somewhat famous for this resemblance. His work was everywhere blessed, and he left an imperishable influence in New England. The tune, linked with Dr. Hunter's hymn, formed the favorite melody which has been the dying song of many who learned to sing it amid the old revival scenes: Death, with thy weapons of war lay me low; Strike, king of terrors; I fear not the blow. Jesus has broken the bars of the tomb, Joyfully, joyfully haste to thy home. "TIS THE OLD SHIP OF ZION, HALLELUJAH!" This may be found, vocalized with full harmony, in the American Vocalist. With all the parts together (more or less) it must have made a vociferous song-service, but the hymn was oftener sung simply in soprano unison; and there was sound enough in the single melody to satisfy the most zealous. All her passengers will land on the bright eternal shore, She has landed many thousands, and will land as many more, Both hymn and tune have lost their creators' names, and, like many another "voice crying in the wilderness," they have left no record of their beginning of days. "MY BROTHER, I WISH YOU WELL." My brother, I wish you well, My brother, I wish you well; When my Lord calls I trust you will Be mentioned in the Promised Land. Echoes that remain to us of those fervid and affectionate, as well as resolute and vehement, expressions of religious life as sung in the early revivals of New England, in parts of the South, and especially in the Middle West, are suggestive of spontaneous melody forest-born, and as unconscious of scale, clef or tempo as the song of a bird. The above "hand-shaking" ditty at the altar gatherings apparently took its tune self-made, inspired in its first singer's soul by the feeling of the moment-and the strain was so simple that the convert could join in at once and chant When my Lord comes I trust I shall -through all the loving rotations of the crude hymn-tune. Such song-births of spiritual enthusiasm are beyond enumeration-and it is useless to hunt for author or composer. Under the momentum of a wrestling hour or a common rapture of experience, counterpoint was unthought of, and the same notes for every voice lifted pleading and praise in monophonic impromptu. The refrainsO how I love Jesus, O the Lamb, the Lamb, the loving Lamb, O turn ye, O turn ye, for why will you die, -each at the sound of its first syllable brought its own music to every singer's tongue, and all-male and female-were sopranos together. This habit in singing those rude liturgies of faith and fellowship was recognized by the editors of the Revivalist, and to a multitude of them space was given only for the printed melody, and of this sometimes only the three or four initial bars. The tunes were the church's rural field-tones that everybody knew. Culture smiles at this unclassic hymnody of long ago, but its history should disarm criticism. To wanderers its quaint music and "pedestrian" verse were threshold call and door-way welcome into the church of the living God. Even in the flaming days of the Second Advent following, in 1842-3, they awoke in many hardened hearts the spiritual glow that never dies. The delusion passed away, but the grace remained. The church-and the world-owe a long debt to the old evangelistic refrains that rang through the sixty years before the Civil War, some of them flavored with tuneful piety of a remoter time. They preached righteousness, and won souls that sermons could not reach. They opened heaven to thousands who are now rejoicing there. CHAPTER VIII. SUNDAY-SCHOOL HYMNS. SHEPHERD OF TENDER YOUTH. Στόμιον πώλων ἀδάων We are assured by repeated references in the patristic writings that the primitive years of the Christian Church were not only years of suffering but years of song. That the despised and often persecuted "Nazarenes," scattered in little colonies throughout the Roman Empire, did not forget to mingle tones of praise and rejoicing with their prayers could readily be believed from the muchquoted letter of a pagan lawyer, written about as long after Jesus' death, as from now back to the death of John Quincy Adams-the letter of Pliny the younger to the Emperor Trajan, in which he reports the Christians at their meetings singing "hymns to Christ as to a god." Those disciples who spoke Greek seem to have been especially tuneful, and their land of poets was doubtless the cradle of Christian hymnody. Believers taught their songs to their children, and it is as certain that the oldest Sunday-school hymn was written somewhere in the classic East as that the Book of Revelation was written on the Isle of Patmos. The one above indicated was found in an appendix to the Tutor, a book composed by Titus Flavius Clemens of Alexandria, a Christian philosopher and instructor whose active life began late in the second century. It follows a treatise on Jesus as the Great Teacher, and, though his own words elsewhere imply a more ancient origin of the poem, it is always called "Clement's Hymn." The line quoted above is the first of an English version by the late Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter, D.D. It does not profess to be a translation, but aims to transfer to our common tongue the spirit and leading thoughts of the original. Shepherd of tender youth, To shout Thy praise. The last stanza of Dr. Dexter's version represents the sacred song spirit of both the earliest and the latest Christian centuries: So now, and till we die And joyful sing; Unite to swell the song To Christ our King. |