift of a rich and generous nature. More vital still was his mystic’s experience of the deep realities of religion.

Wesley, like Watts, wrote very freely and spontaneously, as the thousands of lyrics he wrote bear witness. Not all of them are good; much of the verse reminds one of a painter’s tentative sketches and drawings. But had he not freely written so many he might not have written the smaller number so consummately well. This spontaneous hymnody of the time belongs to the spirit of freedom and wing testing that was abroad; Watts, tired of the labored formality in poetry, had said in the preface to his volume of 1837, “Many a line needs the file to polish the roughness of it, and many a thought wants richer language to adorn and make it shine . . . but I have at present neither inclination nor leisure to correct and I hope I never shall.” And the tradition of English hymnody set by Watts was carried on by Wesley. Watts praised Wesley generously, saying that Wesley’s “Come Thou Traveller Unknown” was worth all the verse that he himself had ever written; this was of course too lavish praise.

The two poets are alike, in general spirit and purpose, yet very different in style. Wesley came from the old heart-of-England stock, from generations of strong and cultivated people: his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all Oxford men; his mother’s father, Doctor Annesley, was a Puritan scholar and divine of national reputation; Charles Wesley was an Oxford master of arts, a Tory, and a strict Anglican. Watts, on the other hand, was by descent half French, of ardent Non-Conformist tradition and education, a doctor of Aberdeen and Edinburgh, a stanch Independent.

But their differences are such as to make their work complementary. They stand unrivaled in the field of English hymnody except as each may rival the other. The style of Watts is austere, objective, and formal; the style of Wesley is warm, subjective, intimate. Watts, born in 1674, the year that Milton died, was nearer to the time of Addison and Dryden; Wesley was nearer to the romantic period. A stanza from a hymn by each on the same theme will indicate the difference:

Even in these four-line stanzas one can see not only clear distinctions between the two writers, but clear signs of the differing times and schools of thought. The first has the air of the Age of Reason; the logical traits are predominant; Deity is envisioned from the Calvinistic point of view—“Jehovah,” “Sovereign Lord,” “Universal King.” The second stanza has the air of the later period—spontaneous, enthusiastic, personal. Compare again Watts’s grand hymn “Before Jehovah’s Awful Throne” with Wesley’s “Love Divine, All Love Excelling.”

The best known hymn by Charles Wesley is “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” published in “Psalms and Spiritual Hymns,” in 1740, soon after his return from America:

CHAPTER VII
BISHOP HEBER AND THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL

A new period of English hymnody centers around Reginald Heber, who with Watts and Wesley stands in the succession of master writers of hymns. Heber was guided by three ideas in regard to the hymn, none of which was new, yet the union of which was new and highly important. The first idea was that of Bishop Ken and others, and of course the medieval church, that the hymn is liturgical and should follow and adapt itself to the church calendar throughout the year; the second idea was that of Watts, the Wesleys, and the Baptist leaders that the hymn should follow and supplement the sermon; the third idea, so urged by Addison, was that the hymn should be a finished piece of literary art. Heber strove to create and have adopted by the Church of England not a psalm-book, nor a psalm-and-hymn-book, but a hymnal to accompany the Book of Common Prayer as a part of the church service; he strove to create and collect a body of hymns which should be of most practical use to instruct and inspire the people and which at the same time should be poems of high literary excellence.

Reginald Heber was born at Malpas, Cheshire, in 1783. His father was a minister of the Church of England, a learned, well-to-do, devout man, a clergyman of the type which all along has carried with zealous good works a certain rich comeliness of life. After a brilliant career at Oxford, Reginald Heber spent fourteen more or less idyllic years at Hodnet as a country squire, a country parson, and a man of letters. During this period, with the advice and contributions of Scott, Milman, and others, he virtually finished his hymn-book. As Bishop of Calcutta he left for India in 1823. He died in India after three years of missionary work in which he combined superbly the good qualities of the modern administrative expert with those of old-time saint. His book, “Hymns Written and Adapted for the Weekly Church Service of the Year,” was never officially adopted, though more than any other book it brought hymn singing into the Established Church. Further than that, it set a new standard for the whole of English hymnody.

