Chapter IX: Part I: The Character of the Hymn (3)

Many of our most frequently used hymns are unfeignedly didactic. Bishop Wordsworth’s “O day of rest and gladness” is a resume of the arguments for the validity of the Christian Sabbath. “The Church’s one foundation” is one of a series of hymns by Samuel J. Stone expounding the Apostles’ Creed. Heber’s hymn, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty” is suffused with poetical feeling, but is none the less a didactic hymn emphasizing the doctrine of the Trinity.

At the same time, this religious truth must have a poetic element. It is the great value of a hymn as a teaching method that it puts heart and feeling into the doctrine it expresses, and so gives it reality and appeal. Despite Dr. Austin Phelps’ rejection of Montgomery’s “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire” as “without the wings of song,” the Church at large has been singing it for a century. Even if the last stanza were omitted, it would still be a good hymn, because the doctrine of prayer is clothed in such beautiful and inspiring language that it is eminently fitted for the expression of a congregation in song.

_The Doctrinal Hymn._

The doctrinal hymn is simply a limited form of the didactic hymn in that it is devoted to the promulgation of the leading Christian doctrines, while the general didactic hymn may be used to inculcate any truth or duty, whether of a fundamental character or not.

The use of the hymn to teach the doctrines of the Church has numerous advantages. It is clear and succinct, not obscuring the truth with philosophical or metaphysical subtleties. It is dogmatic and not argumentative. It has the mnemonic advantage of rhythm and rhyme and is easily remembered. It has the inspiration of collective singing. Above all it is vivid and poetical, emotionalizing and vitalizing what in the philosopher’s hands becomes abstract and dry.

America’s most distinguished hymnologist clearly differentiates the doctrinal theologian and the doctrinal hymn writer: “The theologian and the hymn writer traverse day by day the same country, the Kingdom of our Lord. They walk the same paths; they see the same objects; but in their methods of observation and in their reports of what they see, they differ. So far as theology is a science, the theologian deals simply with the topography of the country: he explores, he measures, he expounds. So far as hymn-writing is an art, the writer deals not with topography, but with the landscape: he sees, he feels, he sings. The difference in method is made inevitable by the variance of temperament of the two men, the diversity of gifts. But both methods are as valid as inevitable. Neither man is sufficient in himself as an observer or a reporter. It is the topography and the landscape together that make the country what it is. It is didactics and poetry together that can approach the reality of the spiritual Kingdom.”[2]

It follows that the doctrinal hymn is not simply reluctantly admissible, it is actually peremptorily necessary if the doctrines of the Christian faith are to be impressed upon each rising generation. This function of the hymn is all the more important because of the decline of doctrinal preaching. It is the “substance of doctrine” the hymns supply rather than the rigid philosophical shell which the creeds and the catechism offer. It is this shell that is “dry,” not the realities it too often hides.

_The Homiletical Hymn._

The homiletical hymn is a homily, as its name implies—a sermonette. The term refers to its form, not to its content, for that is usually doctrinal and always didactic. It is sermonic because it proceeds from point to point, leading the way to a practical application. This form of hymn makes up the great body of the older hymnody, because it was written by sermonizers who applied homiletical methods to their hymns.

Take Doddridge’s hymn, “Ye servants of the Lord”: the first stanza makes the general appeal for service; the second emphasizes the need of readiness for that service; the third, attention to the Lord’s commands; the fourth exclaims over the joy and the reward of service; the fifth, the honors that Christ shall heap on his servant. That makes a fine outline for a sermon!

The homiletical hymn was often dry because the sermon was dry. They were both too frequently “proses” in a sense different from the medieval use of the word.

_The Hymn of Propaganda._

The hymn of propaganda calls for consideration. It is a didactic hymn, of course, but its purpose is not to express the fundamental doctrines of the faith, but to urge some subordinate article of it out of all proportion to its intrinsic importance, or to win adherents for some new religious ideas. There are hymns of Perfectionism, of Holiness, of Unity, of Premillenialism, of Second Adventism, of Christian Science, of phases of Theosophy, that fall within this category.

The spiritual value of some of these is not to be underrated, but each hymn must be judged on its own merits. The danger of exaggeration is the chief point calling for circumspection. Hymns of propaganda criticizing or antagonizing the Christian Church must be rejected.

_Hymns of the Social Gospel._

A few years ago, when the sociological aspect of Christianity won wide attention, it was seriously proposed to rewrite the whole hymnbook and inject the “Social Gospel.” A few desirable hymns on Brotherhood were written which fill out a previously somewhat neglected rubric. Brotherhood is not a discovery of the twentieth century, but has been an integral part of Christianity from the beginning and was never so fully exemplified as at that period.

