3 Glory to thee, who safe hast kept. 4 Lord, I my vows to thee renew: 5 Direct, control, suggest, this day, That all my powers, with all their might, THOMAS KEN, D. D. Rev. Thomas Ken, D. D., the author of this hymn, was a bishop in the Church of England; he was born at Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire, July, 1637, and died at Longleat, Somersetshire, March 19, 1711. He studied at Winchester school, where his name is still seen cut in one of the stone pillars; then his college course was pursued at Oxford; he was ordained to the ministry somewhere about 1666. After holding various preferments he removed again to Winchester; he was a fellow there in the college, and in 1669 became prebendary of the cathedral. In 1682 he was appointed chaplain to Charles II., and two years after this was made Bishop of Bath and Wells. This advancement was the more remarkable because, while he was living in Winchester, the loose court of the gay monarch visited the town and desired his residence for an abiding-place for some of those worthless creatures that followed in his train. "Not for the king's kingdom!" was the reply that became historic. And, instead of being punished, he was rewarded by an appointment which showed that even the king respected-his virtue. It was at Winchester also that he prepared a Manual of Prayers for the use of the scholars, and to this were appended his Morning, Evening, and Midnight Hymns. These were what gave to George Whitefield his pious bent in his college days. And these have come down to us in the years since with memories of early life and home prayers, when the voices now silent have sung at the family altar the unforgotten lines. 3 Thy works with sovereign glory shine, And speak thy majesty divine: Let Zion in her courts proclaim The sound and honor of thy name. 4 But who can speak thy wondrous deeds? Thy greatness all our thoughts exceeds: Vast and unsearchable thy ways; Vast and immortal be thy praise. "The Greatness of God," is the title affixed by Dr. Isaac Watts to this version of Psalm 145 in L. M. It consists of six stanzas, from which those in ordinary use have been chosen. It is a wise and suggestive remark of the German preacher Krummacher, that unbelief does nothing but darken and destroy. It makes the world a moral desert, where no divine footsteps are heard, where no angels ascend and descend, where no living hand adorns the fields, feeds the birds of heaven, or regulates events." 2 New mercies, each returning day, 3 If, on our daily course, our mind New treasures still, of countless price, 4 The trivial round, the common task, 5 Only, O Lord! in thy dear love REV. JOHN KEBLE Rev. John Keble, the author of the Christian Year, is better introduced to the world as a poet. Whatever part he took effectively in the great Tractarian movement was augmented extraordinarily by the exquisite beauty of his hymns. He wrote six of the ninety small treatises which were issued, but it was the poetry and singing put together rather more than the logic of the arguments which arrested to any extent the common people of Great Britain. In the end Keble chose the place of a village pastor; he became the Vicar of Hursley parish, near Winchester, and there, with the surroundings of rural content and peace about him, pursued the path of duty to the end of his life. He was the son of a clergyman, and was born at Fairford, Gloucestershire, April 25, 1792. He was educated at Oxford, graduating with high honors in his class in 1810. In 1831 he was appointed Professor of Poetry. This last distinction he had earned, not only by his eminent fitness for the position, but by the success of his little volume, the Christian Year, a noble work, reaching its ninety-sixth edition in the author's lifetime. It was published in 1827, and when the copyright expired in 1873 nearly half a million copies had been sold. As the market was then opened, and the fame of the poetry had reached the American public also, the sales became almost enormous. He issued afterward other books, but this one was the strongest and best. Large numbers of the poems in it are charged with sentiments which Protestant people are not willing to accept, but Keble shared with Newman all the responsibility of trying to turn the English Church over to Rome, without surrendering the emoluments of the establishment with which he continued in connection, until he died at Bournemouth, March 29, 1866. Keble followed the tradition of almost all the English hymnists in placing a morning and an evening hymn at the beginning of his book of poems. This piece of sixteen stanzas, from which the usual selection is compiled, is found at the opening of the Christian Year. The text added for a motto is quoted from Lam. 3:22, 23: "His compassions fail not. They are new every morning." 