And a standard was needed. The opening of the century brought a wide-spread and, as has been said, democratic publication and use of hymns. Books were published not only in London but in Southampton, Manchester, and other towns over England as well as in America. There was a copious output of original hymns by various authors, in addition to collections of old and new hymns made for various chapels, parishes, or individuals. Between 1800 and 1820 there were nearly fifty different hymn-books in use in the Church of England alone; and yet the Church of England was still largely of the mind that hymn singing was a Dissenting innovation; the metrical Psalms were still in use and regarded as standard.

Indeed, during these years the growth of hymnody had been so rapid and strong as to become disquieting to many; earnest efforts were made to limit it by church ordinances. The liberals, however, and the group of religious revivalists that was gathering at Oxford, instead of trying to restrict and curb the hymn, began to improve it and to use it powerfully for their purpose. Reactionary opposition but served to raise more singing; and, further, the wholesome competition for excellence among the singing people contributed to a great advance in English hymnody. In 1827 appeared the great books of Heber and Keble. That of Montgomery had appeared two years before. Besides the vigorous native hymnody, there was coming in also a new wealth of translations.

In the midst of all this development of hymnody, it was Heber’s book that, more than any other, set the standard. Heber maintains a higher literary level than is maintained by any other author of a large number of hymns. He brought some of the strong intellectual and artistic influences of the time into the hymn-book.

Six of Heber’s most famous hymns may be mentioned, each representing a different conception of hymnody and a different manifestation of the religious spirit. Each is a masterpiece of its type. They show the breadth of their author’s understanding and sympathy; they indicate the intensity and depth of his religion. “Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning” is a calendar hymn for the feast of the Epiphany, liturgical, glittering, stately; “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” is a call of churchly zeal, personal, evangelical, militant; “By Cool Siloam’s Shady Rill” is an exquisite nature poem as well as an exquisite hymn; “Bread of the World in Mercy Broken” is a quiet communion hymn full of pensive loveliness and warm reality of faith; “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” is a hymn for foreign missions, immediately practical, yet blithely, almost gaily, romantic; “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty” is a hymn of grandeur, sonorous, full of the pomp and circumstance of awful worship.

The style of the Epiphany hymn suggests the “wealth of orient pearl and gold” as well as the cool and lively freshness of morning:

CHAPTER VIII
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

During the Victorian era, and more recently both in England and America, have appeared a remarkable number and variety of hymns. Several scores of these the hymn-book seems to have chosen permanently; many others have been chosen, of course, only tentatively. There are a few outstanding ones, like Kipling’s “Recessional” and Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” which leave little doubt of their permanence.

In all the huge movement and stir in the last fifty years, there has been much vigorous manifestation of the religious life. It is not surprising that the fifteen years following the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” produced more ringing lyrics of religion than has any period of the same length in English history. There was tremendous agitation and conflict among religious forces. The zeal of the conservative faithful and the ardor of the progressive faithful showed itself in flashes of art as well as in the earnest, long-drawn, and bitter prosaic struggles.

Hymns rich, intense, and luminous sprang from Conservatives and Progressives alike. And it is strong attestation of the truth and universality of the hymns that even radical Conservatives and radical Progressives were soon—however much or little they were aware of the fact—singing each other’s hymns, “teaching and admonishing one another” according to the Scripture in spiritual songs, singing and making melody in their hearts unto the Lord. The Fundamentalists and the Liberals of to-day sing the hymns of Whittier and Holmes and Mrs. Adams, together with those of Bonar, Newman, and Bickersteth.

Among the major hymnists of the time is Horatio Bonar, the foremost of the Scottish hymn-writers. He was born in Edinburgh in 1808. Graduated from the University of Edinburgh, he entered the ministry of the Established Church of Scotland, from which he later seceded to become one of the founders, and for the rest of his life a leader, of the Scottish Free Church. He died in 1889. He published many hymns, some translations from the Greek and Latin, but mostly original hymns.

Among his best are “A Few More Years Shall Roll”; “Beyond the Smiling and the Weeping”; “Thy Way, Not Mine, O Lord”; “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say”; “Here, O My Lord, I Meet Thee Face to Face”; and “Go Labor On, Spend and Be Spent.”

Bonar’s hymns are sorrowful and plaintive, like autumn winds over Scottish hills. The sadness and transience of life is a recurrent theme.

CHAPTER IX
THE IMPORT OF THE HYMN-BOOK

As mankind’s most ancient and most beloved kind of poetry, the hymn is characterized by depth of thought, by patent serviceableness, and by lasting beauty. Any kind of art, any form of expression whatever, to be perenially fresh and dear to men must be at once profound, relevant, and comely. The constant returning of generation after generation to the hymnal as to Jacob’s well attests the depth and soundness and beauty of it. The hymn-book is a lasting popular Outline of Life, a lyric handbook of philosophy, ethics, and spiritual beauty.

The hymn-book contains a system of philosophy; short and simple as these lyrics are, they have given to innumerable minds a satisfying answer to the question of the source, the nature, and the end of all things. They assert that the origin and support of all life is eternal God, infinitely knowing, just, and kind. The hymn-book teaches a system of ethics; it asserts that man can know, and ought to do, the will of God. The hymn-book teaches a system of esthetics; it asserts that life finds its perfect bloom of beauty and its crown of happiness only in accord with the nature and will of God.

The wise and the prudent may make pause at the hymn’s simple and audaciously confident assertions as to the great mysteries that baffle all the faculties of reason; yet the more wise and prudent hold that poets and prophets can, by the power of chastened imagination, faith, inspiration, go surely beyond the common faculties of reason, experiencing, as Wordsworth says,

and they “see into the soul of things.”

The hymn-book bases its system upon manifold and powerful authority. The hymns, being the thought of strong and deeply experienced souls, kindled into song, claim (1) the regal authority of Poetry. Having a sweeping acceptance by all sorts and conditions of men of religion, they claim (2) the authority of democratic election. Being the choric voice of organized religion speaking out of its ages of experience and out of its present life, they claim the authority of (3) the church catholic. Being, much of it, paraphrase of the Psalms and all of it, in accord with the Bible, the hymnal claims (4) the authority of the Holy Scriptures.

Further, says Charles Wesley’s hymn,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The author desires to make acknowledgment to the following authors and publishers whose books he has consulted.

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Neale, John Mason. Medieval Hymns and Sequences. Joseph Masters, London.

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Wranghan, Digby S. Liturgical Poetry of Adam of St. Victor. (3 Vols.). London.

1882Long, Edwin M. Illustrated History of Hymns and their Authors. P. W. Zeigler & Co., Philadelphia.

1883Prescott, J. E. (Canon of Carlisle). Christian Hymns and Hymn Writers. Deighton, Bell & Co., Cambridge.

1884Lyra Catholica. Kennedy, New York.

Nutter, Rev. Charles S. Hymn Studies. Eaton and Mains, New York.

1885King, James. Anglican Hymnology. London.

1886Duffield, Samuel W. English Hymns, Their Authors and History. Funk and Wagnalls, New York.

Parker, Willcom H. Psalmody of the Church. Chicago.

1888Bullen, A. H. More Lyrics from the Song-books of the Elizabethan Age. London.

Burrage, Henry S. Baptists & Hymn Writers (682 pp.). Portland, Me.

1889Edwards. Romance of Psalter and Hymnal. London.

Edwards, F. G. (and R. E. West).

1890Palgrave, Francis Turner. The Treasury of Sacred Song. Oxford.

1893Robinson, Charles Seymour. Annotations upon Popular Hymns.

Thompson, Robert Ellis. The National Hymn Book. Wattles, Philadelphia.

1896Harder, W. Garrett. The Treasury of American Sacred Songs. Henry Frowde, London.

Humphries, Frank Landon. The Evolution of Church Music. Scribners, New York.

1898Robertson, James. The Poetry and Religion of the Psalms. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.

1899Brownlie, John. Hymns and Hymn Writers of the Church Hymnary. Henry Frowde, London.

Benson, Louis F. The Best Church Hymns. The Westminster Press. Philadelphia.

Barton, William E. Old Plantation Hymns. Lamson, Wolffe & Co., New York.

