amendment and regulation.** With these
words opened an article on our present sub-
ject more than thirty years ago.
The inter-
val has been a time of unusual progress; yet
the observation might be repeated to-day
with as much truth as ever. For while the
last quarter of a century has witnessed one of
the most remarkable religious movements in
the history of our Church, and has left
scarcely one stone unturned by controversy
in its doctrine, discipline, and ritual; while
every irregularity has been called in ques-
tion, and every order more or less enforced,
hymns have been left to run wild. Their
really great importance has been lost sight
of amidst a clash of contention over matters
of more engrossing interest.

เ

But Hymnology itself has not stood still the while, as indeed appears by the long array of works at the head of this paper, and a number of others bearing upon the various branches of the subject there represented, as well as by the now familiar use of this very word Hymnology,' for which a writer of thirty years ago felt constrained to apologize. In fact, not only has the study of hymns become a recognized subject of literary research, but the hymns actually composed far exceed in number those of any equal period, except that which immediately followed the great Wesleyan movement just a century before.

In the days of William of Orange and his immediate successors the religious energies of the people had been laid to sleep under the so-called orthodoxy of those in high places; and when they were awakened by the cry of the Independent Calvinists and early Methodists, they found no channel for their devotions but the Prayer-book, which many of their leaders abhorred as a 'form,' and Tate and Brady's New Version, which they felt to be inadequate to satisfy the cravings of zealous religionists. The leaders could preach and could pray, but the people's demand was for something to sing; so many hymns, so many tunes, stirring, elevating, experimental. The supply was not slack: Isaac Watts, the schoolmaster's son at Southampton, taunted, it is said, by his father for his fastidious objections to the New Version (then really new), vindicated himself by writing off with great rapidity his own metrical Psalms and original Hymns. The ple once set, and the demand increasing with the spread of the revival under the Wesleys, a deluge of hymns was poured out on the land. Charles Wesley alone contributed six hundred; Dr. Doddridge, the two Battyes, Cennick, Hart, Steele, Toplady, and others,

* Quarterly Review,' July 1828.

produced each a separate volume of their own; and a multitude of less prolific writers swell the chorus up to the early part of the present century.

The very circumstance of Methodists having adopted hymns kept the Churchmen of those days more strictly to metrical psalms, and it was long before they raised their courage to throw overboard 'Tate and Brady,' with all the respectable Church-andState associations attached to them, and ventured to spoil the Egyptians by using hymns from Bethesda. But by degrees the Wesleyan and other like hymns gained a more acknowledged entrance into the Church, and indicated the possibility of some improvement upon the metrical psalms. This was a great step, and for some years Church people were satisfied; but such a feeling could not last; for only so long as Churchmen were content to ignore the order and rationale of their own Prayer-book could they be content to use a collection of hymns from which, more or less intentionally, all that harmonised with the spirit and arrangement of our services had been excluded.

The Nonconformists, for the most part, had written the hymns to supplant the Prayer-book; the Churchman attempted with the same hymns to illustrate it; and the result was, that the more he came to understand and appreciate the latter, the more hopeless he found it to adhere to the former.

But during the first quarter of the present century hymns of a character rather better suited to his purpose began to be written, as those by James Montgomery and Bishop Heber, whose hymns were the means of calling our attention to the subject at the time. But in both of them poetry too frequently was aimed at to the loss of simplicity; and the spirit of the Prayer-book was not quite caught by either the layman or the bishop.

Such or nearly such were the English hymns which presented themselves to the collector when Mr. Hall made the first distinet attempt, under the auspices of the late Bishop of London, to compile a Church Hymn-book. His idea was that the hymns already in use might be arranged to accord with the weekly services of the Church, and, exam-imperfect as his book was, an immense sale has proved that it went some way towards satisfying an acknowledged want. But it was imperfect in two respects. In the first place, the editor misapprehended the principle of our weekly services: instead of seeking the leading point around which the Lessons, Epistle, Gospel, and Collect of each Sunday and Holyday are grouped, and which

never have seen the light under other circumstances; they have been sifted through the various tastes of compilers, and tested further by being submitted to popular use. Some have fully established their popularity, some have been as clearly rejected. But a multiplicity of collections quite overwhelming

they combine to enforce, and following out | elicited, original and translated, which would the narrative course of the Christian year as a whole, he merely looked out the contents of each Lesson, Epistle, and Gospel, independently one of another, or some striking text in each, and set against it the hymn most nearly touching upon it. This was his mistake, the other was his misfortune. The Methodist hymns, which formed the staple of consequent confusion and corruption of his materials, and most of the modern hymns, hymns-a breach of uniformity more vexawere not written for our services, and it tious now than ever, because of the easy could hardly be expected that they would intercourse between different localitiesfall in with them very well. The labour and charges of heterodoxy-appeals to the Bishops ingenuity by which Mr. Hall discovered any-suppression of hymns-platform tirades and special connection between the hymns and newspaper controversies-all together cry the services must have been very great; to aloud for some amendment and regulation." us to discover it now, when pointed out, Complaints against many of the existing requires not a little pains. Hymn-books are but too well founded. We should rather eschew the responsibility of disturbing the confidence of congregations by pointing out, without being able to remedy, the graver errors of doctrine in the books put into their hands; but offences most glaring against taste, reverence, consistency, and even grammar, abound to an incredible extent. In the first place, it is scarcely too much to say that most compilers have started without any clear conception of what is a hymn. It is an error as old as the days of St. Augustine, who has laid down a definition of a hymn which, if applied to many of our books, would leave behind a very small residuum. A hymn, he tells us, must be 'praise-the praise of God—and this in the form of song.

