MR. MARTINEAU'S SELECTION OF HYMNS.* Tnis is no ordinary selection
of hymns, nor is it formed, as so many selections are, to serve a temporary purpose. The aim of the editor is a high one, and the sincerity and judgment with which he has endeavoured to carry it out make this volume worthy of careful study. That Mr. Martineau has succeeded in forming a body of hymnody likely to be acceptable generally to members of the Church of England and to orthodox Dissenters we will not say, but the devout feeling that has prompted the work, and the thoughtful attention, the just taste, and the keen susceptibility to many phases of religious emotion which mark its execution,
• Hymns of Praise and Prayer. Collected and edited by James Martineau, LL.D. London: Longman°. 1874,
will be acknowledged by every one who examines the volume with the care that it deserves.
How greatly the religious life is sustained and strengthened by songs of praise has been acknowledged in all ages of the Chris- tian Church. Even in the Scotch Kirk, which until recently sang the Psalms of David only, deeming what they termed uninspired hymns unfit for divine worship, the fervour of devout feeling found expression in the quaint and homely version which some- times rises into poetry, but more frequently falls into doggrel. In the Church of England, not even Sternhold and Hopkins, and Tate and Brady, could wholly destroy the love of spiritual song ;
and it must be remembered that the English Church, in the days of its greatest torpor, had the " Te Deum" and the" Benedicite,".
so that it was never wholly deprived of noble poetry in public worship. The religious revival of the eighteenth century was perhaps as much due to the hymns of Charles Wesley as to the preaching of his brother and of Whitefield. The Independents, too, earlier in the century, owed not a little to Dr. Watts, a man of culture as well as of poetical feeling, who, if he has written many of the worst hymns in the language, has also written a few of the best. Dissent of the orthodox stamp found in men like these its poetical prophets, and lugubrious as were the tunes employed in those days, the heartiness of the singing atoned for its musical defects. To the new life of the new century we owe many of our finest hymns, but few, if any of these are the work of the great poets who. flourished between 1800 and 1840. Wordsworth, greatest of them all, and devout as he was great, has contributed nothing worthy of mention to the hymnody of the Churches. We may say the same of Coleridge, whose noble "Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni " belongs to another category ; of Scott, with the single exception of his version of the "Dies Irae ;" of Crabbe, whose poetical genius was not of the lyric order ; of Byron, despite his Hebrew melodies ; of Moore, whose sacred pieces are false in tone and sickly in expression ; of Southey and Shelley ; of Hood and Keats. James Montgomery, a smaller poet than any of these, is, however, often admirable as a hymn-writer ; and the copious col- lection before us contains more than sixty of his hymns. The truth is, the poet's art is not essential to metrical compositions this class ; poets can of course, and sometimes do, write goo hymns ; but hymns of the highest order of merit may be produced by men and women who lack poetical genius,—by writers who, like Doddridge, Toplady, Conder, Lyte, Bonar, and Charlotte Elliot, express in sufficiently rhythmical verse intense devotional feeling. Whatever views we may hold with regard to what used to be called the Oxford Party, it must be acknowledged that it en- couraged in an extraordinary measure the composition of sacred verse, as well as the production in a modern form of ancient hymns. The chief promoters of the Tract movement were poets, or, to say the least, men of poetical feeling, and the strongest arguments advanced by Dr. Pusey had probably less influence than the publication of the Christian Year. The Ritualism that has blossomed out of Puseyism is also greatly indebted to music and song, and "Hymns Ancient and Modern," although contain- ing several pieces that are objectionable to Dissenters and to Evangelical Churchmen, has achieved a popularity that is well nigh unprecedented. Yet the editors of this popular selection do not scruple to transform the hymns they print so that in many instances the authors would find it difficult to discover their own compositions. And this brings us to some thoughtful remarks made by Mr. Martineau in the beautiful preface to Hymns o Praise and Prayer. After alluding to a selection of hymns made by him many years ago, he writes :—
"In passing through a generation remarkable for rapid change, Christian piety itself, notwithstanding its essential permanence, has in- sensibly modified its complexion ; and in its truest moments resorts to other centres of meditation and speaks in other tones than those which were natural to our fathers. Hence, in justice to the exigencies of a fresh time, it is not enough to add what is absent, it is requisite also to withdraw something that is present, in manuals of an earlier date."
