Part the Second. Hymns and Spiritual Songs. IN SIX BOOKS. I. THE DIVINE PERFECTIONS: CREATION AND PROVIDENCE. II. III. IV. WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT: SCRIPTURE: THE NEW CREATION. V. THE CHURCH OF CHRIST: SERVICE, CONFLICT, AND TRIUMPH. PEAKING TO ONE ANOTHER IN PSALMS AND HYMNS AND SPIRITUAL SONGS, SINGING AND MAKING MELODY IN YOUR HEART UNTO THE LORD. Hymns and Spiritual Songs. INTRODUCTION. HE Christian Hymn is the true sequel of the Hebrew Psalm. From the earliest ages of the Church, the impulse was natural to embody in lyrical forms those emotions of trust, love, and joy called forth by CHRIST'S redeeming work, for which the Psalter itself had no adequate expression. The "wondrous things" of Law and Prophecy had passed into the sublimer glories of the Gospel, and the very "praises of Zion" must yield to the song of Bethlehem, of Calvary, and of Olivet. That the New Testament has no Psalter of its own, does but illustrate the difference between the two dispensations. The inspiration of Jewish hymnody was special, and every song had its place in the Scripture canon; the strain of Christian praise was to be the voice of the Church through all time-spontaneous, varied, and expressing the highest devotional life of each succeeding age. Some eras, as we shall see, have been specially distinguished by the outflow of sacred song; but the gift has in a measure belonged to every generation and to every section of the Church universal. The earliest allusions to hymnody in the New Testament are, no doubt, to be understood of the ancient Psalms. These gave to our Lord and His disciples their parting hymn at the Last Supper,' and to Paul and Silas the "hymns" 2 which they sang in the prison at midnight. Other sacred songs, however, took their place at a very early period, framed on the model of the Gloria in Excelsis of the angels, the Benedictus of Zacharias, the Magnificat of the Virgin, and the Nunc Dimittis of Simeon. These Gospel hymns are all preserved by the evangelist Luke, the friend and companion of the Apostle Paul. The I See Introduction to Psalm cxiii. 2 So Revised Version, Acts xvi. 25. latter also has in his Epistles some scattered sentences which from their rhythmical structure have been thought to be fragments of early hymns. Thus, in an evident quotation, Ephesians v. 14: "Awake, thou that sleepest, And arise from the dead, So in 1 Timothy iii. 16: And Christ shall shine upon thee." "Without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: Again, 2 Timothy ii. 11-13: "Faithful is the saying: For if we died with Him, we shall also live with Him, If we endure, we shall also reign with Him; If we shall deny Him, He also will deny us; In Christian assemblies, the worship was partly that of " psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" (Colossians iii. 16); sometimes, as it would seem, extemporised, 1 Corinthians xiv. 26, "Each one hath a Psalm;" while in the hymns of the redeemed Church contained in the Apocalypse, we have, no doubt, the model of many a strain upraised in the congregations of the saints on earth (Revelation v. 12-14; vii. 12; xii. 10-12; xv. 3, 4). There seems to have been no very definite distinction between the "Psalm," the "Hymn," and the "Spiritual Song; " the three terms being employed as designating the whole class of devotional utterances in the form of song. Roughly, however, we may divide them thus: the Psalms were those contained in the Hebrew Scriptures: spiritual songs included all composed by spiritual men and dealing with spiritual themes; while hymns were direct addresses of praise to God. Thus every hymn was a spiritual song, but every spiritual song was not a hymn. "If we turn," says Archbishop Trench, "to Keble's Christian Year or Herbert's Temple, there are many poems in both, which, as they are certainly not psalms,' so as little do they possess the cha Synonyms of the New Testament, xxviii. Augustine defines the hymn as that which must be sung, must be praise, must be to God. The hymn," says Gregory of Nazianzus, "is melodious praise." "While the leading idea of aλpós," writes Bishop Lightfoot on Colossians iii. 16, "is a musical accompaniment, and that of "pvoc praise to God, cn is the general word for a song, whether accompanied or unaccompanied, whether of praise or on any other subject. Thus it was quite possible for the same song to be at once ψαλμός, ὕμνος, and ᾠδή." racteristics of hymns; but which could most justly be entitled 'spiritual songs;' and in almost all our collections of so-called 'hymns' at the present day, there are not a few which by much juster title would bear this name." Where or when the fountain of sacred song began to flow, we may not precisely tell. Many early hymns have, no doubt, been lost. The letter of Pliny the younger to the Emperor Trajan (A.D. 112), respecting the churches in Bithynia, expressly mentions the singing of hymns "responsively, to Christ as to God," as the great characteristic of Christian morning worship. Ignatius of Antioch is said to have been led by a vision of angels to introduce antiphonal singing into the churches of that city; and the tradition shows how exalted and heavenly an exercise the service of praise was held to be. Other references to the Church hymnody of the second and third centuries may be gleaned from early writers,' but no specimens have been preserved excepting, perhaps, the expanded form of the Gloria in Excelsis, a beautiful composition of unknown date, the substance of which has been incorporated into the Communion Service of the Anglican Church. In the so-called Apostolical Constitutions 3 it runs thus: "Glory be to God on high, and on earth peace, good-will among men. We praise Thee, we sing hymns to Thee, we bless Thee, we glorify Thee, we worship Thee, through the great High Priest; Thee the true God, the One unbegotten, whom no one can approach for the great glory. O Lord, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty, Lord God, the Father of Christ, the Lamb without spot, who taketh away the sin of the world, receive our prayer, Thou that sittest upon the cherubim ! For Thou only art holy, Thou only, Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, the God of every created being, and our King; by whom unto Thee be glory, honour, and adoration." Here, then, we have the first Christian post-biblical hymn that has been preserved to us. The Benedicite opera omnia, or "Song of the Three Children," which also appears to have been used in the service of the churches from the beginning, is from the apocryphal part of the Book of Daniel, and owes its origin to the Alexandrian Jews, from whom it passed into the service of the Church as a "deutero-canonical " Psalm. Of the " shorter doxology," as it is called, the Gloria Patri, there is no appearance in its present form until * See references in Smith's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, vol. i. p. 802. 2 It appears in its Greek form, between the Old and New Testaments, in the Alexandrine MS. of the Scriptures as A Morning Hymn." " 3 Book vii. 47. Bunsen says that, a few interpolations excepted, "we find ourselves" in this work "unmistakably in the midst of the life of the Church of the second and third centuries." Other authorities assign to the whole a considerably later date. |