5 Show us some token of thy love, Upon a marble in the church of St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Mary Woolchurch Haw, Lombard Street, London, one may read this inscription: "John Newton, Clerk, once an Infidel and Libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy, Near 16 years at Olney in Bucks; And years in this church." This epitaph was prepared by himself, the blank of which, preceding the "years," should It will arrest attention on the instant, this frank admission made upon his tombstone by the man whose pen wrote the line all of us have sung for years: "How sweet the name of Jesus sounds." Was that man once an infidel and a libertine? His life has been written by his most intimate friend, Richard Cecil, and by others; our annotations need only that we quote what his biographers have said of him. He was born in London, July 24, 1725, "old style;" August 5, as we now reckon dates; he died in London, December 21, 1807. His father was a sea-faring man, the master of a ship trading chiefly between the ports of the Mediterranean. Within a year of his wife's death he married a woman who apparently did not care to carry out the instructions of the former wife. It was a relief to her to have the child out of the way; and he was put to school for two years, where he acquired the simplest rudiments and a little smattering of Latin. His main acquisitions were in the way of idle habits and a taste for low associates; and by the time he was eleven he left school finally, and accompanied his father on his voyages for the four succeeding years. He was one who never let his virtues get in the way of his enjoyments. Dissolute as he was even in his boyhood, he was not without religious conviction, frequently fasting and praying and returning to the Word of God; and we are told by Cecil that "he took up and laid aside a religious profession three or four different times before he was sixteen years of age.' Very shortly after this, while in sailor's garb, walking about the docks, Newton was seized and impressed on board the Harwich, and as war with France was at this time imminent, there was no way to procure his release. By and by, however, things changed, and he started on his way homeward over the sea. With the main incidents of that voyage we are probably many of us familiar-the terrible storm that threatened to founder the vessel, and which aroused a still more dreadful tempest in Newton's soul; so that amid the crashing of the thunder and the vivid darting of the lightning he became insensible to all without in the recurrence of those Scriptures that sounded as anathemas of heaven upon his guilty head; his despair, his finding a copy of Thomas à Kempis in the cabin and perusing it, and its profound impression upon him; his determination to quit his wicked life-with this we are familiar. Yet while this was succeeded by an undoubted change, it was not a thorough renewal. He needed a hand to lead him from remorse to repentance, from reformation to Christ. Even after his return to England and his marriage to Mary Catlett he reëmbarked in the slave-trade, and made three voyages to Guinea to purchase slaves for the West Indies. It was six years after that dreadful storm that Providence brought him into association with a godly sea captain, who, fathoming his condition, led him to that self renunciation which resulted in the full and unequivocal acceptance of Christ. In the Olney Hymns this one is given as No. 43, Book III. It is changed in many lines; the title of it there is: "On Opening a House of Worship;" and it contains seven stanzas of varying merit. The main value of the piece consists in the recognition once more of the necessity of a due preparation for worship before the exercise begins. The use of it for a dedication service is thoroughly legitimate. 20 "Guide us." Now that the sun is gleaming bright, 2 No sinful word, nor deed of wrong, C. M. 3 And while the hours in order flow, O Christ, securely fence Our gates, beleaguered by the The gate of every sense. 4 And grant that to thine honor, Lord, 5 Now to our God, the Father, Son, With praise to God, the Three in One, Let all creation ring. CARDINAL NEWMAN. This is one of the excellent translations with which John Henry Newman has enriched our hymnology. It is rendered with gracefulness and spirit from the hymn attributed to Ambrose, Jam lucis orto sidere, as found in the Paris Breviary. The author tells us that his voyage from Palermo to Marseilles, on his way home from Rome, was thoroughly occupied: "I was writing verses the whole time of my passage." He was evidently, partly with the return of health, and partly with the gaining of a settled mood of mind, in a state of the highest exhilaration and poetic fervor. A very strange measure of emotion comes over me as, in the ordinary course