In so far as the “Social Gospel” is simply the application of the gospel of Christ to old wrongs that yet need to be righted, like slavery, and war, and alcoholism, or to new social complexes in our modern economic life where there is injustice, or where there is need of help for body, mind, or soul, hymns may prove desirable helps. They will, however, be written spontaneously, not as propaganda, and will be used freely in so far as there is practical and emotional justification for them. The onward progress of the Kingdom in these unfinished tasks will most likely depend on the stimulation of the great motives that have given victory in the past. It is the appeal to these motives that gives vitality to such a hymn as “Where cross the crowded ways of life,” by Frank Mason North.

_Special Hymns._

It is a little difficult to supply hymns for subordinate topics which do not stir the spiritual pulses, and hence the poorest hymns in our hymnbooks are found in these divisions. The doctrines of Human Depravity, Regeneration, Sanctification, the State of the Impenitent Dead, do not lend themselves to attractive hymnic expression.

These hymns have no wings; they are unemotional and without appeal to the imagination. Yet the selectors of hymns who have a purely homiletical point of view demand that a hymnal shall supply appropriate lyrics to fit subjects and occasions that have no lyrical possibilities. If the demands of symmetrical completeness in a hymnal, or of close fitness of theme in a service, must be met, then one must be content with prosaic verses lacking in poetic charm or emotional inspiration.

_The Great Hymnic Themes._

There are certain doctrines, certain experiences, that appeal so strongly to Christian hearts that the impulse to write and sing about them far exceeds that growing out of less general, less striking themes. There may be a great difference in the favorite themes of different persons, under different circumstances, in different generations. The Latin medieval hymnists greatly stressed the suffering Christ; Watts sang of the majesty and glory of God and of his reign in the moral and spiritual world, and his hymns are found largely in the purely worshipful rubrics of our hymnals; Charles Wesley wrote in the midst of a great revival, and his hymns emphasize the plan of salvation and voice the personal experiences of the saved. In our own day the ideas of service, of public welfare, of works of philanthropy and mercy, and of social justice find expression.

The supreme theme, of course, is Christ. Whatever phases of Christian doctrine or experience may seem to absorb the mind of any generation, still the songs cluster about the person of Jesus Christ. As Dr. Austin Phelps eloquently insists, “here the rapture of holy song culminates on earth, as it does in heaven. Here every grace of religious character, and every experience of a devout life, has found freedom to express itself in hymns of worship. Where can another such body of sacred poetry be found in any language, as that which comprises the Christology of the songs of the Church?”

This hymnody is all the more appealing in that it sings a living and not a dead Christ, a present personality, near and dear, and not merely a historical character. The singer does not strain his power of thought and elevation of expression to hymn adequately the perfections of an infinite God, but spontaneously rejoices in a Friend who “sticketh closer than a brother”!

_Chapter VI_
THE GOSPEL HYMN

If this were a purely scholastic and literary treatise on the hymnody of the Church, the subject of this chapter might be ignored; but this discussion purports to be practical, and the Gospel hymn is too large a factor in the life and work of our churches to be thus brushed aside. It is a conservative estimate to say that four out of five churches in our land make use of these hymns to a greater or less extent. They even elbow their way into the most exclusive hymnals issued by ecclesiastical authorities. Collections of them are found not only in rural or village communities, but in urban churches as well. Great denominational publishing houses issue them by the hundred thousand. They are heard in the great ecclesiastical gatherings and conventions of the land. Great evangelistic movements depend on them for inspiration and for aggressive energy.

Yet the Gospel hymn has been treated as a convenient “punching bag” for the literary and musical idealist. One respects the antagonistic attitude of the high liturgist to whom the form is so significant, or of the literary or scholarly man whose susceptibilities are outraged by the acknowledged shortcomings and banalities of many of these popular religious lyrics. Nonetheless, one is astonished that persons of high intelligence, in their devotion to exclusively literary and musical standards, should be blind to the great spiritual value of the better specimens of this indiscriminately condemned class of hymns, and to the extraordinary effectiveness and the immense results in aggressive religious work which this people’s hymnody has demonstrated.

This is really only the recrudescence of an ancient feud between the conception of the hymn as exclusively worshipful and belonging to the liturgical service, and as the free lyrical expression of the religious life of the people adapted to all phases of Christian life—individual, domestic, and social, as well as ecclesiastical. As the church life of the early Christians began to crystallize, the former improvisations were discouraged. In time, the service of song was taken from the laity in the interest of greater dignity and churchliness. The Arian controversy with its hymnic outburst freed the wings of popular religious song, only for them to be restrained again by the rigid formalism organized and enforced by Gregory the Great.

