not only making of their books

'But a mash'd heap, a hotchpotch of the slain;'

but freely selecting, revising, and rearranging the scattered materials to construct another, and setting at nought all respect for their sole proprietorship in their own labours. Their zeal, however, in the good cause, shown in their past exertions, may fairly be taken as an earnest of their public spirit, and a ground for supposing them ready to adopt the sentiment of Whitgift's last words, prefixed by Bishop Mant to his own labours in this cause-Pro Ecclesiâ Dei, pro Ecclesiâ Dei.' But there are other objections which have been raised to any authoritative interference in this matter; and there are good old prejudices too in favour of Tate and Brady, or the accustomed Hymn-book, which must be removed by some outweighing reasons in favour of the proposed step. Habit is second nature; and we have been so long left to ourselves, that what Mr. Blew calls the patent defect of an authorised hymn-book' is not patent to the generality of people. Yet if purity of doctrine is important; if the motto of our Church, that we all speak the same things,' is to be retained; if the religious tone of the people is to be considered, a very cursory glance at existing collections will satisfy us that some regulation' is greatly needed. And it would be but consistent that we, who have a prescribed book of prayers, should also have some restriction upon our hymns. Again: the Prayer-book is itself imperfect without its complement of hymns or anthems; for, to pass by the plain recognition of such singing in the Rubric, we may fairly test the perfection of anything by a comparison with its professed model, especially when to that model it stands in the relation of an offspring. Now it is well known that the pre-Reformation Prayer-books, after the pattern of which ours was framed, had their regular arrangement of metrical hymns throughout. And it was by no means the intention of the Reformers to deprive us of these, at once the most popular and least corrupt parts of the old services. Cranmer himself tried his hand upon the 'Salve festa dies,' but gave it up in despair, writing to the King, that, as his English verses wanted the grace and faculty which he could wish they had,' he craved of his Majesty that he would cause some other to do them in more pleasant English and verse.' It would further be difficult to discover a reason for our differing in this point from almost every national Church. Eastern and Western, Greek and Russian, Roman and Reformed, are richly provided by the constituted authorities, and why not the Anglican? One of our own offshoots, the Church in America, put forth her selection. seventy years ago, and that in Scotland recently. To those

who

the

who think it an insuperable evil to shut out for ever, or at least for a long time, the inspirations of a future Ken, a Cowper, a Wesley, or a Keble, it may be answered that the same argument would have prevented the fixing of all prayers; and that hymns of real merit hereafter composed may be at some future time adopted by competent authority. To those again among clergy who would say, with the late Mr. Newland, 'If I am not to be trusted in the selection of hymns, neither am I to be trusted in composing sermons,' we should say that not only does this also prove too much, for it is equally applicable to prayers; but there is a great difference between that which is spoken to the people as the expression of the preacher's thoughts, and that which is put into the mouths of the congregation to be rehearsed as the words of the Church in worship of which they are a part. But assuming this question settled in the affirmative, and a committee of divines, poets, musicians, and ritualists appointed to this work, they have a task before them that no one can estimate until he has sounded the depth and width of the subject himself. Hymns have a history, a philosophy, and a literature of their own. Hymnology has its roots in the beginnings of history, its branches are co-extensive with Christendom, and it requires a special study which has never yet been bestowed upon it. It is a subject of no little importance to the purity and, may we add? the popularity of religion. Yet it is far from being a merely popular, transient, and superficial matter: the well-known saying of the politician, Let me make a people's ballads, and let who will make their laws,' has its counterpart in religion; for all leaders of religious movements, from Arius to Wesley, have borne witness to the fact that hymns are more powerful in fixing religious dogmas, and guiding religious feeling, in the minds of the people than any other mode of teaching. What is powerful for good may be, and often has been, more powerful for ill; and it is not always that which is positively evil, but frequently that which is negatively and poorly good, that works most harm. It is well then that we should keep in mind the necessity of a more extended view of hymnology in those who undertake the proposed task than has yet been generally taken of it.

A considerable number of the hymns already in use in the English language owe their origin, more or less directly, in the various degrees of 'translation,' 'paraphrase,' and 'imitation,' to the inspirations of other ages and other lands; but hitherto we have gone only as chance gleaners, and our gatherings have been scanty, and partially chosen; it is time we went as a Church and a nation, and boldly laid claim to our right, as members of Vol. 111.-No. 222. the

the great brotherhood, to a full participation in the common store. It will, therefore, be worth while to take a rapid general survey of the hymnology of foreign churches; and we hope our readers will not be startled when they are told that they are to be carried off to Jerusalem and Antioch, and brought home gradually by Corinth and Milan, through France, Spain, and Germany, in search of such apparently homely things as hymns.

1. The Hebrew hymns lay first claim to our notice, not only by right of their supreme antiquity, but as being enshrined in the Sacred Volume. They fall naturally into three classes: 1. The occasional pieces, scattered up and down the books of the Qld Testament; 2. The authorized collection of the Jews themselves, known as the Psalms of David, gathered together, probably out of a vast number, of which the rest, being rejected as uninspired, have been lost; and 3. The hymns of the New Testament, the Magnificat, the Nunc dimittis, and the Benedictus.