of these annotations, I reach the name of John Henry Newman. The venerable prelate of the Roman Catholic Church lies dead as I take my pen; friends whose names are mighty, and whose numbers grow large as they gather, are looking upon his face, pale and quiet, in the hall of the Oratory at Birmingham. He was born in London, February 21, 1801; he died in Birmingham, August 11, 1890, two days ago, suddenly, and apparently without pain. It arrests one's imagination to think seriously here how much he has learned within these forty-eight hours concerning those things which he tried honestly to understand, if ever a Christian man tried to understand anything, for years on years of patience, gentleness, and prayer. Charles Kingsley was the frankest of Great Britain's great men; as a true man he said in public what made a true man pay attention to his words. This led Dr. Newman at once to give his whole heart to the world in his Apologia pro Vita Sua. Not everybody agreed with him, but since then everybody respected him. We used to go and hear him preach; for better English speech, more classical correctness, could nowhere be found in London, and with that there was an indescribable dignity, touching one's heart like a sort of appealing cry from a soul in earnest and a life perfectly pure. He began almost with the century, he has lived almost to its end. He was a marked man in the world of letters, in history, and in ecclesiastical position. EARLY, my God, without delay, My thirsty spirit faints away 2 I've seen thy glory and thy power 3 Not life itself, with all its joys, 4 Thus, till my last expiring day, C. M. Dr. Isaac Watts gives to this the title, "The Morning of a Lord's Day." It consists of six stanzas, and is his version of Psalm 63, first part, C. M. It used to be sung at what were called "Dawn Meetings' years ago, and it is still employed as a devotional meditation by many a child of God, as he rises and remembers that the day has come which in the Lord's house is better than a thousand. "Since I began," says Edward Payson, when he was preparing for the ministry, "to beg God's blessing on my studies, I have done more in one week than in the whole year before." Martin Luther, when most pressed with toils, would never fail to throw himself on his knees the moment he saw the sunrise; for he felt this in his soul: "I have so much to do that I cannot get on without three hours a day praying." Many of God's best people have attributed their strength and advancement, more than to anything else, to the habit of devoting the first moments of the morning to supplication. Havelock rose at four o'clock, if the hour for marching was six, rather than be compelled to lose the precious privilege of LORD, in the morning thou shalt hear To thee will I direct my prayer, 2 Up to the hills, where Christ has gone 3 Thou art a God before whose sight 4 But to thy house will I resort, I will frequent thy holy court 5 Oh, may thy Spirit guide my feet C. M. 44 Psalm 122, C. M. One of the six stanzas is omitted. These words have long been associated with a familiar old tune, which used to be sung almost invariably in New England whenever they were given out from the pulpit or at family prayers. One might close his eyes and reproduce the whole vision of a conference-meeting with just a strain of that tune 'Mear," as naturalists are said to draw the picture of a fish the moment they see a single scale taken from it. Some days there were in this Christian republic wherein the very folk-songs of the people were psalms and hymns from Tate and Brady or Worcester's Watts sung to Aaron Williams' music. In these times some persons get up what they call "Old Folks' Concerts," in which they make the ancient choirs appear very funny. But those were excellent and pious days after all; they fashioned brave men and pure women, and they gave to the world great literature, and sweet memories of patience and strength, and gentle lives that knew and loved God when times were tougher than now. Not long ago a touching poem was published anonymously in the Hartford Times which seems to be worth quoting and perhaps preserving: 5 My soul shall pray for Zion still, While life or breath remains: There my best friends, my kindred, dwell, There God, my Saviour, reigns. 24 Going to Church" is the title which Dr. Isaac Watts has affixed to this version of "I HEARD the words of the preacher As he read that psalm so dear, Which mother sang at our cradle To the ancient tune of Mear. "And I felt her angel presence As sung were those blessed words; My heart was with rapture filling As sweet as the song of birds. "I longed for the land of summer, Life's river, with waters clear, "To-day that e'er-welcomed cadence "Brothers and sisters have parted; "I feel when we meet up yonder, My soul, how lovely is the place C. M. |