Seeing the blemishes of this first experiment, and the vain attempts at improvement which followed it, the venerable society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, following up a suggestion in our former article, undertook the preparation of a Hymn-book. The error in principle, to which we have alluded, was here avoided; but practically, from having few new sources to draw from, the improvement is less marked than could be wished, and the barbarous curtailing of good hymns (for want, we suppose, of courage to break boldly enough through the old Procrustean system of "three verses and the Gloria Patri," which the prolixity and pointlessness of Tate and Brady had entailed upon us) is very disappointing. However large the circulation of these two books, they left many persons unsatisfied. What the Society had failed to do well was taken up by numberless individuals, some to do better, many worse; and there cannot be less than two hundred hymnals now in use, all published within the last thirty years.

That hymns should be addressed to God one would not expect to find doubted; yet practically this rule has been set aside, not only by those whose doctrine and custom sanction invocations of saints, but by others who have been led to do so by mere love of poetry. Bishop Heber frequently fell into this snare, as in his

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;
Star of the East the horizon adorning,

Guide where our Infant Redeemer is laid.'

How surprising it is that Pope's celebrated apostrophe to his soul

'Vital spark of heavenly flame!' &c.—. and Toplady's

So far up to the present time. Most happily and most wisely, the subject has been left hitherto to individuals to work out. The field has been left open, and an inducement thereby offered to all to work freely and do their best. We have thus obtained a large number of hymns of an improved tone, and showing a more intimate acquaintance with the subject generally. A very slight comparison of what we have and what we know now with the resources and knowledge of thirty years ago will satisfy us that, in spite 'Deathless Principle! arise!' &c.— of all the disadvantages of the present system, much good has come of it. If it has left should ever be admitted as appropriate to much to be done-perhaps much to be un- the worship of God, grand though they be done-yet it has done not a little already; as as poetry. And this brings us to the third may be seen by the great improvement mani-point in the definition, namely, that a hymn fested in the interesting collection of 'Hymns must be in the form of song; for song is not Ancient and Modern' which stands last upon poetry. our list. Numberless hymns have been thus

Addison's well-known paraphrase

Can this be a legacy left us by the high- | service-book, instead of being a complement pew system, when men, curtained in oak and to the Prayer-book; and thus it happens red baize, may have thought they came to that our hymns, in their tone, their style, church for their private orisons? their character, and their spirit, jar sadly with our prayers and lessons, whereas they ought to form with them an integral part of one well-harmonized whole. Take, for example, a hymn-one in itself unobjectionable-from the Hymn-book of the Christian Knowledge Society. Let us suppose ourselves in one of our old parish churches, the very type of liturgical worship, consistency, reverence, and solemnity, on the Sunday after Ascension, where the Morning Prayer, Litany and Communion Service are said, it may be chorally or not, so it be done in the spirit of our Church's worship. All is in keeping until after the third collect, when Hymn 65 is given out; instantly we must shake off the sense of supplication with which we joined in the prayers, and make ready for

We leave to divines the errors of doctrine which have crept in unawares from all sides with the subtle flow of the metre,-the pill of heresy silvered with rhyme. It is a sad truth, that every one who was dissatisfied with the obvious teaching of the Prayerbook and Articles has sought a vent for his opinions in a hymn-book. The Calvinist has Calvinized, and the sympathizer with Rome has Romanized, the services of his Church by his hymns; and although good theologians would no more think of grounding an argument on a hymn than on an impassioned sermon, yet the unwary may easily imbibe false notions from either.

We leave to the working parish-priest the duty of guarding against fine writing to the detriment of that plainness of speech so essential to the poor, yet so unaccountably forgotten by those would-be specially-popular writers the Methodists, who think nothing of using ineffable,' omnipotent,' beauteous,' 'timorous,' and the like, instead of their common synonyms, and indulge freely in such stilted phrases as

'Infinite grace! Almighty charms!

Stand in amaze, ye rolling skies,' &c. ;

and often, in consequence, come down suddenly to a bathos all the worse by contrast,

as

Shout, O earth, in rapturous song,

Let your strains be sweet and strong.

At sign of Him yon Seraphs bright

Exulting clap their wings."

We leave to the church musician the innumerable cases of false accentuation, merely stating from experience that many lines convey a different sense, when accented musically, from that which the author, who only read his lines, intended; many are left with no sense at all.

It will be a pleasure to us and the reader to pass from this fault-finding, to discover, if possible, the causes on one side, and the remedy on the other. The primary cause we take to be this:- We have started to provide hymns without what military men would call a basis of operations; and this not because we have it not, but because we have overlooked it. We have compiled hymnals ad nauseam upon all sorts of plans, while we had in our hands a frame-work asking to be furnished, and offering a principle for our guidance in which all agree. We went on as if a hymn-book was to be an independent

'Salvation! Let the echo fly

The spacious earth around!
While all the armies of the sky

Conspire to raise the sound.'

And then, with equal promptitude, we must subside from this apostrophe (all well in its place) into. a state of mind fitted for the solemn invocations of the Litany. Cases of this kind are common enough, if not quite so bad; and we leave it to the compilers who provide, and the clergy who select, the hymns, to decide who is most to blame. We would earnestly urge on both that every hymn, to be telling, must be well placed; that it must bear a relation, not only to the whole service of the day, but to that particular part which precedes or follows it.

It may seem to some that all these restrictions would result in the production of a book of which it might be said (as one com'piler complacently says of his own) that any recommendations it may possess are chiefly negative (!); that so much concession to the prejudices of the many users would eliminate all that is striking and forcible. It may be asked in reply, Is this the case with our Prayer-book? Yet was not that subjected to the most rigorous revision, and does it offend in any one of the above points?

This, however, admits of no doubt, that there is much which is as it ought not to be in our present hymn-books; and the feeling is beginning to gain ground, that, if we go much longer without change for the better, we shall grow worse. A remedy has already