BV

372

·B87
1860

Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

PREFACE.

THE use of metrical Psalms and Hymns in the English tongue is as ancient as the English Book of Common Prayer. At the publication of the Ordinal, in 1552, one ancient Hymn, the Veni Creator Spiritus, in the longer of the two forms which are now found in those offices, was incorporated into the ritual itself. To the version of the Psalms by Sternhold and Hopkins were also appended certain paraphrases and other devout verses; embracing the Lord's Prayer; the Ten Commandments; the Apostles' and Athanasian Creeds; the Te Deum; the Hymns from Scripture included in the Morning and Evening Prayers; and, with a few other lines, the Humble Suit, the Lament and the Complaint of a Sinner, three several forms of confession. These were probably from the same hands with those metrical Psalms, and bear date from the reign of Edward the Sixth.

Without other metrical voice, however, the public worship of the Church remained through a century which shines with names of poetic and Christian glory. While the old Latin Hymns were sung in the communion of the Church of Rome; while those of the followers of Huss had not died away; while millions of tongues echoed and re-echoed the songs of Luther and of his successors in Germany and Sweden; the Church of England, in this resembling rather the Calvinist communions of Scotland, France, and Switzerland, held itself almost exclusively within the limit of versified portions of the sacred Scriptures. Content with the inheritance of its majestic liturgy, it loosened its hold on the sacred psalmody of the earlier Christian ages, and made no effort to enrich itself with new offerings from Spencer or Quarles, from Herbert or Donne, from Bishop Hall or Bishop King. The early Nonconformists, too, attempted no more.

At the revision of the Prayer-book in 1662, another version of the Veni Creator was added, and placed, as now, first in order. Small as was the step, it seems to have originated with a rising taste for the union of sacred words with flowing numbers in the offices of worship. The next step was the permission, in 1696, soon after the next revision or

attempt at revision, to sing the smoother Psalms of Tate and Brady; of which Bishop Compton, of London, in recommending them to his Diocese, speaks as "a work done with so much judgment and ingenuity, that he is persuaded it may take off that unhappy objection which has hitherto lain against the singing Psalms; and dispose that part of divine service to much more devotion." It would seem that with this version, or about the same time, must have come in some more pleasing paraphrases of the other versified parts of Scripture and of the Te Deum, which were appended to later editions of the Prayer-book; including our first hymn for Christmas, the first and third for Easter, the first for Whitsunday, and the first for the Holy Communion.

In the meantime the scattered effusions of Crashaw, Quarles, Herbert, Milton, Baxter, Bishop Taylor, and at length of Bishop Ken, had continued the impulse to the utterance of devotion in sacred verse, till it found, in the peculiar facility and the pious fervour of Watts, a most fitting instrument. His first book of Hymns was published in 1709, exhibiting at once a wonderful ripeness in his divine art. Within three years after, the few but exquisite Hymns of Addison appeared. Those of Doddridge

and of Charles Wesley followed in the next generation; and still a generation later, those of Cowper, Newton, and Toplady.

From amongst all these a very few, and not always the same, found their way, we scarcely know how, between the covers of the Prayer-book. Such were the Hymns of Addison, the Morning and Evening Hymns of Bishop Ken, the Communion Hymn of Doddridge, and the Christmas Hymn of Wesley. They must have been already used in parish churches; and usage, not authority, gave them their place with the Psalms. Although in most churches and on most occasions no Hymn may have been sung, it became established that this part of the public services was governed, not by the rule which prescribed the liturgy, but by that which left the sermon and its appendages to the direction of the minister. Many and various, therefore, have been the collections of Hymns which have now been published for parochial use in England.

When the American Prayer-book was set forth in 1789, a selection of twenty-seven Hymns received the same authoritative sanction with the metrical version of the Psalms. It is not obvious on what grounds exactly these twenty-seven were selected. Besides five of those paraphrases, which seem to