English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth CenturyHistorians of the English congregational hymn, focusing on its literary or theological aspects, have usually found the genre out of step with the rationalist era that produced it. This book takes a more balanced approach to the work of four writers and concludes that only eighteenth-century Britain, with its understanding of public verse, common truth, and the utility of poetry, could have invented the English hymn as we know it. The early hymns sought to inspire, teach, stir, and entertain congregations. The essential purpose shifted slightly in line with each poet's setting and in accord with the poetic thought of his day. For Isaac Watts's Independents, powerful traditional imagery was appropriate. Charles Wesley's enthusiasm proceeded from and served the spirit of the revival. John Newton's prophetic vision particularly suited the impoverished community at Olney. William Cowper's masterful handling of formal conventions and his idiosyncratic personal hymns reflect his poetic, rather than clerical, vocation. Despite such temporal variations, the great poetry by each man displays themes of general Christian relevance, suggesting common experience, showing normative features of the genre, and bearing a complex and intriguing relationship to secular literature. |
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... believer. The grotesque tableaux of the Crucifixion familiar in Watts's hymns were subordinated to the reactions of the singers. As we have suggested, the relationship that this lesson in subjectivity bears to contemporary literature is ...
... believers' various spiritual states was very old indeed: “It is easy therefore for every man to finde out in the Psalmes, the motion and state of his owne soule, and by that meanes, his own figure and proper erudition.” Individual psalm ...
... writers were escaping. Tate and Brady made one of many attempts at modernization. The prescribed uses of the psalms show further that the psalms were accepted as both Christian and expressive of common spiritual states of the believer. The.
... believer. The combined characteristics of hymns, suggested in the opening pages of this chapter, provide reasons why a new variety of song was needed. First of all, while they marvelously expressed a range of familiar spiritual states ...
... believers; the next challenge was to justify texts unhallowed by the divine revelation that sanctified the Scriptures. Conforming to Calvinist critical tradition and recalling Sternhold's and Hopkins's strictures against those “ungodly ...
Contents
Self Sense the Revival | |
John Newton Olney Prophet | |
Exemplary Tradition the Loss of Control | |
Conclusion | |
Notes | |
Other editions - View all
English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century Madeleine Forell Marshall,Janet Todd Limited preview - 1982 |
English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century Madeleine Forrell Marshall,Janet M. Todd No preview available - 2014 |