1900Brownlie, John. Hymns of the Greek Church. Translated with Introduction and Notes. Oliphant, Anderson & Terrier, London.

1901Bridges, Robert. A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn Singing. B. H. Blackwell, Oxford.

1902Dickenson, Edward. Music in the History of the Church. Scribners, New York.

1903Benson, L. F. Studies in Familiar Hymns. Westminster Press, Philadelphia.

Blume, Clement (and Maria Guido Dreves). Analecta Hymnica Medii Ævi. (54 Vols.).

Breed, David R. The History and Use of Hymns and Hymn Tunes. Revell, New York.

Warren, C. S. F. The Dies Irae. London.

1904Kerr, W. P. The Dark Ages.

Wesley Bicentennial Publication. Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.

1905Courthope, W. J. A History of English Poetry (5 Vols.). London.

Everett, Grace M. Hymn Treasures. Eaton and Mains, New York.

1906Brown, Theron (and Butterworth). The Story of the Hymn and Hymn Tunes. American Tract Society, New York.

Crosby, Fanny J. Memories of Eighty Years. Earle & Company, Boston.

Sankey, Ira D. My Life and the Story of Gospel Hymns. Sunday School Times Co., Philadelphia.

1907Baketel, Oliver S. Concordance to the Methodist Hymnal. Eaton & Mains, New York.

Julian, John. Dictionary of Hymnology. John Murray, London.

Schürer, E. Geschichte des Judischen Volkes in Zeitalter Jesu Christi. J. C. Hinrichsche Buchhandlung, Leipzig.

1908Donahoe, Daniel Joseph. Early Christian Hymns. The Grafton Press, New York.

Saintsbury, George. A History of English Prosody. (3 Vols.). Macmillan, London.

1909Alden, R. M. Introduction to Poetry. Henry Holt & Co., New York.

Hymns Ancient and Modern. Historical Edition. London.

1910Jevons, F. B. The Idea of God in Early Religions. Cambridge University Press.

1911Mackensie, A. S. The Evolution of Literature. Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, New York.

Nutter, Charles F. (and Wilbur F. Tillett). The Hymns and the Hymn Writers of the Church. Methodist Book Concern, New York.

Patterson, Frank Allen. The Middle English Penitential Lyric. New York.

Reed, Edward Bliss. English Lyrical Poetry. Yale Press, New Haven.

Tillett, Wilbur F. (and Charles F. Nutter. See above).

1912Campbell, Duncan. Hymns and Hymn Makers. Black, London.

Julian, John. Dictionary of Hymnology. John Murray, London (2d edition).

Reeves, Francis B. The Evolution of Our Christian Hymnology. The John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia.

1913Mearns, James. Early Latin Hymnaries. An Index of Hymns in Hymnaries before 1100. Cambridge University Press.

Schilling, Felix E. The English Lyric. Boston.

1914Wright, Thomas. The Life of Isaac Watts. C. J. Farncombe, London.

1886-

1915Analecta Hymnic Medii Ævi. Leipsic. (54 Vols).

Benson, Rev. Louis E. The English Hymn. Its Use and Development. Doran, New York.

Duncan, Rev. Canon. Popular Hymns, Their Authors and Teaching. London.

Work, Edgar Whitaker. The Bible in English Literature. Revell, New York.

1915Hastings, James (Editor). Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Scribners, New York.

Stopford, J. B. Sermons on Hymns for the Church Service. Skeffington, London.

1916Smith, Robert Elmer. Modern Messages from Great Hymns. The Abingdon Press, New York.

1917Merrill, William A. Latin Hymns. Sanborn, New York.

Oxford Book of English Mystical Poets, Compiled by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee. The Clarendon Press, Oxford.

1918Emmett, C. W. (and Dr. Sanday). The Psalms Explained. Humphrey Milford, London.

1919Osmond, Percy H. The Mystical Poets of the English Church. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London.

Price, Carl F. The Music and Hymnody of the Methodist Hymnal. The Methodist Book Concern, New York.

1920Wendell, Barrett. The Traditions of European Literature from Homer to Dante. Scribner’s Sons, New York.

Gayley, Charles Mills (and Benjamin Putnam Kurtz). Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism. Ginn & Co., New York.

