01.19. Religious Singing
Chapter 19 RELIGIOUS SINGING.
Every one is agreed as to the power of song. And yet it would be hard to analyze the strange, strong influence it produces on mind and heart.
It is indeed remarkable how the human voice, when thrown from conversation into another kind of intonation, a versified, melodized utterance, that instantly, every auditor in hall or church feels differently and acts differently. New sets of emotions seem to be stirred, thought moves on a higher plane, visions of a purer, nobler life in the future or past fill the mind and swell the soul, and a better man exists for a few moments if not for all time.
National hymns and anthems wonderfully mold and shape a country’s character and history.
During royal reigns in France the Marseillaise is not allowed to be sung. It seems able to produce a revolution with a single rendition.
We question whether any man can hear the Songs of his Homeland in a foreign country without being profoundly moved. In addition to the national anthem there is a variety of melodies bearing on friendship, love and the home life, all of which contribute their influence in the formation of individual character, and, heard in after years, can never be listened to without emotion. The mother of the writer had cradle songs, and hymns we have heard her sing in the evening by the fireside, which wrought abiding impressions for good on the hearts and lives of her children.
Then there were the cottonfield chants sung by the negroes at their work, and the wild, weird melodies rendered by the colored deck hands of the steamboats on the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers, that once heard left an everlasting effect upon the mind.
Any kind of music seems to attract the human family, the hand organ on the street, the soldier’s love ditty in the camp, the strumming guitar amid the moonlit trees, the flute from over the water, and the improvised quartette on the big liner in midocean. We remember once how two gentlemen singing at a piano in the saloon of a steamer on the Mediterranean brought almost every passenger into the room, while officers of the ship hung around the door, and sailor faces lined the transoms. It was a study to watch the countenances of this silent and cosmopolitan audience. The skins were of every color, white, yellow, red, brown and black, and yet all had the same expression of deep, unaffected interest. The heart was asserting itself. The soul was touched. A common humanity was present.
David spoke of "songs in the night," and at once a troop of recollections comes to us all of beautiful hours and experiences gone by, through the power of these single four words. He had doubtless listened to music in the night time as we have, and been affected as we were.
Numerous have been the times that we have gone to our hotel window and listened to students singing as they went back to college, until the last voice died away on the night air.
Repeatedly we have stood on the wharf in Vicksburg and seen one of our mammoth palatial steamboats at the hour of sunset swing out into the mile wide Mississippi, turn her head southward towards New Orleans, and gradually disappear around the distant bend with fifty deck hands chanting one of these primitive, blood-tingling, eye-filling river songs which remains ever after a beautiful and strangely sorrowful memory. As the weird strains died out along the shadowy shores, and down the misty stream, we have turned back into the city and, as we walked upon the streets felt the emptiness of the world, the unsatisfactoriness of this life, with such a longing for a happier world and a better life, that at times we thought the heart would fairly break.
It is not to be wondered at, that God has laid his hand on music and made it one of his mighty factors and instruments for the spread of the Gospel. The Old Testament has a good deal to say about the song side of salvation, and speaks of the "singers," and also "the harps with a solemn sound." In the New Testament we read that Jesus sang with his disciples. The words of that hymn can doubtless be traced back, but how we would love to know the melody. Paul and Silas sang at midnight in prison, and found a comfort in it, while the jailer and prisoners realized a conviction, that perhaps could not have been felt or produced at that time by any other means of grace.
Song seems to be one of the wings of the flying angel of Truth. And so when God sent the preacher John Wesley to bless the world, he dispatched with him the singer Charles Wesley, to bless it even more. The same Holy Spirit, in calling Moody to the work, put Sankey by his side. And when he commissioned Whittle he joined Bliss with him. And so on to this day, after the preacher prays, the people sing; and when the sermon is ended the congregation sings again. While after the selection of an evangelist is made, the next question is who shall assist him by leading in song? As we are creatures of manifold powers and sensibilities; as we are indeed in a creative sense harps of a thousand strings, it is needful that our hymns and spiritual songs should cover the whole range of spiritual feeling. We did not say of sentiment. We are speaking of the moral and spiritual realm and what properly belongs to that, in a pure elevating, comforting, inspiring, heart-revealing, Christ manifesting, God elevating collection of words and melody.
We believe that songs which refer to broken domestic ties, and appeal to the natural affections have no rightful place in a true hymnology. They make the people weep, but such tears are not these that God wants, and that the Word of God properly preached or incarnated in hymn is intended and able to produce.
