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 320 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,

The hymns, then, speak of the origin of all things in terms of certain knowledge. A hymn by John Sterling published in 1840 begins with these lines:

A hymn by Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks in simple words of the great mystery:

The Hebrew psalm, turned into English numbers by Isaac Watts, thus asserts the eternity of all-ruling Deity:

Another hymn by Watts asserts the eternal supremacy of God—the primary hymnal theme:

Many of the hymns speak of this inward assurance of God being corroborated by the testimony of external nature, especially in the grander aspects such as sunrise, storms, mountains, and the sky at night. Again to quote Watts, who is speaking evidently from his own emotions as well as from the artistic and spiritual tradition of the Psalms:

Lines such as the following gleaned from the hymn-book carry on the same idea, creation declaring the Creator:

Addison’s familiar and ornate lines repeat the ancient inspired idea, “The heavens declare the glory of God”:

Lines from Sir Robert Grant’s hymn, “O, Worship the King,” spring evidently from a contemplation of the sky:

The hymns declare that human beings may have sure apprehension of the infinite spirit, and communion with it:

An American hymn by Frederick L. Hosmer asserts the reality of human acquaintanceship with the personality of God:

Two lyrical statements of this basic idea in the Bible, one in the Old Testament, one in the New, are unsurpassed in grandeur of conception and splendor of expression; they are true hymns, though as yet there is no adequate metrical version in English. Perhaps there will never be. The passages state in ultimate words the idea of the immanence and permanence of Deity:

The passage from the New Testament, part of a letter of St. Paul to the Romans, is an outburst of song:

For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

It is no wonder that jail-doors would not hold in front of a man who could write songs like this in his letters and sing them in jail at night; even the

as Baring-Gould’s hymn says, be able to hold before such songs and souls.

The philosophy, the deep and steadfast belief, of these two ancient hymns is that of the modern hymn-book. Its lyrical great argument is to

But the hymns, with all their brave certainty about the order and direction of the universe, make no claim to have sounded all its depths; they know for sure, but they do not know all. To quote again from Matthew Bridges’s hymn:

Another hymn thus expresses the idea of the smallness of man’s highest conception before the reality:

Whittier in his “Eternal Goodness” has this stanza about the smallness and yet the certainty of man’s knowledge:

We know, says the hymn, that unlimited Good is above and beyond the visible world wherein we see His power. The hymn-book is not pantheistic, if pantheism is identifying the Absolute merely with creation.

The last two lines of this hymn by Watts touch on the mystery of the Trinity: Divinity can be apprehended only by means of Divinity—the eternal wisdom, proceeding from God into human mind, perceives the true incarnate Word. A hymn by Samuel Wesley, father of John and Charles Wesley, shows the same process of thought:

The same humility but surety of faith is seen in Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light,” and likewise in a hymn of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which is not so well known as it may be:

The modern hymnal statement of its philosophy, its thought about the order and direction of the universe, is briefly and simply stated, but unshakably certain:

These passages are illustrative of the hymn-book’s affirmation concerning God and concerning man’s approach to Him. It teaches that God is infinite in being, wisdom, love, and power. The book teaches further that the Infinite has shown His nature and will to this world in the person of Jesus Christ; that the Logos, Idea, Spirit, Word, which was in the beginning and without which was not anything made that was made, became flesh and dwelt among us, the Infinite became finite and visible, drawing man out of darkness, revealing the way of life, and showing that the universe is ordered by wisdom and love. And the hymn-book teaches further that infinite God revealed historically in the Son is yet ever-present Spirit, and that God is one. This constitutes the basic proposition of the hymnal philosophy.

Then follows naturally a consideration of man—What is man that thou art mindful of him?—and of his duty and his destiny.

Concerning the nature of man, the hymn-book holds that he is dust of the earth, plus the breath of God:

Some of the old hymns call man worm in the dust; Darwin trailed him lower yet than the worm, to the germ—racially, that is, as elementary science traces him there individually; but the hymn-book, with Genesis, takes him, as we see, on down to inorganic dust itself.

Thus, then, is summarized the hymn-book’s philosophy concerning the origin and nature of man: Dust indeed he is, yet also breath of God; and it is the purpose of his life that the creature shall rise more and more out of the dust and become the child and friend of God. This is the duty and destiny of man.

The duty of man, declares the hymn-book, is to attain to God. This carries measureless implications of God-likeness in his being and behavior—the best use of all his faculties at their best; the exercise of perfect justice and mercy, for as man becomes more a son of God he becomes more a brother of man. The duty of man is then to climb upward to God. And the hymns say that there is one true Way.

But man is free to choose his way. He is made so much in the image of God that he has the power of shaping life according to his own will. The sun, says William Wordsworth’s hymn,

Being thus free, man does not have to rise. He can choose to go away from, rather than toward, the ultimate Good. And this is sin; sin is more than man’s imperfection and his lowness in the scale. 334 It is willing and doing contrary to the perfect will of God. And with sin is darkness and sorrow, hell, discord with God, and the stony necessity of repentance and redemption.

