England's Antiphon

Here is one in which the peculiarities of his theories show themselves very prominently. There is a constant tendency in such to wander into the region half-spiritual, half-material.

THE ASPIRATION

      How long, great God, how long must I      Immured in this dark prison lie;  My soul must watch to have intelligence;  Where at the grates and avenues of sense  Where but faint gleams of thee salute my sight,  Like doubtful moonshine in a cloudy night?      When shall I leave this magic sphere,      And be all mind, all eye, all ear?      How cold this clime! And yet my sense      Perceives even here thy influence.  Even here thy strong magnetic charms I feel,  And pant and tremble like the amorous steel.  To lower good, and beauties less divine,  Sometimes my erroneous needle does decline,      But yet, so strong the sympathy,      It turns, and points again to thee.      I long to see this excellence      Which at such distance strikes my sense.  My impatient soul struggles to disengage  Her wings from the confinement of her cage.  Wouldst thou, great Love, this prisoner once set free,  How would she hasten to be linked to thee!      She'd for no angels' conduct stay,      But fly, and love on all the way.

THE RETURN

  Dear Contemplation! my divinest joy!      When I thy sacred mount ascend,      What heavenly sweets my soul employ!  Why can't I there my days for ever spend?  When I have conquered thy steep heights with pain,  What pity 'tis that I must down again!  And yet I must: my passions would rebel      Should I too long continue here:      No, here I must not think to dwell,  But mind the duties of my proper sphere.  So angels, though they heaven's glories know,  Forget not to attend their charge below.

The old hermits thought to overcome their impulses by retiring from the world: our Platonist has discovered for himself that the world of duty is the only sphere in which they can be combated. Never perhaps is a saint more in danger of giving way to impulse, let it be anger or what it may, than in the moment when he has just descended from this mount of contemplation.

We find ourselves now in the zone of hymn-writing. From this period, that is, from towards the close of the seventeenth century, a large amount of the fervour of the country finds vent in hymns: they are innumerable. With them the scope of my book would not permit me to deal, even had I inclination thitherward, and knowledge enough to undertake their history. But I am not therefore precluded from presenting any hymn whose literary excellence makes it worthy.

It is with especial pleasure that I refer to a little book which was once a household treasure in a multitude of families,156 the Spiritual Songs of John Mason, a clergyman in the county of Buckingham. The date of his birth does not appear to be known, but the first edition of these songs157 was published in 1683. Dr. Watts was very fond of them: would that he had written with similar modesty of style! A few of them are still popular in congregational singing. Here is the first in the book:

A GENERAL SONG OF PRAISE TO ALMIGHTY GOD

  How shall I sing that Majesty    Which angels do admire?  Let dust in dust and silence lie;    Sing, sing, ye heavenly choir.  Thousands of thousands stand around    Thy throne, O God most high;  Ten thousand times ten thousand sound    Thy praise; but who am I?  Thy brightness unto them appears,    Whilst I thy footsteps trace;  A sound of God comes to my ears;    But they behold thy face.  They sing because thou art their sun:    Lord, send a beam on me;  For where heaven is but once begun,    There hallelujahs be.  Enlighten with faith's light my heart;    Enflame it with love's fire;  Then shall I sing and bear a part    With that celestial choir.  I shall, I fear, be dark and cold,    With all my fire and light;  Yet when thou dost accept their gold,    Lord, treasure up my mite.  How great a being, Lord, is thine.    Which doth all beings keep!  Thy knowledge is the only line    To sound so vast a deep.  Thou art a sea without a shore,    A sun without a sphere;  Thy time is now and evermore,    Thy place is everywhere.  How good art thou, whose goodness is    Our parent, nurse, and guide!  Whose streams do water Paradise,    And all the earth beside!  Thine upper and thy nether springs    Make both thy worlds to thrive;  Under thy warm and sheltering wings    Thou keep'st two broods alive.  Thy arm of might, most mighty king    Both rocks and hearts doth break:  My God, thou canst do everything    But what should show thee weak.  Thou canst not cross thyself, or be    Less than thyself, or poor;  But whatsoever pleaseth thee,    That canst thou do, and more.  Who would not fear thy searching eye,    Witness to all that's true!  Dark Hell, and deep Hypocrisy    Lie plain before its view.  Motions and thoughts before they grow,    Thy knowledge doth espy;  What unborn ages are to do,    Is done before thine eye.  Thy wisdom which both makes and mends,    We ever much admire:  Creation all our wit transcends;    Redemption rises higher.  Thy wisdom guides strayed sinners home,    'Twill make the dead world rise,  And bring those prisoners to their doom:    Its paths are mysteries.  Great is thy truth, and shall prevail    To unbelievers' shame:  Thy truth and years do never fail;    Thou ever art the same.  Unbelief is a raging wave    Dashing against a rock:  If God doth not his Israel save,    Then let Egyptians mock.  Most pure and holy are thine eyes,    Most holy is thy name;  Thy saints, and laws, and penalties,    Thy holiness proclaim.  This is the devil's scourge and sting,    This is the angels' song,  Who holy, holy, holy sing,    In heavenly Canaan's tongue.  Mercy, that shining attribute,    The sinner's hope and plea!  Huge hosts of sins in their pursuit,    Are drowned in thy Red Sea.  Mercy is God's memorial,    And in all ages praised:  My God, thine only Son did fall,    That Mercy might be raised.  Thy bright back-parts, O God of grace,    I humbly here adore:  Show me thy glory and thy face,    That I may praise thee more.  Since none can see thy face and live,    For me to die is best:  Through Jordan's streams who would not dive,    To land at Canaan's rest?

To these Songs of Praise is appended another series called Penitential Cries, by the Rev. Thomas Shepherd, who, for a short time a clergyman in Buckinghamshire, became the minister of the Congregational church at Northampton, afterwards under the care of Doddridge. Although he was an imitator of Mason, some of his hymns are admirable. The following I think one of the best:—

FOR COMMUNION WITH GOD

  Alas, my God, that we should be    Such strangers to each other!  O that as friends we might agree,    And walk and talk together!  Thou know'st my soul does dearly love    The place of thine abode;  No music drops so sweet a sound    As these two words, My God.* * * * *  May I taste that communion, Lord,    Thy people have with thee?  Thy spirit daily talks with them,    O let it talk with me!  Like Enoch, let me walk with God,    And thus walk out my day,  Attended with the heavenly guards,    Upon the king's highway.  When wilt thou come unto me, Lord?    O come, my Lord most dear!  Come near, come nearer, nearer still:    I'm well when thou art near.* * * * *  When wilt thou come unto me, Lord?    For, till thou dost appear,  I count each moment for a day,    Each minute for a year.* * * * *  There's no such thing as pleasure here;    My Jesus is my all:  As thou dost shine or disappear,    My pleasures rise and fall.  Come, spread thy savour on my frame—    No sweetness is so sweet;  Till I get up to sing thy name    Where all thy singers meet.

In the writings of both we recognize a straight-forwardness of expression equal to that of Wither, and a quaint simplicity of thought and form like that of Herrick; while the very charm of some of the best lines is their spontaneity. The men have just enough mysticism to afford them homeliest figures for deepest feelings.

I turn to the accomplished Joseph Addison.

He was born in 1672. His religious poems are so well known, and are for the greater part so ordinary in everything but their simplicity of composition, that I should hardly have cared to choose one, had it not been that we owe him much gratitude for what he did, in the reigns of Anne and George I., to purify the moral taste of the English people at a time when the influence of the clergy was not for elevation, and to teach the love of a higher literature when Milton was little known and less esteemed. Especially are we indebted to him for his modest and admirable criticism of the Paradise Lost in the Spectator.

Of those few poems to which I have referred, I choose the best known, because it is the best. It has to me a charm for which I can hardly account.

Yet I imagine I see in it a sign of the poetic times: a flatness of spirit, arising from the evanishment of the mystical element, begins to result in a worship of power. Neither power nor wisdom, though infinite both, could constitute a God worthy of the worship of a human soul; and the worship of such a God must sink to the level of that fancied divinity. Small wonder is it then that the lyric should now droop its wings and moult the feathers of its praise. I do not say that God's more glorious attributes are already forgotten, but that the tendency of the Christian lyric is now to laudation of power—and knowledge, a form of the same—as the essential of Godhead. This indicates no recalling of metaphysical questions, such as we have met in foregoing verse, but a decline towards system; a rising passion—if anything so cold may be called a passion—for the reduction of all things to the forms of the understanding, a declension which has prepared the way for the present worship of science, and its refusal, if not denial, of all that cannot be proved in forms of the intellect.

The hymn which has led to these remarks is still good, although, like the loveliness of the red and lowering west, it gives sign of a gray and cheerless dawn, under whose dreariness the child will first doubt if his father loves him, and next doubt if he has a father at all, and is not a mere foundling that Nature has lifted from her path.

  The spacious firmament on high,  With all the blue etherial sky,  And spangled heavens, a shining frame,  Their great Original proclaim.  The unwearied sun from day to day  Does his Creator's power display;  And publishes to every land  The work of an almighty hand.  Soon as the evening shades prevail,  The moon takes up the wondrous tale;  And nightly to the listening earth  Repeats the story of her birth;  Whilst all the stars that round her burn,  And all the planets, in their turn,  Confirm the tidings as they roll,  And spread the truth from pole to pole.  What though in solemn silence all  Move round the dark terrestrial ball?  What though no real voice nor sound  Amidst their radiant orbs be found?  In reason's ear they all rejoice,  And utter forth a glorious voice,  For ever singing as they shine:  "The hand that made us is divine."

The very use of the words spangled and frame seems—to my fancy only, it may be—to indicate a tendency towards the unworthy and theatrical. Yet the second stanza is lovely beyond a doubt; and the whole is most artistic, although after a tame fashion. Whether indeed the heavenly bodies teach what he says, or whether we should read divinity worthy of the name in them at all, without the human revelation which healed men, I doubt much. That divinity is there—Yes; that we could read it there without having seen the face of the Son of Man first, I think—No. I do not therefore dare imagine that no revelation dimly leading towards such result glimmered in the hearts of God's chosen amongst Jews and Gentiles before he came. What I say is, that power and order, although of God, and preparing the way for him, are not his revealers unto men. No doubt King David compares the perfection of God's law to the glory of the heavens, but he did not learn that perfection from the heavens, but from the law itself, revealed in his own heart through the life-teaching of God. When he had learned it he saw that the heavens were like it.

To unveil God, only manhood like our own will serve. And he has taken the form of man that he might reveal the manhood in him from awful eternity.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PLAIN.

But Addison's tameness is wonderfully lovely beside the fervours of a man of honoured name,—Dr. Isaac Watts, born in 1674. The result must be dreadful where fervour will poetize without the aidful restraints of art and modesty. If any man would look upon absurdity in the garb of sobriety, let him search Dryden's Annus Mirabilis: Dr. Watts's Lyrics are as bad; they are fantastic to utter folly. An admiration of "the incomparable Mr. Cowley" did the sense of them more injury than the imitation of his rough-cantering ode could do their rhythm. The sentimentalities of Roman Catholic writers towards our Lord and his mother, are not half so offensive as the courtier-like flatteries Dr. Watts offers to the Most High. To say nothing of the irreverence, the vulgarity is offensive. He affords another instance amongst thousands how little the form in which feeling is expressed has to do with the feeling itself. In him the thought is true, the form of its utterance false; the feeling lovely, the word, often to a degree, repulsive. The ugly web is crossed now and then by a fine line, and even damasked with an occasional good poem: I have found two, and only two, in the whole of his seventy-five Lyrics sacred to Devotion. His objectivity and boldness of thought, and his freedom of utterance, cause us ever and anon to lament that he had not the humility and faith of an artist as well as of a Christian.

Almost all his symbols indicate a worship of power and of outward show.

I give the best of the two good poems I have mentioned, and very good it is.

HAPPY FRAILTY

  "How meanly dwells the immortal mind!    How vile these bodies are!  Why was a clod of earth designed    To enclose a heavenly star?  "Weak cottage where our souls reside!    This flesh a tottering wall!  With frightful breaches gaping wide,    The building bends to fall.  "All round it storms of trouble blow,    And waves of sorrow roll;  Cold waves and winter storms beat through,    And pain the tenant-soul.  "Alas, how frail our state!" said I,    And thus went mourning on;  Till sudden from the cleaving sky    A gleam of glory shone.  My soul all felt the glory come,    And breathed her native air;  Then she remembered heaven her home,    And she a prisoner here.  Straight she began to change her key;    And, joyful in her pains,  She sang the frailty of her clay    In pleasurable strains.  "How weak the prison is where I dwell!    Flesh but a tottering wall!  The breaches cheerfully foretell    The house must shortly fall.  "No more, my friends, shall I complain,    Though all my heart-strings ache;  Welcome disease, and every pain    That makes the cottage shake!  "Now let the tempest blow all round,    Now swell the surges high,  And beat this house of bondage down    To let the stranger fly!  "I have a mansion built above    By the eternal hand;  And should the earth's old basis move,    My heavenly house must stand.  "Yes, for 'tis there my Saviour reigns—    I long to see the God—  And his immortal strength sustains    The courts that cost him blood.  "Hark! from on high my Saviour calls:    I come, my Lord, my Love!  Devotion breaks the prison-walls,    And speeds my last remove."