And then, alluding to the influence of the Anglican movement in one direction and to a devotional feeling in the opposite direction which is disposed to loosen itself even from sacred history, he adds :— " If there be a spiritual devotion which more and more draws away from what tradition. Apostolic or other, has questionably said about the first ago, and, gathering itself into the centre, identifies its Christianity with the religion of Christ in its pure and personal essence, this simpli- fication is as legitimate, and as much requires to be provided with adequate expression in worship, as the opposite tendency to luxuriant overgrowth of dogma and symbol. The difference between the present volume and its predecessor is due to the attempt to meet this change the new hymns admitted belonging chiefly to tho poetry of the inner life ; while the old hymns excluded mainly deal with objective incidents either in Biblical history or in tho Apocalyptic representation of the future. It is, however, a question of great difficulty how far, in the true service of a Church or of a time, a change of this kind, to some extent inevitable, should bo carried by an editor. Though piety, the more spiritual it is. has the less disposition to remain historical, it were a fatal error (as the experience of all mystic movements, including George Fox's abundantly shows.) to indulge this tendency to its ex.- tromity ; to fling history out of religion altogether, and let no section of it b3 'sacred,' no 'land' be 'holy.' We deo ire ourselves, if in this higher life we forget our ancestry, and profess to be autochthones. No detached personal force of ours, no eclectic gleaning of wisdom from foreign fields, will find us wings to reach our heaven, and lay us low beneath an Authority that rules us. Only to the rarest prophets, if even to them, are divine things really new ; with the rest of us they are not what we win, but what we keep ;—the residuary truth and sanctity that remain at heart, when superficial errors are discharged, and that breathe in the undertones of trust and aspiration, however the articulate speech of worship may change its words. If there be any who can waft their souls to God on Vedic hymns, or toil upwards by the steps of Gentile metaphysics, far be it from me to question the efficacy of the exercise ; it may possibly be as good for them as singing the Athanasian Creed. But for myself, both conviction and feeling keep me close to the poetry and piety of Christendom. It is my native air, and in no other can I breathe ; and wherever it passes, it so mellows the soil and feeds the roots of character, and nurtures such grace and balance of affection, that for any climate similarly rich in elements of perfect life I look in lain elsewhere. The only problem, therefore, with which I have to deal, is how to separate among the Biblical materials the permanent essence from the accretions which are already marked as certain to fall away."
This is finely expressed, and the remainder of the preface carries on the thought suggested in this passage. It is inevitable that the "dogmatic realism" of the Anglican school should produce in many minds, and those often of the most sensitive fibre, a wish to annihilate dogma altogether, and to substitute the religion of feeling for the religion of fact. Christianity, however, is either true historically, or it is morally false, as being built upon a lie, and it is just possible that Mr. Martineau, in his anxiety to provide spiritual food that shall satisfy the hunger of a soul that cannot accept the orthodox creed, does an injury sometimes, though with the best intentions, to those who still cling to historical incident as the basis of their faith. He acknowledges the difficulty, and observes that tried by Conservative feeling, he may seem to have parted with too much, and tried by the balance of critical pro- bability, he may seem to have removed too little.
It is scarcely needful to Bay that while freely using the hymns of orthodox Churchmen and Dissenters, Mr. Martineau does not scruple to adapt them to the conditions under which this collection is produced :—
" It is offered to a Nonconformist Broad Church by an editor whose prevailing feeling carries him less to Broad Church sources than to other springs—Catholic, Mystical, Semi-Puritan, Lutheran, Wesleyan— and gives him therefore what he moats loves, and what speaks most truly for him, mingled with much which neither he nor his readers can believe. May he drop this impossible element and save the rest ? or is he bound to forego the whole, and accept his silent exile from a chorus in which he longs to join, and which gives him a voice Infinitely better than his own?"
The reply, it appears to us, is obvious. It is essential that the belief as well as the literary rights of the hymn-writer should be respected. It would be unjust to make Keble express views in his hymns opposed to his ecclesiastical principles ; it would be monstrous under the names of Watts or Wesley, and by an altera- tion of their language to utter doubts with regard to the divinity of our Lord. At the same time, certain changes in the words of the hymn written may be made with perfect propriety, if the editor takes due care to announce them, and if he is careful not to in- sert doctrines or expressions which the authors would have repu- diated. No charge can be made against Mr. Martineau of im- proprieties like these. He makes, indeed, various changes, and many readers familiar with the originals will probably think that some of their favourite hymns are injured by these alterations, but nothing of this kind has been done without acknowledgment —" the author's name appearing in italics whenever even a word is changed, or the change itself being given, along with the original, in a special index, whenever it affects the first line."
If we miss in this admirable selection many hymns as familiar and almost as dear as the words of Scripture, it is full of interest to observe how closely all branches of the Christian Church come together in their hymns of prayer and praise. Here the Calvinist Toplady has a place by the side of the Arminian Wesley, the Roman Catholic Faber sings in harmony with the arch-enemy of his Church Martin Luther, and with the Independents Doddridge and Watts, while James Montgomery, the Moravian, is not out of harmony with Bishop Heber and Archbishop Trench. The hymn, indeed, is the expression of deep religions feeling, and that feeling is shared by multitudes whose doctrinal opinions are widely diver- gent ; it unites as no mere statement of dogma can the early ages of the Church with the Church of the present day, and it shows
how deep and strong is the bond of union, notwithstanding the many seeds of discord that spring up throughout Christendom. Mr. Martineau's selection of Hymns for the Christian Church and Home has reached, we believe, a large number of editions; the present volume, which may be regarded as a valuable contri- bution to the literature of toleration—to the charity which willingly finds points of assent and rejects points of difference—deserves to be equally successful.
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