Prothero, Rowland E. The Psalms in Human Life. (New Edition, 417 pp.). London.

1921Poteat, Hubert McNeill. Practical Hymnology. Boston.

Ninde, Edward S. The Story of the American Hymn (429 pp.). New York.

1922Prescott, Frederick Clarke. The Poetic Mind. Macmillan, New York.

INDEX

Abelard 23

“Abide with Me” 34, 232

Adams, John 10

Adams, John Quincy 11, 26, 249

Adams, Sarah Fowler 35, 198, 287

“Adeste Fideles” 88

Addison, Joseph 19, 20, 100, 199, 323

Adler, Felix 318, 345

“A few more years shall roll” 290

Alford, Henry 350

Alfred the Great 13, 14, 92

Ainger, Arthur C. 311

“Ainsworth’s Psalms” 137

“All hail the power of Jesus’ name” 195

“All praise to thee, my God, this night” 110

Ambrose 14, 77, 209

“American Hymnal, The” 6, 160, 178

“A mighty fortress” 265

“Analecta Hymnica Medii Ævi” 83

Ancient hymns 52

“Anthologia Graeca Carminum Christianorum” 75

Arygll, Duke of 318

“Army and Navy Hymnal, The” 6

Arnold, Matthew 21, 22

“Art thou weary, art thou languid?” 261

Ashurst, Sir William 9

“Awake, my soul, and with, the sun,” 110

“Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve” 185

Baker, Rev. Sir Henry 134, 292

Bacon, Francis 135

Balfour, F. H. 273

“Baptist Hymnal, The” 160, 178, 227

Bardesanes 63

Baring-Gould, Sabine 298, 325

Bates, Katherine Lee 46, 346

“Battle Hymn of the Republic” 12, 307

“Bay Psalm-Book” 8, 16, 43

Bede, the Venerable 12, 13, 92

“Before Jehovah’s awful throne” 28, 168, 182

“Beneath the Cross of Jesus” 309

Bernard of Cluny 23, 84

Bernard of Clairvaux 23, 85, 263

Blake, William 279

“Blest be the tie that Binds” 192

Blume, Clement 83

Bonar, Horatio 290

“Book of Praise” 21, 160, 178

Bowring, Sir John 237

Borthwick, Jane 267

Boynton, Percy H. 23

“Bread of the world in mercy broken” 218

“Break Thou the bread of life” 310

Breed, David 118

Bridges, Robert 29, 318

“Brightest and best of the sons of the morning” 218, 244

Brooks, Bishop Phillips 26, 307

Brown, Carleton F. 93

Browne, Sir Thomas 109, 165

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 281

Browning, Robert 30, 276

Bryant, William Cullen 26, 247, 299, 342

Bulwer-Lytton 188

Burgess, Henry 64

Burke, Edmund 27, 274

Burns, Robert 13, 27, 162, 206, 207

“By cool Siloam’s shady rill” 218

Byrd, William 126, 128

Byron, Lord 211

Caedmon’s Hymn 12, 91

“Calm on the listening ear of night” 250

Calvin, John 117, 120

“Candle-lighting Hymn, The” 71

Carlyle, Thomas 264

Cary, Phoebe 26, 286

Catherine de’ Medici 117

Caswall, Edward 262

Charlemagne 14

“Catholic Encyclopedia” 83

Chatfield, A. W. 72

Chadwick, John 338

Chaucer 86, 192

Chesterton, G. K. 318

Christ, and Paranikos 75

“Christian, dost thou see them” 260

“Christians, awake salute the happy morn” 214

“Christ the Lord is risen today” 177

Chrysostom 63, 68, 209

Clement of Alexandria 71, 81

Clephane, Elizabeth 309

Coffin, Henry Sloan 318

Columbus 8

“Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire” 82

“Come oh thou traveler unknown” 28

“Come ye disconsolate” 208

“Commit thou all thy ways” 184

Cook, Albert S. 92

“Cotter’s Saturday Night” 14

Coverdale, Bishop 119

Cowper, William 27, 36, 45, 185, 201, 323

Crashaw, Richard 104, 131

Crosby, Fanny J. Van Alstyne 310

“Crossing the Bar” 30, 276

Darwin, Charles 179, 289, 332

David 52

Davidson, Francis 128

“Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” 303

Dictionary of Hymnology 28, 82

“Dies Irae” 15, 45, 83, 88

D’Israeli, Isaac 118

Doane, Bishop 248

Doddridge, Philip 185

Donne, John 27, 127, 135

Drayton, Michael 99

Dreves, and Blume 83

Drummond of Hawthornden 100

Dryden, John 204

Dwight, Timothy 10, 26, 245

Edmeston, James 239

Edward VI 121

“Ein feste burg” 264

Ellerton, John 297

Elliott, Charlotte 284

Ellis, Havelock 318, 343

Elizabeth, Mother of John the Baptist 54

Ephrem, Syrus 63

Eusebius 62

Faber, Frederick 254

“Fair is the Meadow” 269

“Faith of our fathers” 254

“Father, what e’er of earthly bliss” 208

Fawcett, John 192, 194

“F. B. P.” 96

“Fight the good fight” 29, 298

Findlater, Sarah Borthwick 267

Fletcher, Phineas 101, 135

“Fling out the banner” 248

“For all thy Saints who from their labors rest” 292

Fortunatus 82, 88

Franklin, Benjamin 11

“From every stormy wind that blows” 239

“From Greenland’s icy mountains” 219, 339

Gannett, W. C. 301

Garfield, James A. 12

Gascoigne, George 127

George, the Third 180

Gerhardt, Paul 182, 266

German Hymns 87, 164, 181, 245, 263

Germanicus 13

“Geneva Hymn Book” 118

Gilder, Richard Watson 26

“Give to the winds thy fears” 182

Gladstone, William E. 298

Gloria in Excelsis Deo 8, 76

“Gloria Laus et Honor” 25, 262

“Gloria Patri” 60

“Go labor on” 290

“God moves in a mysterious way” 201

“Golden Treasury, The” 21

“Goostly Psalms” 119

Grant, Sir Robert 242, 323

Great Northwest, Opens with hymn singing 9

Greek Hymns 15, 71

Gregory of Nazianzus 71

“Guide me, oh thou great Jehovah” 213

Gurney, Mrs. 228

Guyon, Madame 36

Hale, Edward E. 301

Harding, W. G. 12

“Hark, hark, my soul” 257

“Hark the glad sound, the Saviour comes” 186

“Hark, the herald angels sing” 28, 177

Harvard College 10, 140

Hay, John 26, 310

Heber, Bishop Reginald 215

Hebrew Singing 14, 58

Hedges, F. H. 264

“He giveth His beloved sleep” 281

Henry VIII 13, 124

Herbert, George 135

Herrick, Robert 27, 39, 40, 58

Hewitt, T. B. 266

Higginson, Thomas W. 329

Hilary of Poitiers 76

Holland, J. G. 310

Holmes, Oliver Wendell 26, 33, 243, 299, 321

“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty” 221

Hopkins, Sir John 126

Hopkins, and Sternhold 121

Hosmer, F. L. 301, 324, 344, 345

How, Bishop 292

“How firm a foundation” 12, 214, 336

“How gentle God’s commands” 185, 191

Howe, Julia Ward 12, 307

Hunnis, William 127

“Hush, my child, lie still and slumber” 140

“Hymnal for American Youth” 6

“The Hymnal” (Presbyterian) 160, 178

“The Hymnal” (Protestant Episcopal) 160, 227

Hymn-book, defined 6

Hymn, defined 6, 32, 40, 112, 187, 227, 293

“Hymns Ancient and Modern” 4, 160, 178, 210, 227, 293

“Hymns from the land of Luther” 207

“Hymns of the living church” 160, 178

“Hymns of Worship and Service” 6

“I heard the voice of Jesus say” 290

“I love thy kingdom, lord” 246

“I love to tell the story” 311

“In heavenly love abiding” 283

“In Memoriam” 30

“In the Cross of Christ I glory” 237

Indians 9

“It came upon a midnight clear” 250