The Waldenses, the Hussites, the Lollards, each group had its own popular hymnody. In the general breaking of bonds in the Reformation, the popular hymns of Huss and Luther and their associates, and the metrical psalms of Marot and Sternhold set to popular secular melodies, were the first manifestations of the new freedom.

The same outcry was heard against the hymns of Watts, and a little later against those of the Wesleys, not only in Great Britain, but in New England as well. In the latter the outcry was heard against the “camp-meeting ditties” of the aggressive Methodists as they spread into the West.

Even now, in Germany there is frequent protest against the use in church service of the simpler “folk” hymns, like “Harre des Herrn” (Wait on the Lord), “Ich will streben” (I will strive), and “Sei getreu bis in den Tod” (Be faithful unto death), because they are more recent in origin and have not the severe dignity of the older hymns and chorals.

And so the feud between the devout formalism of the liturgical spirit and the free attitude of aggressive spirituality has gone on from century to century and from land to land, and will continue to do so “until He come.”

_Lack of Discrimination._

There is an utter lack of discrimination shown in the opposition to Gospel hymns.

It is no more true that all Gospel and Sunday-school hymns are crude, illiterate, and undignified than is the anti-foreign Chinese’s charge that all Americans are liars and thieves. Many of the Gospel hymns were written by devout, cultured people of high intelligence. Fanny Crosby has had wide recognition, and there have been many others of equal ability, but lacking her adventitious appeal for sympathy. There are many Gospel hymns which deserve the harshest denunciations that have been expressed. In a people’s hymnody that was inevitable; but there are others so fine that the line of essential values between the Gospel and the standard hymn is difficult to trace. Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings’ _Spiritual Songs_ was practically a people’s Gospel songbook, used for the same purposes and in the same relative spirit, and largely made up of new materials in text and music just like a modern Gospel songbook, being even issued in parts. Among its new hymns were Palmer’s “My faith looks up to Thee” and Smith’s “The morning light is breaking,” now recognized as leading standard hymns. The same is true of Gilmore’s “He leadeth me, O blessed thought!” and Kate Hankey’s “I love to tell the story” and Mrs. Hawks’ “I need Thee every hour.” Mrs. Gates’ “I will sing you a song of that beautiful land,” E. E. Hewitt’s “More about Jesus would I know,” Hopper’s “Jesus, Saviour, pilot me,” Stite’s “Simply trusting every day,” Walford’s “Sweet hour of prayer,” Hunter’s “In the Christian’s home in glory,” Bliss’ “Almost persuaded,” Spafford’s “It is well with my soul,” and Pres. Dr. J. E. Rankin’s “God be with you till we meet again” are none of them illiterate or undignified. Indeed, many of the writers of these despised hymns were college professors, clergymen of high standing, editors, women of education and culture and of profound spiritual life. Many Gospel song writers are far and away superior to the average of the hymnists of the eighteenth century—indeed, have written nothing so unpoetical and so distinctly offensive to good taste as some of the hymns published by Watts and Wesley, the hymnic giants of that age.

There is an impulse to distinguish between Gospel hymns and Gospel songs, accepting the former and rejecting the latter; but that is playing with words. Good Gospel songs are to be baptized Gospel hymns and allowed to enter the golden gates of approved hymnody. Others draw the line at the end of the Moody and Sankey campaigns, closing the canon at that time and regarding all later Gospel songs as apocryphal! But the worst specimens that have appeared were issued before that date and many excellent ones have been written since. No such mechanical criteria can be applied. The acid test of actual usefulness must be employed with Gospel songs as it was to formal hymns. That many of the former have won a permanent place without the emendation needed by the latter shows how unjustified is the indiscriminate condemnation of this whole class of sacred lyrics.

_Wrong Assumptions of the Opposition._

In much of the discussion there seems to be an underlying assumption that there is an inherent antagonism between the standard and the Gospel hymn, that the latter is intended to displace the former. Nothing can be farther from the truth. It is true there is an occasional church where the standard hymns are neglected, but they are a negligible minority. The current Gospel song collections practically all supply a large department of standard hymns and their tunes, in many cases all that are in actual general use. The value of the standard hymn is recognized everywhere as having a most important place in the work of the church.

But its very dignity and strength occasion the limitations to its use, and beyond those limitations the Gospel hymn comes as a complementary help. The wise preacher does not use Gospel hymns in his formal, worshipful services, but finds them indispensable in popular evening services, where not awe and solemnity but spirit and aggressiveness, and appeal to the person of average or less culture, are needed. His prayer meeting and other subordinate meetings of groups need the individual feeling and intimacy with religious things supplied by the Gospel hymns.

