Singers and Songs OF The Church: BEING BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF THE HYMN-WRITERS IN ALL THE PRINCIPAL COLLECTIONS. 4 WITH NOTES ON THEIR PSALMS AND HYMNS. BY JOSIAH MILLER, M.A. AUTHOR OF OUR HYMNS, THEIR AUTHORS AND ORIGIN,' 'OUR DISPENSATION,' ETC. SECOND EDITION. 'The fineness, which a Hymn or Psalm affords, Is, when the soul unto the lines accords.' GEORGE HERBERT. 'Deinde qui cantat, vacuus est, et diversarum cogitationum curas relegat, AMBROSE. PREFACE. NCOURAGED by the rapid sale of the first edition of my work, 'Our Hymns: their Authors and Origin,' and the favourable reception given to it, I have adopted the suggestion of some of my friendly critics, and have both emended the former material, and enlarged the plan of the work, so as to make it a Biographical Companion to all the principal Hymnals, and substantially a new work. The labour of including so many authors (more than five hundred), and the thousands of hymns in so many Collections, and the necessary research and correspondence involved, have been very great; but it is hoped that the result will be valued by the general reader, and especially by the large and increasing class who take delight in Hymns and Hymnology. Most people have their favourite hymns, and there are millions who from week to week use their Hymn Books in public worship, until they find that a thousand pleasing associations are clustering around the hymns they sing, and their familiar words are influencing their daily and most sacred feelings, and interweaving themselves in the very fabric of their spiritual nature. It is the object of this work to provide such information of the authors and origin of our hymns as will add to the pleasure and advantage of private devotion and public worship. Some Collections give the names of the authors. These can be turned to in our 'Alphabetical List of Authors,' and the biography, &c. at once found. But some of the principal Collections give no names of authors. In using them it will be necessary to find the first line of the hymn in our 'Comprehensive Index of Psalms and Hymns;' and thus the author, and what is known of him and of the particular hymn, will be ascertained. To explain more fully our object, we shall quote the following passage from our former work: In our public assemblies prose compositions are usually given with the illustration they derive from our knowledge of the author. We know something of the speaker who addresses us, or he announces a well-known name as that of the author of what he reads; or, if it be in a place of worship, pre-informs us that he is going to read part of the Gospel of S. John, or of an Epistle by S. Peter or S. Paul. And we very seldom put any prose composition to the disadvantage of being judged on its intrinsic merits, and apart from our knowledge of its author (although, for special reasons, this is done in some departments of our literature). But our hymns usually suffer from this disadvantage. In many instances they embody the sentiments of a particular writer, and were born of the peculiar circumstances in which he wrote them; yet all that we know of them, beyond their internal testimony, is their number in a Collection, or the page on which they are found. It is the object of this work to assist in the removal of that disadvantage, and to lend new interest to our public praise by informing the worshipper of the lives of the authors whose hymns he sings, and of the origin and history of those hymns. To illustrate, every thoughtful reader or worshipper will see the new meaning and value that belong to such a psalm as 'Out of the depths I cry to thee,' when he recognises in its translator a Christian David, the storm-tossed Luther, writing in 1524, when struggling to emerge from the dark waves of spiritual conflict; and that 'Lord, it belongs not to my care,' is more than before, when received from much-suffering Richard Baxter persecuted and afflicted, alike uncertain of his liberty and his life; and that •God moves in a mysterious way' has a new interest when accepted from the pen of Cowper, involved in thick clouds, yet not without some beams of light shining fitfully on him through their rifts. It is the object of this work to supply such illustrative information. The writer has felt the want of such a work, Preface. vii and, finding it still unsupplied, he has made an humble attempt to supply it. The biographical sketches are arranged in chronological order, so as to provide the materials for a history of the schools of hymn-writers, and the eras of the hymnic art. I did not think it possible to include in one volume the history and the biographies, nor have I attempted to give sketches of all hymn-writers. Having with regret to draw somewhere the line of limitation, I have confined myself to those who have so far won their way to public favour as to have a place in one or more of the twenty-five principal Collections to which this work is a Biographical Companion, and of which I have given a list. The limits of this preface will admit of only one preparatory step, the determination of what precisely a Christian hymn should be. Nearly a century ago the Rev. John Newton said: They should be hymns, not odes, if designed for public worship, and for the use of plain people, Perspicuity, simplicity, and ease should be chiefly attended to; and the imagery and colouring of poetry, if admitted at all, should be indulged very sparingly and with great judgment. Sir Roundell Palmer says, along with other wise words about hymns: 'Affectation or visible artifice is worse than excess of homeliness: a hymn is easily spoiled by a single falsetto note. Nor will the most exemplary soundness of doctrine atone for doggrel, or redeem from failure a prosaic, didactic style.' Dean Alford says:— An English hymn should be plain in diction, chastened in imagery, fervent in sentiment, humble in its approach to God. Its lines should be cunningly wrought, so that they may easily find their way to the ear of the simplest, and stay unbidden in his memory. It should be metrically faultless; so departing at times from perfect uniformity, as to render reason for the departure, and give a charm to its usual strictness. And James Montgomery says:— A hymn must have a beginning, middle, and end. There should be a manifest gradation in the thoughts, and their mutual dependence |