of the superstition which forbade all singing in church except of the psalms of David. "Watts" had, however, very generally taken the place of the old Puritan books, and as a concession to liberalism and progress, an appendix to Watts had been added, containing selections from Toplady, Newton, Doddridge, Wesley, and a few others. This "Watts and Select" was the standard hymn-book throughout New England. Only a few years before "Plymouth Collection" was published, the village church where the Editor's boyhood was spent was threatened with a serious division because it had ventured to supersede "Watts and Select" with the more catholic" Church Psalmody; " and the strife was only allayed by a compromise, according to which for several years every hymn was announced from both hymn-books, the conservatives singing from the one book, the progressives from the other. Mr. Beecher, with a catholic courage rare in any minister, disregarded all conventional lines in the preparation of his hymn-book. He laid all poetry under contribution, not only the Calvinistic Watts and Toplady and the Arminian Wesley, not only the extremely proper, not to say prosaic, Doddridge and the self-abasing Newton, but he brought in contributions from sources which had theretofor usually been regarded as purely secular, Mrs. Browning, William Cullen Bryant, John G. Whittier; he even went beyond the lines of orthodoxy, and incorporated lyrics from the Unitarians Henry W. Longfellow and John Pierpont; and he set Puritanism at defiance by borrowing from Episcopal and Roman Catholic authors. There is now scarcely a single collection of any value in use in our churches which does not contain contributions from Unitarian and Roman Catholic sources; but though their use in 1855 was not wholly unprecedented, Mr. Beecher was severely criticised for his boldness. Even to-day there is no collection wider in its range or more catholic in its spirit; even to-day it would not be easy to find a better statement of the principles on which both hymns and tunes for congregational singing should be selected, than is to be found in the original Introduction to "Plymouth Collection," written in 1855. The success which instantly attended the publication of "Plymouth Collection," and the fame of the congregational singing of Plymouth Church, introduced a radical change in the musical services of the Puritan churches, and inspired a number of editors to follow the example which Mr. Beecher had set. In 1855 there were probably not a score of congregations in the land which were supplied with music-books for congregational use; now the great majority of the non-liturgical churches in our cities and towns, and even in our larger villages, are supplied with such books. There is no space here to trace the further development of congregational music; it must suffice to note respecting it two facts, I. In the nearly forty years which have elapsed since Plymouth Collection" was published, there has been, not only a great development in hymns and tunes, but also in that religious experience of which hymns and tunes are the expression. The Puritan theology developed an experience of awe and reverence perhaps more profound, certainly more unmixed with other emotions, than the later theology. But it did not develop the experience of trustful love for God, nor the spirit of ethical zeal, in the sense of military ardor, nor the aggressive missionary spirit. The ministry of such men as Lyman Beecher, Charles G. Finney, Leonard Bacon, Horace Bushnell, Phillips Brooks, and, certainly not least, Henry Ward Beecher, not to mention other like prophets of the new life in the Old World, has not been in vain. The hymn-book of to-day must have expressions of these later experiences, born of that theology which has made the fatherhood of God and the responsibility of Man its central teaching. No better expressions of awe and reverence can be found than in the stirring hymns of Watts; but beside these must be in the hymn-book of to-day the voices of Whittier, Holmes, and Faber. 2. Musically the development of the churches has taken two directions, one towards a broader, the other towards a higher, musical culture. Through the leadership of such men as Mr. Sankey and Mr. Stebbins, and through their musical compositions and those of some of their contemporaries of the same musical school, music has become an expression of the spiritual life for thousands who before were without a voice in public worship, and, as suppressed feeling easily dies, were often without any share in public worship. I desire to put on record my profound sense of the obligation of the Christian Church to those whose musical service has been rendered through what are known as "The Gospel Songs." But with this development, for which the Church is chiefly indebted to the United States, there has gone on another towards a higher musical life, for which it is chiefly indebted to England. Dykes, and Barnby, and Smart, and Hopkins, and Monk, have created a new school of music far superior spiritually, as well as musically, to anything available for church hymnology which existed half a century ago. The editor of to-day is no longer shut up to German chorals, which are almost uniformly unmelodious, and unsuited to American life, or to adaptations more or less successful, but always hazardous, from either oratorios, symphonies, or operas, by the great masters. The great English tune-writers are themselves masters in their own department. Their tunes are not fragments; each tune has its distinctive character; and the best of them are not wanting in that melodic quality which is almost essential to the congregational tune. What Mr. Beecher wrote in 1855 is no longer true: "The tunes which burden our modern books, in hundreds and thousands, utterly devoid of character, without meaning or substance, may be sung a hundred times, and not a person in the congregation will remember them. There is nothing to remember. They are the very emptiness of fluent noise." Thanks to the great tune-writers of the last fifty years, it is possible to-day to make a hymn and tune book which will realize in fact what could only be a prophet's ideal forty years ago: "But let a true tune be sung, and every person of sensibility, every person of feeling, every child even, is aroused and touched. The melody clings to them. On the way home, snatches of it will be heard on this side and on that; and when, the next Sabbath, the same song is heard, one and another of the people fall in, and the volume grows with each verse, until at length the song, breaking forth as a many-rilled stream from the hills, grows deeper and flows on, broad as a mighty river! Such tunes are never forgotten. They cling to us through our whole life. We carry them with us upon our journey. We sing them in the forest. The workman follows the plough with sacred songs. Children catch them, and singing only for the joy it gives them now, are yet laying up for all their life, food of the sweetest joy. Such tunes give new harmony and sweetness even to the hymns which float upon their current. And when some celestial hymn of Wesley, or of the scarcely less than inspired Watts, is wafted upon such music, the soul is lifted up above all its ailments, and rises into the very presence of God, with joys no longer unspeakable, though full of glory!" |