In evangelistic meetings a few of the standards can express the high peaks of interest, but the Gospel songs lead up to those heights. The great revivals of the nineteenth and of the early decades of this century were distinctly characterized by the use of Gospel songs, many of them not even of the higher type.

_Unfairness in Comparisons Made._

While the worst specimens of Gospel hymns have usually been selected as the basis of attack, the very best of the standard hymns have been held up as the criterion of value; the utter unfairness of such comparison is evident enough. Gospel hymns should be judged by their best specimens when compared with standard hymns.

The inequity of such a comparison is made more flagrant by the fact that these standard hymns, only hundreds in number, which are justly appreciated and lauded, are the survivors of multiplied tens of thousands that were written through the generations. Of the more than seven hundred written by Isaac Watts, twenty-three appear in the recent _Presbyterian Hymnal_. Of the nearly seven thousand hymns of Charles Wesley, the new _Methodist Hymnal_, naturally biased in judgment by tradition, uses only fifty-five, while the _New Presbyterian Hymnal_ finds space for only eighteen. This tremendous mortality is not necessarily due to offensive weakness and faults, for hundreds served their day and generation most acceptably and well. In like manner the older Gospel hymns, which have had their day of usefulness are fading out of these collections, making way for new ones that express the feelings of the present generation more intimately. This is as it should be.

But when the detractor of current Gospel hymns finds some delectable bit of vulgarity or of literary clumsiness or of grammatical solecism, let him remember that Watts published lines like these:

“Tame heifers here their thirst allay
And for the stream wild asses bray.”

“I’ll purge my family around
And make the wicked flee”;

and that John Wesley allowed his brother to publish

“Idle men and boys are found
Standing on the devil’s ground;
He will give them work to do,
He will pay their wages too.”

Remember also that William Cowper, the poet acclaimed by literary critics as the father of a new movement in poetical writing, issued such a stanza as this:

“Not such as hypocrites suppose
Who with a graceless heart
Taste not of Thee, but drink a dose
Prepared by Satan’s art.”

If the great poets and hymn writers of that age wrote such lines, what must have been the character of the verses of the obscure scribblers and poetasters of their day!

Not only do the best of the standard hymns alone survive, but those survivors have been rewritten and amended by a half-century of editors and hymn revisers, their revisions being re-revised by succeeding critics, as we have seen in a previous chapter. Every line and phrase has been submitted again and again to the microscope of the literary critic, until we have a body of hymns established in every detail by the consensus of the best literary minds of the last century. This is no derogation of our accepted hymns, but a great advantage to them; but it must not be overlooked in making a fair comparison.

_Criteria for Evaluation._

Much of the criticism of the Gospel hymn is due to excessive emphasis on the literary and poetical aspects of the verses to which objection is made. But we have already insisted on the fact that these are not the final criteria of the value of hymns, although they are important factors not to be overlooked.

Speaking of a hymnal containing material of inferior literary quality, Dr. Austin Phelps, of Andover Seminary, who shared with his colleague in the faculty of that institution the honor of being the fathers of American hymnology, wisely remarks: “It is a shallow judgment either to approve or to condemn such a work in the spirit of a connoisseur in aesthetics. The very conditions of excellence in a body of popular psalmody must extend its limits out of the range of a purely Attic taste.”

The approval or rejection of a hymn, or of a body of hymns, is not a question of personal taste or liking, nor even of personal religious reactions, but a question of the needs of the people to be stimulated and helped, and the results of interest and spiritual impression secured among them by the hymns under consideration.

_Gospel Hymns and the Unsaved._

There is a distressing lack of understanding both of the real function of the hymn and of the needs of the body of Christians as a whole, and even a greater ignorance of the psychology of reaching the unsaved. If the body of our standard hymns fails to develop needed interest among a large element in our churches, how much less will it appeal to these outside the fold! If these intellectually and culturally less privileged masses in and out of the Church are to follow the Apostolic example and “sing with the understanding,” the songs must lie within the range of their understanding. Professor A. S. Hoyt, D.D., of Auburn Theological Seminary, sums up the situation very wisely: “A few of the modern revival hymns make quick appeal to the modern heart, are easily sung, and may be teachers of religious life. The majority of them are shallow in thought and without musical worth. But in all matters of education we must help men as we find them and patiently lift them to better things.”

