In Tuneful Accord. Trevor Beeson

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      5. Nineteenth-Century Hymn Writers and Composers

      There was little hymn singing in the Church of England before about 1820. An edition of Tate and Brady’s late seventeenth-century versification of the psalms included some to secular folk tunes but this was not sufficient to relieve the general austerity of Sunday worship. The explanation of this lack of hymnody lies in the fact that at the Reformation the Church of England was influenced by the theology of John Calvin, rather than that of Martin Luther. This was so tied to the Bible that it became possible to use only biblical material for worship purposes. Thus Bible readings, psalms, biblical canticles and prayers echoing the biblical themes formed the staple provided by the Book of Common Prayer. Anthems, when used, consisted of aspirations or affirmations drawn from the Bible. This was in marked contrast to the situation in those parts of Europe, most notably Germany, where the embracing of Lutheranism, whose handling of the Bible was less rigid, allowed the flowering of what became a great tradition of mighty hymns, including some written by Luther himself. These would eventually enrich the worship and devotion of Christians everywhere. Bach’s Passions and his Christmas Oratorio have many Arias with non-scriptural words.

      The breakthrough in England was created by the Methodists who abandoned Calvinist theology and came to regard music as well as preaching as a major weapon in their campaign to evangelize the English people and to rescue the Church of England from the pit of formality and complacency into which it had descended. Hymns, in common with worship as a whole, were seen as ‘a converting ordinance’ and the sight of huge congregations, mainly of working people, united in their enthusiastic singing of them, provided clear evidence of their effectiveness. When the preface to the first edition of the 1933 Methodist Hymn Book began, as all subsequent editions have done, ‘Methodism was born in song’, this was a plain statement of the truth.

      The fact that during the early years of the nineteenth century Methodist congregations, meeting in halls and the open air, were attracting increasing numbers from parish churches was an important incentive to Anglican clergy to make hymn singing an integral part of their own services. A late eighteenth-century hymn-singing Evangelical movement within the Church of England was also influential and, as the century advanced, a widespread belief arose that the church’s worship needed to be renewed and enhanced by greater congregational participation. All these factors combined to open the doors to a degree of spontaneous change that transformed the experience of worship in England’s parish churches. The rise of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement later contributed a rich supply of ancient hymns drawn from medieval sources and brought alive by fine translations from the Latin.

      The Methodists were prolific hymn writers and one of their number, Charles Wesley, who never left the ministry of the Church of England, held a high doctrine of the Eucharist. He combined the essential gifts of the hymn writer – deep religious insight, confirmed by personal experience and expressed through the gifts of the poet – to the level of genius and wrote no fewer than 4,000 hymns. These, together with those of Isaac Watts, another genius of Independent church allegiance, and many others, became immediately available to enterprising Anglican parsons. Initially, they were not welcome everywhere: the gentry tended to regard them as vulgar and some bishops declared hymns to be illegal inasmuch as no provision for them was made by the rubrics of the Prayer Book.

      Nonetheless, once started, the use of hymns became unstoppable. By 1840 about 40 different hymn books, mainly local productions, were in use and one of these, consisting of 146 hymns, edited by a Sheffield vicar and, after a struggle, authorized by the Archbishop of York, ran to 29 editions, circulating among many parishes in the north of England.

      Reginald Heber

      Often described as ‘the father of the modern hymn book’, Heber was a child of the eighteenth century, born into a Yorkshire family of landed gentry, though his father was also a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Reginald had a brilliant career at the same college, winning a number of poetry prizes and election to a fellowship of All Souls’ College. After two years of travelling in Europe, he was ordained in 1804 and immediately appointed Rector of Hodnet, a family living in Shropshire, which had been kept vacant for two years until his return to England. He was also squire of the parish and his father-in-law, who was Dean of St Asaph, secured for him a prebend of that cathedral. His scholarship was recognized by appointment as Bampton Lecturer at Oxford, and his income further augmented by the preachership of Lincolns Inn, in London.

      In 1822 he was offered the bishopric of Calcutta, which at first he declined, but later was persuaded to accept. For the next four years he was an exemplary missionary bishop. His diocese covered the whole of British India and he travelled extensively, preaching, confirming and generally encouraging the small, scattered expatriate communities. But in 1826, after conducting a Confirmation and visiting a school, he sought to cool down in a swimming pool and died from drowning.

      In the following year, Heber’s widow managed at last to obtain permission from the Archbishop of Canterbury for the publication of a hymn book compiled by her husband during his years at Hodnet. Soon after his arrival in the parish he perceived that hymns might be useful for illustrating the Bible readings in the Sunday services and at the same time involve the congregation more closely in the worship. Until then the only collection of hymns known to him was Olney Hymns – a product of the Evangelical movement in 1779 – which included items by important poets such as John Newton, William Cowper and Augustus Toplady.

      Heber, although a High Churchman, wrote about his experience of using hymns in this way in an evangelical magazine, the Christian СКАЧАТЬ