James I of England 13, 129, 134

Jefferson, Thomas 10

“Jerusalem, my happy home” 83, 96, 270

“Jerusalem, the golden” 83, 262, 348, 353

“Jesus calls us o’er the tumult” 284

“Jesus, Lover of my soul” 28, 168-173, 353

“Jesus shall reign where’er the sun” 152

“Jesus the very thought of thee” 83

Jocopone de Todi 88

Johnson, Samuel 301

Johnson, Dr. Samuel 15, 19, 26, 39, 179

Jonson, Ben 102

Julian, John 28, 82, 140, 173, 264, 270

“Just as I am, without one plea” 285

Keble, John 228

Ken, Bishop 110

Ker, “The Dark Ages” 84

Key, Francis Scott 248

Kingsley, Charles 298

Kipling, Rudyard 29, 312, 347

Lanier, Sidney 310

La Salle 9

Lathbury, Mary 310

Latin hymns 15

“Lead kindly light” 198, 233, 234, 353

Lee, Robert E. 12

“Let us with a gladsome mind” 31

Lincoln, Abraham 7, 12, 243

“Lo, he comes with clouds descending” 177

Loe, William 131

Longfellow, Henry W. 300

Longfellow, Samuel 301, 342

“Love divine, all love excelling” 28, 168, 176

Lowell, J. R. 26

Luther, Martin 120, 209, 264, 353

“Lycidas” 20

“Lyra Germanica” 267

Lyte, Henry F. 231

Magnificat 56, 120

Mary, Queen of Scots 13, 129

Marot, Clement 117

Mason, Lowell 221

Masson, “Life of Milton” 126

Matheson, George 28

McKinley, William 12

Medieval hymns 15, 24, 83

Medley, Samuel 28

Mennonites 5

“Methodist Hymnal, The” 4, 160, 178, 227

Milman, Henry Hart 216, 237

Milton, John 30, 31, 32, 97, 126, 135, 168, 222, 345

Monica 77

Montgomery, James 102, 217, 223

Moore, Thomas 208

Moravians 164, 263

More, Sir Thomas 125

“My country, ’tis of Thee” 253, 275

“My faith looks up to thee” 29, 246

“My Jesus, as thou wilt” 268

Neale, John Mason, 25, 75, 79, 253, 258

“Nearer, my God, to thee” 34, 35, 36, 45, 198, 353

Newman, John Henry 199, 233, 329

Newton, John 29, 201

North, Frank Mason 316

“Nunc Dimittis” 56

“O come, all ye Faithful” 83

“O could I speak the matchless worth” 28

“O for a closer walk with God” 201

“O for a thousand tongues to sing” 28

“O, God, Our Help in Ages Past” 13, 28, 30, 149

“O Jesus, thou art standing” 292

“O little town of Bethlehem” 307

“O Love that will not let me go” 28

“O mother dear, Jerusalem” 96, 270, 349

“One sweetly solemn thought” 286

“O worship the King” 242

Olney hymns 29, 201

“Onward Christian Soldiers” 298

Oxenham, John 315

Oxford 140, 237, 239, 253

“Oxford University Hymnal” 160, 178, 237

“O Zion, haste” 341

Palgrave, Francis Turner 160, 178, 296, 339, 346

Palmer, Ray 29, 246

Palmer, Roundall; Earl of Selbourne 21

“Pange Lingua Gloriosi” 88

“Paradise Lost, Morning Hymn” 31

Paranikos, and Christ 75

Patmore, Coventry 175

Paul of Samosata 62

Pembroke, Countess of 133, 135

Perronet 194

Phelps, Samuel D. 310

Pierpont, John 294

Pliny, The Younger 60

Poe, Edgar Allan 276

Pope, Alexander 100, 204, 342

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow” 112

Princeton 10

Proctor, Adelaide 309

Prothero, Rowland E. 15

Prudentius 78

Psalmody 116

Psalms, The 10, 11, 15, 52, 53, 67, 126, 162, 164

“Psalms in Human Life, The” 15

“Psalms in Metre” 16, 116, 121

Queen Elizabeth 13, 103, 109, 129, 135

Raleigh, Sir Walter 109

Reed, Edward Bliss 26

“Religio Medici” 109, 165