_Gospel Hymns and the Demands of Worship._

Perhaps the most misleading assumption among those who reject the Gospel hymn is that the chief use of hymns is in worship. They will sing didactic hymns, hortative hymns, inspirational hymns, addressed solely to human ears and hearts in the stated church service and then cast out the Gospel hymn because it is not fitted for solemn worship. That attitude conceives the Divine Being as a literary connoisseur, or as a music critic who applies conventional academic criteria in accepting what his people bring him. Their slogan is that we must bring to God only our best, insisting that anything but our best is an insult to him, forgetting that we do not bring the hymn, but the spiritual results of the hymn in devotion and love and consecration, and that hymn which produces these in the given congregation is the best.

Moreover, the approach to God is not the sole function of effective hymns; it may instead be the approach to men. The best hymn in that department is the one that succeeds most fully in affecting the souls to be influenced. There, not the abstract values of the hymn count, but its psychological adaptation to the actual mental, moral, and spiritual condition of the minds and hearts to be helped, not overlooking even the physical factors essential to religious results.

Furthermore, there are lines of church activity which need the religious atmosphere and suggestiveness but are concerned with social and administrative work, with the temporalities of church life, for which many of these Gospel hymns are eminently fitted. There are campaigns, drives, and movements that need musical help such as many of the less subjectively pious Gospel hymns can give.

_Gospel Hymns in the Preparatory Service._

There are large and miscellaneous church gatherings where there is no preparation of mind to sing worthily and deeply religious hymns, and where it would be a sacrilege to ask the miscellaneous crowd to take upon their lips such a hymn as “O Love that wilt not let me go” or “Oh, worship the King, all-glorious above.” Better to sing the semi-religious and shallow “Brighten the corner where you are” until the crowd has been psychically organized.

_Gospel Hymns in the Laboratory._

When we come to organized campaigns to persuade unconverted persons, old and young, to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, the need of these informal, stimulating, emotional folk songs becomes immediately apparent. Awe, impressiveness, spiritual elevation of mind, such as are supposed to be produced by the standard hymns, are not the stimuli that create aggressiveness of mind among Christian workers, nor are they calculated to awaken a response among the unspiritual. It is proved as surely by actual laboratory experiment that Gospel songs produce the conditions needed for securing a religious revival as that hydrochloric acid and water poured over zinc clippings will produce hydrogen.

Lord Shaftesbury, the great English philanthropist and Christian worker, speaking in Ireland in the interest of evangelistic work there, said: “Therefore go on circulating the Scriptures. I should have been glad to have had also the circulation of some well-known hymns, because I have seen the effect produced by those of Moody and Sankey. If they would only return to this country, they would be astonished at seeing the influence exerted by those hymns which they sing.”

It is worthy of incidental note that the most of those to whom the Gospel hymn is anathema are not much in sympathy with any evangelistic methods; nay more, they seem to shrink from popular manifestations of religious life. They have sharpened the edge of their religious refinement until it will no longer cut.

_The Advantages of Gospel Hymns._

These Gospel hymns have several distinct advantages that should not be overlooked. They are simple, easily understood by everybody, quickly appropriated as his own expression by the most limited in education or culture. They are quite emotional, expressing feeling and creating it. They are spontaneous and free, with no labored subtlety or recondite allusion. They are usually more or less rhythmical and stimulating, physically as well as mentally. They are adaptable to various situations and states of feeling. Even more than standard hymns they express personal religious experiences, and are more direct in their hortative method. The chorus, if intelligently written, emphasizes the fundamental idea of the hymn in an unescapable way. As a tool for aggressive effort it has no substitute, and but one rival—earnest and spirit-filled preaching.

_Discrimination in the Use of Gospel Songs._

It should be said, however, that the inventory of its values mentioned above applies to only a comparatively small part of the Gospel songs offered to the public, just as the accepted standard hymns are a very small part of the formal hymns from which they have been gleaned. Usually its faults are aridity, vapidity, and shallowness. Yet in all these shortcomings, specimens of equal weakness and futility can be found in verses by accepted hymn writers.

The better Gospel songs are after all the sincere expression of a certain stage of culture of mind and soul. That stage may not be high nor admirable, but it must be allowed its spontaneous expression.

Every generation has had its own ephemeral hymnody and will continue to have it in spite of all the scolding critics. When our religious people stop writing and singing new songs and are satisfied to sing over and over again the songs of preceding ages, it will prove that the process of ossification has set in and that vital force is passing away. Better that literary unskillfulness and mediocre musical talent shall continue to write, better to have ephemeral, shallow, and unsatisfying songs written by the thousands, than that the impulse to express spontaneously the vital godliness within should be entirely lost.

THE SINGING CHURCH