Moreover, the hymns which deserve the name should have a variety of verbal expression as well as melody, in order to meet every one of the moods and tenses, every inward state and condition, every loss and possession, every hope and despair, and every privilege and danger of this most wonderful creation of God, a human soul.
Men need to be awed with anthems of the greatness and grandeur of God; horror stricken with minor chord productions about the world of the lost; awakened from slumber by trumpet-like sounds of the Judgment; as well as comforted in sorrow, strengthened in trial and temptation, and stimulated to do and endure for the holy cause of heaven. A hymn with doggered lines or wretched poetry ought not to be allowed in a respectable hymnbook. Neither should be tolerated old love songs like "Annie Laurie," "Belle of the Mohawk Vale," and many others that have sipped off their everyday garments, put on Sunday clothes as to sacred words, and now try to pass themselves off for saints or angels.
There are some of our modern day pieces that are so full of associations of early days and serenading nights, that the mood produced is anything but devotional and religious when they are sung. The words, "Let us go courting," would be eminently more fitting as a conclusion from the pulpit, than the sentence, "Let us pray."
However, we must confess that after one of these hymns we are glad to hear somebody say, "Let us pray." We feel the need of it -- not only on behalf of the robbed and wronged congregation, but for the singers themselves. Yes, indeed -- let us pray after some of the jigs, waltzes, quicksteps, love songs and regular negro cabin breakdowns, misnamed hymns, we have heard in Sunday schools, churches, protracted meetings, and even on holiness camp grounds.
How few of the popular gospel meeting hymn books of the day are marked with any broadness as to the great subjects and doctrines of the Bible. Let the reader look at the departments of Wesley’s hymn books, and the narrow jollification line of the Issues of today. With some there is not a single solemn opening piece of the Being and attributes of God. Not a solitary hymn about hell, and none on the Day of Judgment, as described in the Bible, and as sung by Watts, and John and Charles Wesley. The song books that appeal to the vitiated taste today are mainly on the "Old Black Joe," "Jollification Jump," "Moonlight on the Mother’s Grave," and "Mother’s Boy" line. People think these are religious hymns, when they are not on spiritual and supernatural planes, but in the domestic and natural realms.
Then, as we read the wretched doggerel lines claiming to be poetry, in some published hymn books, and contrast them with the pure, chaste, refined, elevated, inspired as well as rhythmic verses of John and Charles Wesley, of Watts and Newton, of Faber and Moore, we confess to a sickness of heart and a nausea elsewhere, and a conviction irresistible, that difficulty of hearing, yes, stone deafness, would not be an umixed evil under certain circumstances. The mother of the writer informed us when we were a boy, that the reading of a hymn by a Methodist preacher, his solemn lining it out to the congregation, and the deeply impressive melody to which it was sing made a lifetime impression upon her. The music was "Windham;" the words ran Shall I for fear of feeble man, The Spirit’s course in me restrain? Or undismayed by deed and word, Be a true witness for my Lord! Shall I to soothe the unholy throng Soften my speech or smooth my tongue; To gain earth’s gilded toys or flee The cross endured, my Lord, by Thee!
What then is he whose face I dread, Whose wrath or scorn make me afraid? A man? An heir of death! A slave To sin! -- A bubble on the wave!
Yea, let men rage since thou wilt spread Thy shadowing wings around my head, Since in all time thy tender love Will still my sure protection prove.
She said that the preacher dwelt in a most effective way upon the last three words of the second and fourth lines in the first two stanzas. That his noble bearing and fine scorn as he read the third verse was indescribable. While the exultation in the fourth came like an inspiration.
She pictured the man’s solemnity, dignity, unctious delivery and unmistakable moral superiority, speaking like one who had just come from the presence of God; the singing by many voices of the great hymn to the Heaven inspired melody of Windham; and she had the writer as much moved as the people had been in that faraway day of her girlhood. To hear of such things, and then in these latter days, see a man in a short bobtail sack coat kick up his heels and go to singing "On Monday I am happy, On Tuesday I am gay -- "etc., etc., makes us yearn with a great longing for the return to our midst of some beautiful things that have faded and fled away.
We conclude while in this mood with the words of David: "It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto thy name, O most High. To shew forth thy loving kindness in the morning, and thy faithfulness every night.
Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon the psaltery; upon the harp with a solemn sound."
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