Here, then, is the hymn-book’s system of ethics, its consideration of the duty of free man, his struggle with adversity, his defeat of hell, and his attainment of heaven. The hymns speak with searching wisdom and deep appeal about the long journey that man must travel, and the true way.

Of the future of man the hymn-book makes comprehensive and most steadfast affirmation. It affirms that the human race, under God, has shining days before it, and a prosperous journey. Before the hymns have done with this dust-creature man, they have advanced him to the state of a flaming seraph, crowned and, beyond all telling, free and glorious. But it is a strugglesome way.

We say that the hymnal is a lyric handbook of practical living, if it is a book of glorious dreams. Life is short, says one of Wesley’s hymns:

And man must be on his long way. Doddridge, following St. Paul, finds great zest in life—“as a strong man, to run a race”:

But life, sings Toplady, is not all haste and urgency; duty may lead through peace as well as turmoil:

Sorrow and toil are part of the uphill journey, but even that may have its element of joy:

Oliver Wendell Holmes believes it:

Isaac Watts sings out, as only Watts can express such ideas:

The sturdy hymn of faith, “How Firm a Foundation,” has this stanza:

One of Bonar’s hymns begins:

The best lyrics of the hymn-book, and the favorite ones, are those expressive of human insufficiency and loneliness. They are much more than intellectual realization of the fact; they are cries of longing for fellowship with God.

“Abide with Me” expresses the same insufficiency and peril of life, and longing for completeness and solid standing:

“Nearer, My God, to Thee” condenses in a stanza the gist of the hymn-book’s whole theory of life and its meaning and end:

Now, when souls have found that fellowship, they desire to share it; this indeed is the final test of whether they have found it. A hymn by John Chadwick (1840-1904) is a good summary of this idea:

The city of God, says a hymn by Palgrave—of “The Golden Treasury”—is

One of the most familiar of modern hymns, Bishop Heber’s “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” this figures human duty and its fulfilment:

Favorite among the hymns are those of mutual encouragement and exhortation, such as “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “Christian, Dost Thou See Them?” and “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.”

The passion of the hymn-book for world-wide enlightenment and justice and peace is vividly expressed in some of the best hymns. Especially have some of the more recent hymns stressed social responsibility as a direct method of forwarding the purpose of creation. They expect the world to be less and less a wilderness of woe; they expect crooked paths to be made straight for the children of men, and deserts to blossom as the rose. This will all come with growing Christian enlightenment and practice.

One notices the ring of militant evangelism in these hymns:

When people sing such zealous ideas as these, they may bring surprising things to pass. This zeal brings to mind such traveling souls as Livingstone, John Wesley, Roger Williams, the French priests among our West and Northwest wilds, St. Augustine in England, and St. Paul himself smiling over the catalogue of his missionary hardships.

Isaac Watts, looking ahead from the end of the seventeenth century, is confident as to the influences of such evangels:

Alexander Pope, Roman Catholic contemporary of non-conforming Watts, writes with equal conviction and splendor:

William Cullen Bryant writes out of the spirit of Puritan New England:

And Samuel Longfellow:

The hymnal Utopia, an ideal city, built to music, to deep harmonies of grace and truth, is much spoken of, and it is imaged forth in great light and splendor. There is a spiritual city, not built with hands, invisible in the heavens; and there is to be also on the earth a state built after the celestial likeness—the Kingdom of Heaven, the City of God.

To attain this city is the purpose of man’s journey that he calls life. Individuals may be citizens of the kingdom, enriched with its privileges and delights long before the human race in general shall come to it; at the same time the hymns see the whole world moving toward it. Hymns new and old announce the coming kingdom and the City of God.

Some of these hymns have a very modern ring; and yet their basic idea goes back very far in the world’s best recorded thought. All the better if it is spoken in the phrase of modern life.

Their visions of better times for the human race in the world, pictured with such reality of conviction, seem humanly plausible. There are all sorts of agencies busy. What we call science is a wonderfully good, if a sometimes pert, servant of God; its freeing man from the old fears that used to bedevil his life, from the terrible plagues and famines, from the grinding toil that blinds the mind and deadens the spirit—all this is something. Now, with the new 347 freedom and leisure and power that man is getting, the hymn-book thinks, he has most to fear and guard against himself; he must have purity of heart and humility of spirit and good will toward man. To quote from Kipling’s hymn:

As to the life after death, the hymn-book is triumphantly certain. Strangely at the darkest point of human experience, the contemplation of death and decay, the hymns grow most sanguine.

This life at best is very short.

And death for the just is but going to a happy and permanent home.

But the City of God which the hymns predict will rise in the earth as the climax of human welfare and felicity is, they say, only the earthly counterpart of the celestial City of God.

The most familiar figure portraying the ultimate destiny of the human soul is that of singing praises to God with the accompaniment of harps around the throne in the holy city. It is an attempt to picture the ultimate height of duty achieved and therefore the ultimate height of felicity.

