Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/128

100 This impulse by which the singer selects from the wide wealth of Scriptures specific material suited to his own life and times is more closely linked with other processes of social psychology and national life than is commonly supposed. The fact that he selects images of certain sorts and ignores others shows habitual attitudes and inherited points of view which hold their lesson to-day. For it becomes apparent to any one thoughtfully scanning any standard collection of English hymns and noting their theme and date that in these sacred lyrics can be traced not only characteristic marks of literary movements of the last three centuries, but more than that: salient lines of political and social thought as well.

Note for example the hymns of the nineteenth century—though in the century before it the hymns of Addison, Watts, the Wesleys, and others are equally to the point. The early decades of the nineteenth century were, in world politics, the period of the Napoleonic conquests and defeats, in literature, a period of Romantic triumph; these were years which stirred the emotions of poets secular and religious. These poets expressed the age, its visions, hopes, discouragements, and disillusionments, with a play of imagination which heightened hope and despair, giving significance alike to conceptions vast, fanciful, and remote, and to the minutest details of common life. Wordsworth's glorification of the "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love" finds a counterpart in Keble's hymn, "New every morning is the love," simpler and truer than many more pretentious stanzas, more mindful as it is of "the trivial round, the common task" which "brings us daily nearer God."

But in many of the hymns of this time God is regally conceived of as King, God of Battles, a God of Nations, a veritable tribal God, imperial and triumphant. The Christian experience is meanwhile figuratively portrayed in a multitude of hymns, not so often as a pilgrimage or a voyage, but as a strife. Calculated to the in- crease of holy morale was such a hymn of the Napoleonic. era as "Oft in danger, oft in woe," with its stanza: