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Chapter III.

HYMNS OF THE LATTER DAY MORNING.

"But who the melodies of morn can tell."

HE morning light of the Christian Church fell upon Pliny the younger; and in that light he

saw the martyr spirit of our first century. He had seen the Christians of his time suffer, and knew that their sufferings never broke their joy. Their morning hymns had never, perhaps, touched his ear; but he has bequeathed a precious testimony to the cheerful devotion of the people who could be charged with no crime but that of meeting on "a stated day before it was light, to sing hymns to Christ as God," and to renew their mutual pledges of truthfulness, purity, and love. Blessed souls! "The word of Christ dwelt in them so richly" that they must needs "prevent the dawning of the day" with their songs. The apostolic spirit was still alive in them. They were rejoicing in the dawn of the latter day. They were in jeopardy every hour; every little group was "baptized for the dead"; but they ate their "meat with gladness," cheering their meat-time with joyful psalmody; their love-feasts were brightened with chant and

chorus, and their homes were vocal with simple melodies and favourite hymns. What hymns must they have been which were pure overflowings of hearts full of divine influence? What songs, when every singer gave out the form of old anthems newly instinct with Christian life, or extemporized in melody and rhythm according to his own distinctive spiritual gift? What was their style of hymn? How did they sing? Their psalmody must have been at once a reiteration of the past and an embodiment of exemplar songs for the future. Echoes from that morning of church music come to our ears and hearts even now in some hymns which still breathe the perfume of an apostolic age. The warm and jubilant spirit, and the triumphant heavenliness of tone which distinguish those ancient songs, give life to our modern liturgies, and are so like the worship of prophets, apostles, and martyrs, that in singing them we may enjoy a feeling of unison with choirs of the first Christian converts. When we join "with angels and archangels" in the "thrice holy," or lift up our hearts with the "gloria in excelsis," or help to swell the anthem peal of the Te Deum, are we not using fragments from that early collection of hymns in which the praises of the old covenant saints were taken up and poured onward in richer Christian harmony through the first ages of Messiah's kingdom? In them we have the first Christian responses to the songs of patriarchal and prophetic days. The first song in which the people join at the Holy Communion "with angels and archangels," etc., is one of the first echoes of the Christian Church to those voices of seraphims which the prophet heard in the temple, and which were answered and repeated from Patmos in the hearing of a rapt apostle :—

Holy, holy, holy

Jehovah Sabaoth,

The whole earth is full

Of his glory.

The anthem of "Glory to God in the Highest," sang by the multitude of "heavenly hosts," was first responded to by the happy shepherds as they "returned glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen;" and then both angels and shepherds were answered by the martyr church in the glorious old Greek hymn which in our English Liturgy the communicants are called to chant at the close of the Sacramental Supper. And if, as the tradition goes, the Te Deum broke in alternate parts from the lips of Ambrose and Augustine during the solemnities of Augustine's baptism, it is probable that the holy singers merely caught the full-toned expression of an earlier time, the day-spring of the Church, when the company of believers gave forth utterances in which creeds, and praises, and thanksgivings, and intense prayer, and living hopes were interwoven and wrought up into one grand church hymn for all generations and all times. One incident in the history of Robert Hall serves to set forth the native majesty of the Te Deum, and its close conformity to the spirit and manner of inspired psalms. He had composed a sermon on a text which had touched his fine sense of grandeur and had deeply moved his heart. On completing his sermon, he turned to the concordance to find the text. It was not to be found. It was not in the Bible. It was a sentence from the Te Deum, "All the earth doth worship Thee, the Father everlasting." All ears are not fine enough to be charmed with the rhythm of these ancient hymns; and many sincere worshippers

even lack the power of fairly appreciating their simple grandeur and glowing power. Translations necessarily dim their glory, lower their tone, and lessen their power. But now and then some hymnist of deep sympathy with the past, drinks inspiration from these ever-living springs of song, and casts the whole. breathing measures into metrical form and rhyme, which at once suit the taste and command the hearts of wider multitudes and later times. How many who were never moved into fellowship with "all the company of heaven" by the liturgical translation of the Ter Sanctus, have risen into something like an approach to the old strain when singing Bishop Mant's more popular but beautiful verses

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Bright the vision that delighted

Once the sight of Judah's seer,
Sweet the countless tongues united
To entrance the prophet's ear.
Round the Lord in glory seated,
Cherubim and seraphim
Fill'd his temple, and repeated
Each to each th' alternate hymn.

Lord, thy glory fills the heaven,
Earth is with its fulness stored;

Unto Thee be glory given,

Holy, holy, holy Lord!"

Heaven is still with glory ringing,

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Earth takes up the angels' cry,

Holy, holy, holy," singing,

"Lord of hosts, the Lord most high!"

Ever thus in God's high praises,

Brethren, let our tongues unite;
Chief the heart when duty raises
God-ward at his mystic rite:
With his seraph train before Him,
With his holy Church below,
Thus conspire we to adore Him,

Bid we thus one anthem flow!

"Lord, thy glory fills the heaven,

Earth is with its fulness stored;
Unto Thee be glory given,

Holy, holy, holy Lord!"

Thus thy glorious name confessing,

We adopt thy angels' cry.

"Holy, holy, holy," blessing

Thee, "the Lord of hosts most high!"

As rank after rank from "the noble army of martyrs" passed away during the morning tide of the Church, leaving no record, and without the least care about the preservation of their memory upon earth, so, many of the hymnists of early days were happy in expressing their joys in song while they lived, and then departed, bequeathing their hymns to following generations, without a single effort to secure for their own names the future honours of authorship. Some of their simple, tender, trustful hymns, full of Christ and winged with heavenliness, still remain as nameless memorials of the generation whose purity inspired contemporary authorities with wonder. One hymn there is which seems to claim a place among those which Pliny says the Christians used to sing before the morning dawn. It is in the spirit of the Psalmist, who said, "My eyes prevent the night watches," and may be rendered thus:

From our midnight sleep uprising,

Thee, Gracious One, we will adore;
Loud the angels' hymn uplifting

To Thee, Almighty, evermore!

The holy, holy, holy Lord and God art Thou!
In mercy's name, have mercy on us now!

From the couch and death-like slumber
Thou makest me, O Lord, to rise:
Thou my mind and heart enlighten
And free my lips from sinful ties,

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