“Rise, crowned with light” 100

“Rock of ages” 49, 196, 197, 199, 353

Roosevelt 7, 12

Romney portrait 179

Rossetti, Christina 278

Rossetti, Gabriele 278

Ruskin, John 124

Saintsbury, George 27, 170

St. Augustine 12, 68, 77, 81

St. Basil 68

St. Colomba 92

St. Francis of Assisi 23

St. Gregory 14, 82

St. Jerome 80

St. Patrick 12, 92

St. Paul, his theory of poetry 55, 57, 69, 76, 325

St. Sylvia of Aquitania 80

St. Stephen the Sabaite 74

“Salve Regina” 8

“Saviour, breathe an evening blessing” 239

“Saviour, when in dust to thee” 243

Schelling, Felix E. 27

Scott, Sir Walter 15, 216, 243

Sears, Edmund H. 250

Shelley, Percy Bysshe 243, 251, 256, 275

Shenstone, William 206

Schaff, Philip 15, 264

Sidney, Sir Philip 124, 128, 133, 135

Smith, Samuel F. 252

“Softly now the light of day” 248

“The spacious firmament on high” 100

Sparks, Jared 10

“Spectator, The” 19

Spenser, Edmund 101, 135

“Soldiers of Christ, arise” 28, 177

“Stabat Mater Dolorosa” 88

Stedman, Edmund Clarence 24

Steele, Ann 207

Stennett 158

Sternhold and Hopkins 16, 44, 109, 116, 125

Sternhold, Thomas 121, 124, 134, 137

“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” 267

Stone, S. J. 300

Stowe, Harriet Beecher 26, 327

Stowell, Hugh 239

“Sun of my soul” 228

Tallis, Thomas 96, 126

“Tate and Brady” 11, 109, 117, 136, 137

Taylor, Jeremy 105

Te Deum 60, 77, 204, 353

Tennyson, Alfred 29, 252, 276

“Ter Sanctus” 60

Thackeray, William M. 223

“The church’s one foundation” 300

“The King of love my shepherd is” 293

“The morning light is breaking” 252

“The Son of God goes forth to war” 218

“The star spangled banner” 248

Theodore de Beza 118

“There is a fountain filled with blood” 201

“There is a green hill far away” 284

“There’s a song in the air” 310

Thomas Aquinas 88, 209, 353

Thompson, James 205

“Thy will be done” 285

“’Tis midnight, and on Olive’s brow” 295

Titles of hymns 171, 199

Toplady, Augustus 196, 199

Toy, Crawford H. 53

Trent, W. P. 31

Twenty-third Psalm 38, 129, 131, 132

Tye, Christopher 104

Tyrtæus 14

Van Dyke, Henry 318

Vaughan, Henry 135, 249

“Veni Creator” 82, 88

Waring, Anna L. 283

Warner, Anna Bartlett 282

Washington, George 10

“Watchman, tell us of the night” 238, 245

Watts, Isaac 11, 26, 28, 30, 39, 104, 106, 137, 138, 159, 166, 167, 185, 207, 215, 312, 321, 322, 342

“Weary of earth, and laden with my sin” 300

“We may not climb the heavenly steep” 306

Wesley, Charles 29, 98, 161, 320

Wesley, John 10, 75, 163, 171, 173, 179, 186, 196

Wesley, Samuel 328

Wesley, Susannah 165

Wesleys, The 13, 27, 165

“We would see Jesus” 282

“When All Thy Mercies, O My God” 21

“When I survey the wondrous cross” 152

“When our heads are bowed with woe” 237

“Where cross the crowded ways of life” 317

White, Kirke 47, 242

Whittier, John Greenleaf 26, 85, 302, 328

Williams, William 213

Winkworth, Catherine 266

Wither, George 106, 135

Wordsworth, Bishop Christopher 29, 277

Wordsworth, William 29, 30, 174, 249, 276

“Work for the night is coming” 311

Wright, Thomas 139

Wyatt, Sir Thomas 95, 100, 125

Wyclif, John 132

Yale College 10, 140

Yattendon Hymnal 29

Zacharias 54

Zangwill, Israel 318, 343