Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/594

578 578 HYMNS [CLASSICAL AND HEBKEW. Hellenic hymns, according to this conception of them, have come down to us, some from a very early and others from a late period of Greek classical literature. Those which passed by the name of Homer were already old in the time of Thucydides. They are mythological poems (several of them long), in hexameter verse, some very in teresting. That to Apollo contains a traditionary history of the origin and progress of the Delphic worship ; those on Hermes and on Dionysus are marked by much liveliness and poetical fancy. Hymns of a like general character, but of less interest (though these also embody some fine poetical traditions of the Greek mythology, such as the story of Tiresias, and that of the wanderings of Leto), were written in the 3d century before Christ, by Callimaclms of Gyrene. Cleanthes, the successor of Zeno, composed (also in hexa meters) an &quot;excellent and devout hymn&quot; (as it is justly called by Cudworth, in his Intellectual System) to Zeus, which is preserved in the Eclogce of Stobseus, and from which Aratus borrowed the words, &quot; For we are also His off spring,&quot; quoted by St Paul at Athens. The so-called Orphic hymns, in hexameter verse, styled reAerat, or hymns of initia tion into the &quot;mysteries&quot; of the Hellenic religion, are productions of the Alexandrian school, as to which learned men are not agreed whether they are earlier or later than the Christian era. The Romans did not adopt the word &quot; hymn ; &quot; nor have we many Latin poems of the classical age to which it can properly be applied. There are, however, a few, such as the simple and graceful &quot; Diause sumus in fide &quot; (&quot; Dian s votaries are we &quot;) of Catullus, and &quot; Dianam tenerse dicite virgines&quot; (&quot;Sing to Dian, gentle maidens&quot;) of Horace, which approach much more nearly than anything Hellenic to the form and character of modern hymnody. 2. Helreiv Hymnody. For the origin and idea of Christian hymnody we must look, not to Gentile, but to Hebrew sources. St Augustine s definition of a hymn, generally accepted by Christian an tiquity, may be summed up in the words, &quot; praise to God with song&quot; (&quot;cum cantico&quot;). Bede understood the &quot;can- ticum &quot; as properly requiring metre ; though he thought that what in its original language was a true hymn might retain that character in an unmetrical translation. Modern use has enlarged the definition : Roman Catholic writers extend it to the praises of saints ; and the word now com prehends rhythmical prose as well as verse, and prayer and spiritual meditation as well as praise. The modern distinction between psalms and hymns is arbitrary (see PSALMS). The former word was used by the LXX. as a generic designation, probably because it implied an accompaniment by the psaltery (said by Eusebius to have been of very ancient use in the East) or other instru ments. The cognate verb &quot; psallere &quot; has been constantly applied to hymns, both in the Eastern and in the Western Church ; and the same compositions which they described generically as &quot; psalms &quot; were also called by the LXX. &quot;odes&quot; (i.e., songs) and &quot;hymns.&quot; The latter word occurs, e.g., in Ps. Ixxii. 20 (&quot;the hymns of David the son of Jesse&quot;), in Ps. Ixv. 1, and also in the Greek titles of the 6th, 54th, 55th, 67th, and 76th (this numbering of the psalms being that of the English version, not of the LXX.). The 44th chapter of Ecclesiasticus, &quot; Let us now praise famous men,&quot; &c., is entitled in the Greek Trarepow fytvos, &quot; The Fathers Hymn.&quot; Bede speaks of the whole book of Psalms as called &quot;liber hyrnnorum,&quot; by the universal consent of Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins. ^ In the New Testament we find our Lord and His apostles singing a hymn ({/x.vr/o-avres e^A#ov), after the institution of the Lord s Supper ; St Paul and Silas doing the same TW Oeov) in their prison at Philippi ; St James re commending psalm-singing ((//oAAeVo)), and St Paul &quot; psalms and hymns and spiritual songs &quot; (i^aA/AoTs xat /u,vois xai wScus Trvef/xaTi/cais). St Paul also, in the 14th chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians, speaks of singing (i/xAu&amp;gt;), and of every man s psalm (eVao-ros v/xwv t/ a.A^oj/ e^et), in a context which plainly has reference to the assem blies of the Corinthian Christians for common worship. All the words thus used were applied by the LXX. to the Davidical psalms ; it is therefore possible that these only may be intended, in the different places to which we have referred. But there are in St Paul s epistles several passages (Eph. v. 14 ; 1 Tim. iii. 16 ; 1 Tim. vi. 15, 16 ; 2 Tim. ii. 11, 12) which have so much of the form and character of later Oriental hymnody as to have been sup posed by Michaelis and others to be extracts from original hymns of the Apostolic age. Two of them are apparently introduced as quotations, though not found elsewhere in the Scriptures. A third has not only rhythm, but rhyme. The thanksgiving prayer of the assembled disciples, recorded in Acts iv., is both in substance and in manner poetical; and in the canticles, &quot;Magnificat,&quot; &quot; Benedictus,&quot; &c., which manifestly followed the form and style of Hebrew poetry, hymns or songs, proper for liturgical use, have always been recognized by the church. 3. Eastern Church Hymnody. The hymn of our Lord, the precepts of the apostles, the angelic song at the nativity, and &quot; Benedicite omnia opera,&quot; are referred to in a curious metrical prologue to the hymnary of the Mozarabic Breviary, as precedents for the practice of the Western Church. In this respect, however, the Western Church followed the Eastern, in which hymnody prevailed from the earliest times. Philo describes the &quot; Therapeut3 &quot; of the neighboiirhood The of Alexandria as composers of original hymns, which (as peu- well as old) were sung at their great religious festivals, the people listening in silence till they came to the closing strains, or refrains, at the end of a hymn or stanza (the &quot; acroteleutia &quot; and &quot; ephymnia &quot;), in which all, women as well as men, heartily joined. These songs, he says, were in various metres (for which he uses a number of technical terms) ; some were choral, some not ; and they were divided into variously constructed strophes or stanzas. Eusebius, who thought that the Therapeutae were com-. munities.of Christians, says that the Christian practice of his own day was in exact accordance with this description. Gibbon considered it to be proved, by modern criticism, that the Therapeutse were not Christians, but Essene Jews ; but he recognized in their customs &quot; a very lively image of primitive discipline ; &quot; and he states that the Christian religion was embraced by great numbers of them, and that they were probably, by degrees, absorbed into the church, and became the fathers of the Egyptian ascetics. Apollos, &quot; born at Alexandria,&quot; may possibly have been one of them. The practice, not only of singing hymns, but of singing Ant them antiphonally, appears, from the well-known letter of P ho Pliny to Trajan, to have been established in the Bithynian sin{: churches at the beginning of the 2d century. They were accustomed &quot; stato die ante lucem convcnire, carmenque Christo, quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem.&quot; This agrees well, in point of time, with the tradition recorded by the historian Socrates, that Ignatius (who suffered martyrdom about 107 A.D.) was led by a vision or dream of angels singing hymns in that manner to the Holy Trinity to intro duce antiphonal singing into the church of Antioch, from which it quickly spread to other churches. There seems to be an allusion to choral singing in the epistle of Ignatius himself to the Romans, where he exhorts them, u xP^ ye^o/xevoi&quot; (&quot;having formed themselves into a choir&quot;), to &quot;sing praise to the Father in Christ Jesus.&quot; A statement