This trope of singing hymns has been since misty ancient times the most acceptable symbol that poets could find of the idea. But a symbol is no more than a symbol. The too literal mind is sure to find trouble with the figure; yet there is great call to thought in it. The harp means music, and that implies sweetness, harmony, order—diversity becoming higher unity. Human souls in concord with celestial harps will be as notes in divine music, each 351 itself, and all a perfect unity, a harmony of praise. Praise. It seems safe to say that from the time when one of mankind first looked up with a gleam of intelligence in his eyes, this matter of ascribing worthship has been an important concern of his life; according to the records, it has occupied much of the time and attention of various peoples—it is in most languages the first syllable of recorded thought. And it has doubtless been one of man’s most practically useful occupations.

For praise is looking up with admiration and love to an ideal. It is prizing superior might, intellect, or beauty. It is a contemplation of perfection, or of the best ascertained idea of perfection, with a firing of the emotion to delight and acclamation, and a stirring of the will to approach, to emulate, and to find union with that perfection. Contemplation calls the ideal Truth. The will names it Duty. The emotion calls it Beauty as the high object of its delight.

And the use of praise—the practical effect of this contemplation and acclamation of what is higher, this finding of something to raise the eyes unto, to wonder at, and to rise toward—has been to furnish a desirable end to otherwise confused and divergent trails of life, to raise a unifying standard, and to give to mankind a common view of what Plato calls “the road of their longing and the quality of their souls.”

Contemplation of higher perfection with love and 352 delight, that is praise, and that is what the hymnal images as the highest employment of the soul; and that is the heart of the hymn-book.

The symbol of praise in the form of song looks especially toward emotion which man puts into melody of tone and rhythm. Song is the blossoming of emotion. Here the whole is typified by its flower, joy in the contemplation of all-pervading Good raising the voice into lyric beauty. Significant, too, is the detail picturing the lyric acclaim as being also choric. This is a most social and catholic figure conceiving souls at the highest employment and in joyful concord.

The details of the figures, gold and precious stones, white garments, palms, and crowns, have been dimmed by custom; yet they have thrilled people for ages, and are still to sensitive imaginations full of richness and splendor of meaning. The hymn means by jewels, doubtless, freedom from all conceivable poverty; by white garments, the cleanness which humanity really has in mind for itself and longs for; by palms, the triumph of the soul’s faculties; by crowns, the hope of the earth toward which democracy is stretching its hands—the hope that every man shall be free, absolute rightful monarch of his own being, respecting his neighbor’s kingship as his own—a divine democracy where all are crowned royalty. This is not the citizenry of old begging friars and anemic clerks that the young cavalier feared to find in heaven; the lowest of this citizenry is grander than all medieval 353 knights and ladies and kings and queens whatsoever. And the holy city is no outpost, but the capital center of all might, holy benevolence, spotless grace, and immortal joy.

These dreams and visions of the hymn-book are so plausible and beautiful that unlettered folk take them as words of truth and hope, and hold them always in their memory; yet there is no mind so strong of wing that it is not challenged by these songs to soar to heights beyond its reach. The harmony of the hymnal voices, too, is symbolic of the harmony it would foster among men. In the hymn-book the parties, the Anglicans, Baptists, Unitarians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Eastern Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and some members of no church, are together in deep accord. Its greatest contributor is a Jewish king. Augustine, Bernard of Cluny, Isaac Watts, and John Mason Neale were far apart in time and circumstance, but very near together in “Te Deum Laudamus,” “Urbs Beata Hierusalem,” “Jesus Shall Reign,” and “Jerusalem the Golden.” Wesley and Toplady did not agree in some dogmas; but they sing with wonderful harmony in “Rock of Ages” and “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” Newman the Roman Catholic and Mrs. Adams the Unitarian were far apart in circumstance but near together in “Lead, Kindly Light” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther are side by side in sweet accord when they sing songs of prayer and praise to God. The hymn-book is a great book for faith, hope, and 354 charity—and especially for charity, the greatest of these.

Now to summarize the teachings of this elect book of lyric poetry—this popular lyric manual of philosophy, ethics, and esthetics—about the beginning and end of all things: The beginning and end is God, and God is infinitely good, and the universe is therefore ordered and safe. He images forth his nature and will in the spheres that move to music and in the harmonies of a wind-flower beside the road; but above all other images of Him is man himself. And man, says the hymn-book, has the duty of fulfilling the will of God concerning him. But he is so God-like as to be free. He may go right or wrong, toward death and destruction or toward life and endless freedom and felicity.

This is the body of the hymn-book. Its terse and apt injunctions to duty, its harmonious phrases speaking calmness of mind and steadiness of purpose, its gentle and graceful verses winning folk to peace and charity with their neighbors, its prayer for all sorts and conditions of men as brothers, its stern warnings, its ringing calls to uprightness and purity of life, its sweet rhythms of consolation and hope—all these things, sung by mothers to their children, learned, as our fine English idiom says, by heart, illuminated and colored by memorable airs and by recollections of scenes familiar and dear, hallowed often with memories of solemn and exalted experiences—make the hymn an invaluable force for good, and an ever-fresh inspiration to grace and comeliness of life.