Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/610

594 594 HYMNS [BRITISH. to them), are perceptible in the vividness and force with which these writers, while adhering with a severe simplicity to the sense of the passages of Scripture which they under took to render, fulfilled the conception of a good original hymn. Morrison s &quot; The race that long in darkness pined &quot; and &quot;Come, let us to the Lord our God,&quot; and Brace s &quot;Where high the heavenly temple stands &quot; (if this was really his), are well entitled to that praise. The advocates of Bruce in the controversy, not yet closed, as to the poems said to have been entrusted by him to John Logan, and published by Logan in his own name, also claim for him the credit of having varied the paraphrase &quot; Behold, the moun tain of the Lord,&quot; from its original form, as printed by the committee of the General Assembly in 1745, by some excel lent touches. Method- Attention must now be directed to the hymns produced ist by the &quot;Methodist&quot; movement, which began about 1738, hymns. an( ^ ^j^ afterwards became divided, between those esteemed Arminian, under John Wesley, those who adhered to the Moravians, when the original alliance between that body and the founders of Methodism was dissolved, and the Calvinists, of whom Whitfield (himself no poet) was the leader, and Selina, countess of Huntingdon, the patroness. Each of these sections had its own hymn-writers, some of whom did, and others did not, secede from the Church of England. The Wesleyans had Charles Wesley, Seagrave, Olivers, and Bake well; the Moravians, Cennick and Ham mond (with whom, perhaps, may be classed John Byrom, who imbibed the mystical ideas of some of the German schools) ; the Calvinists, Toplady, Berridge, William Williams, Madan, Batty, Haweis, Kowland Hill, John Newton, and Cowper. Charles Among all these writers, the palm undoubtedly belongs Wesley, to Charles Wesley. In the first volume of hymns published by the two brothers are several good translations from the German, believed to be by John Wesley, who, although he translated and adapted, is not supposed to have written any original hymns ; and the influence of German hymnody, particularly of the works of Paul Gerhardt, Scheffler, Tersteegen, and Zinzendorf, may be traced in a large pro portion of Charles Wesley s works. He is more subjective and meditative than Watts and his school ; there is a didactic turn, even in his most objective pieces (as, for example, in his Christmas and Easter hymns) ; most of his works are supplicatory, and his faults are connected with the same habit of mind. He is apt to repeat the same thoughts, and to lose force by redundancy he runs some times even to a tedious length ; his hymns are not always symmetrically constructed, or well balanced and finished off. But he has great truth, depth, and variety of feeling ; his diction is manly, and always to the point ; never florid, though sometimes passionate and not free from exaggera tion ; often vivid arid picturesque. Of his spirited style there are few better examples than &quot; for a thousand tongues to sing,&quot; &quot; Blow ye the trumpet, blow,&quot; &quot; Eejoice, the Lord is King,&quot; and &quot; Come, let us join our friends above ;&quot; of his more tender vein, &quot; Happy soul, thy days are ended ;&quot; and of his fervid contemplative style (without going beyond hymns fit for general use), &quot; O Thou who earnest from above,&quot; &quot; Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go,&quot; and &quot;Eternal Beam of Light Divine.&quot; With those whose taste is for hymns in which warm religious feelings are warmly and demonstratively expressed, &quot; Jesus, lover of my soul,&quot; is as popular as any of these. Olivers. Of the other Wesleyan hymn-writers, Olivers (originally a Welsh shoemaker, afterwards a preacher) is the most remarkable. He is the author of only two works, both odes, in a stately metre, and from their length unfit for congregational singing, but one of them, &quot; The God of Abraham praise,&quot; an ode of singular power and beauty. The Moravian Methodists produced few hymns now Cer : available for general use. The best are Cennick s &quot; Children of the heavenly King,&quot; and Hammond s &quot; Awake and sing Ha the song of Moses and the Lamb,&quot; the former of which mo (abridged), and the latter as varied by Madan, are found in many hymn-books, and are deservedly esteemed. Byrom, By: i whose name we have thought it convenient to connect with these, though he did not belong to the Moravian com munity, was the author of a Christmas hymn (&quot; Christians awake, salute the happy morn &quot;) which enjoys great popu larity in the county (Lancashire) of which he was a native ; and also of a short subjective hymn, very fine both in feel ing and in expression, &quot; My spirit longeth for Thee within my troubled breast.&quot; The contributions of the Calvinistic Methodists to English To hymnody are of greater extent and value. Few writers of hymns had higher gifts than Augustus Montague Top- lady, author of &quot; Rock of Ages,&quot; by some esteemed the finest in the English language. He was a man of ardent temperament, enthusiastic zeal, strong convictions, and great energy of character. &quot; He had,&quot; says one of his biographers, &quot; the courage of a lion, but his frame was brittle as glass.&quot; Between him and John Wesley there was a violent opposition of opinion, and much acrimonious controversy ; but the same fervour and zeal which made him an intemperate theologian gave warmth, richness, and spirituality to his hymns. In some of them (particularly those which, like &quot; Deathless principle, arise,&quot; are medita tions after the German manner, and not without direct obligation to German originals) the setting is somewhat too artificial ; but his art is never inconsistent with a genuine flow of real feeling. Others (e.g., &quot;When languor and disease invade,&quot; and &quot; Your harps, ye trembling saints &quot;) fail to sustain to the end the beauty with which they began, and would have been better for abridgment. But in all these, and in most of his other works, there is great force and sweetness, both of thought and language, and an easy and harmonious versification. Berridge, Williams, and Rowland Hill (all men remark- Be able for eccentricity, activity, and the devotion of their w lives to the special work of missionary preaching), though ^ not the authors of many good hymns, composed, or adapted from earlier compositions, some of great merit. One of Berridge, adapted from Erskine, has been already men tioned ; another, adapted from Watts, is &quot; Jesus, cast a look on me.&quot; Williams, a Welshman (who wrote &quot;Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah &quot;), was especially an apostle of Calvinistic Methodism in his own country, and his hymns are still much used in the principality. Rowland Hill wrote the popular hymn beginning &quot; Exalted high at God s right hand.&quot; If, however, the number as well as the quality of good Cc hymns available for general use is to be regarded, the *? authors of the &quot; Olney Hymns &quot; are entitled to be placed at the head of all the writers of this Calvinistic school. The greater number of the Olney Hymns are, no doubt, homely and didactic ; but to the best of them (and they are no inconsiderable proportion) the tenderness of Cowper and the manliness of Newton give the interest of contrast, as well as that of sustained reality. If Newton carried to some excess the sound principle laid down by him, that &quot;perspicuity, simplicity, and ease should be chiefly attended to, and the imagery and colouring of poetry, if admitted at all, should be indulged very sparingly and with great judgment,&quot; if he is often dry and colloquial, he rises at other times into &quot;soul-anirnating strains,&quot; such as &quot;Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God;&quot; and sometimes (as in &quot; Approach, my soul, the mercy seat &quot;) rivals Cowper himself in depth of feeling. Cowper s hymns in this book are, almost without exception, worthy