Of the first class Dr. Neale gives a catalogue in his 'Commentary' (Diss. I.) of more than seventy, as they are found arranged in the Mozarabic Breviary to be used as Canticles. The best known are the two Songs of Moses (Exodus xv. 1-19; Deut. xxxii. 1-12), the Song of Deborah (Judges v.), of Balaam (Numbers xxiii.), of Hannah (1 Samuel ii. 1-10), and of Job (xix. 25-27). With the exception of the last, which is sung by the priest in our Burial Service, the Church of England has not adopted any of these; and very few are sufficiently general in their allusions to be fitted, without a somewhat strained interpretation, to our times and circumstances. Some one or two, however, have been successfully rendered in English metre, as, for instance, Isaiah's Hymn (lii. 7, 8), by Dr. Watts, in his

'How beauteous are their feet!

Who stand on Zion's Hill!"

As regards the Psalms and New Testament Hymns, we are saved further trouble; for our Church has already appropriated and recast in our own tongue the whole of these glorious outpourings of the prophet-poets of the old dispensation, and, so to say, put the mark of Christianity upon them by the addition of the Gloria Patri Filio,' &c., at the end of each; the Psalter is recited throughout by us every month, and the Canticles daily in turn. With this, then, we should have omitted further notice of Jewish hymnology; but that we fancy we hear some of our readers ask, perhaps with some indignation, whether we have forgotten the metrical versions of the Psalms. We have not forgotten them— we never shall: we know that every notion of metrical singing

in England was for two centuries founded upon and limited by 'Sternhold and Hopkins,' or 'Tate and Brady;' but surely the days of the versions' are numbered. Have we not already in our most beautiful Prayer-book translation all the sublimity, poetry, devotional pathos, and innate music of the Psalter, fully preserved in its original form, and that form not only the best suited to its spirit, but in its rhythmical cadence and fitness for musical recitation unequalled by the smoothest metre? The world is. indebted to our own Bishop Lowth for the discovery that the Psalms (and we may add the Canticles) are written in a most complete system of rhythmical arrangement, guided not by sound but by sense-thought answering to thought, and sentence to sentence, instead of line to line, and ending to ending. The 96th Psalm and the Magnificat have been pointed out as good examples, especially the 7th and 8th verses of the latter, which are cases of antithetical parallelism:

Most happily for us, this character of the originals has been admirably retained in our Authorized Versions, both in the Bible and Prayer-book; and one cannot help feeling the fitness of their parallel structure for the antiphonal chanting of our choirs; and, without doubt, these were written for some like method of singing (see 1 Samuel xviii. 7); but this very fitness for the one makes them unfit for the other method; for how improbable, and indeed impossible, it must be, as the learned and judicious Archdeacon Evans observes, that a rhythmical structure of parallel thoughts should co-exist with a metrical structure of words! Let any one, for instance, seek-it will be in vain-for any marked parallelism in Tate and Brady's metrical Magnificat.

We readily allow that here and there a happy paraphrase, whether from the Old and New Versions, or from the many others that have appeared at different times, might claim a place as an independent hymn, including of course the Old Hundredth ;' but we must confess that we see little reason to dwell longer upon the metrical Psalms as a source for supplying any considerable portion of such a collection as we need, and still less as having any claim to stand as a distinct branch of our hymnology, as contemplated in the motion of Archdeacon Sandford mentioned above. It is, no doubt, their Scriptural origin that has led hitherto to this distinction; but this same reasoning would

z 2

include

include all the Scotch and other paraphrases of passages of Scripture, such as Morrison's

the hymn

The race that long in darkness sat;'

'Thou God, all honour, glory, power,'

from the Revelations; and,

While shepherds watched their flocks by night.'

Indeed the fact that the Psalms form part of the Holy Scriptures ought to make us all the more unwilling to subject them to the dilution which is unavoidable in rendering them into metre. But we cannot dismiss the metrical Psalms without calling them to account for the objectionable supremacy which the organ has established for itself over the choir and congregation: we are convinced that if the words of our old metrical Psalmody had been at all worthy of their subject, they would have coerced the music to adapt itself accordingly; and we should have been spared the incongruity of the poorest and most prosaic, as well as the most bombastic lines of psalms and hymns being made a conveyance for such tunes as Cambridge New, Devizes, Portsmouth, &c.; if indeed such tunes would ever have come into existence.

Who could endure to hear and sing hymns, the meaning and force of which he really felt-set, as they frequently have been, to melodies from the Opera, and even worse, or massacred by the repetition of the end of each stanza, no matter whether or not the grammar and sense were consistent with it?-not to mention the memorable cases of

and

-My poor pol

My poor pol

My poor polluted heart;'

-Our Great Sal

Our Great Salvation comes!'

In leaving the Hebrew Psalms and Hymns we make a great stride, passing from Jewish to Christian hymnology, or, to speak more accurately, from hymns in which Christianity under prophecy and figure to those in which it appears as a present fact. From the very earliest date, after the day of Pentecost, we find the Church using certain anthems, mostly, as we might expect, taken from Scripture, and forming, together with the Canticles, a link between apostolic and post-apostolic times;