His psalms and hymns are immeasurably better than his lyrics. Dreadful some of them are; and I doubt if there is one from which we would not wish stanzas, lines, and words absent. But some are very fine. The man who could write such verses as these ought not to have written as he has written:—

  Had I a glance of thee, my God,    Kingdoms and men would vanish soon;  Vanish as though I saw them not,    As a dim candle dies at noon.  Then they might fight and rage and rave:    I should perceive the noise no more  Than we can hear a shaking leaf    While rattling thunders round us roar.

Some of his hymns will be sung, I fancy, so long as men praise God together; for most heartily do I grant that of all hymns I know he has produced the best for public use; but these bear a very small proportion indeed to the mass of his labour. We cannot help wishing that he had written about the twentieth part. We could not have too much of his best, such as this:

  Be earth with all her scenes withdrawn;  Let noise and vanity begone:  In secret silence of the mind  My heaven, and there my God, I find;

but there is no occasion for the best to be so plentiful: a little of it will go a great way. And as our best moments are so few, how could any man write six hundred religious poems, and produce quality in proportion to quantity save in an inverse ratio?

Dr. Thomas Parnell, the well-known poet, a clergyman, born in Dublin in 1679, has written a few religious verses. The following have a certain touch of imagination and consequent grace, which distinguishes them above the swampy level of the time.

HYMN FOR EVENING

  The beam-repelling mists arise,  And evening spreads obscurer skies;  The twilight will the night forerun,  And night itself be soon begun.  Upon thy knees devoutly bow,  And pray the Lord of glory now  To fill thy breast, or deadly sin  May cause a blinder night within.  And whether pleasing vapours rise,  Which gently dim the closing eyes,  Which make the weary members blest  With sweet refreshment in their rest;  Or whether spirits158 in the brain  Dispel their soft embrace again,  And on my watchful bed I stay,  Forsook by sleep, and waiting day;  Be God for ever in my view,  And never he forsake me too;  But still as day concludes in night,  To break again with new-born light,  His wondrous bounty let me find  With still a more enlightened mind.* * * * *  Thou that hast thy palace far  Above the moon and every star;  Thou that sittest on a throne  To which the night was never known,  Regard my voice, and make me blest  By kindly granting its request.  If thoughts on thee my soul employ,  My darkness will afford me joy,  Till thou shalt call and I shall soar,  And part with darkness evermore.

Many long and elaborate religious poems I have not even mentioned, because I cannot favour extracts, especially in heroic couplets or blank verse. They would only make my book heavy, and destroy the song-idea. I must here pass by one of the best of such poems, The Complaint, or Night Thoughts of Dr. Young; nor is there anything else of his I care to quote.

I must give just one poem of Pope, born in 1688, the year of the Revolution. The flamboyant style of his Messiah is to me detestable: nothing can be more unlike the simplicity of Christianity. All such, equally with those by whatever hand that would be religious by being miserable, I reject at once, along with all that are merely commonplace religious exercises. But this at least is very unlike the rest of Pope's compositions: it is as simple in utterance as it is large in scope and practical in bearing. The name Jove may be unpleasant to some ears: it is to mine—not because it is the name given to their deity by men who had had little outward revelation, but because of the associations which the wanton poets, not the good philosophers, have gathered about it. Here let it stand, as Pope meant it, for one of the names of the Unknown God.

THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER

  Father of all! in every age,    In every clime adored,  By saint, by savage, and by sage,    Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!  Thou great First Cause, least understood!    Who all my sense confined  To know but this, that thou art good,    And that myself am blind  Yet gave me, in this dark estate,    To see the good from ill;  And, binding Nature fast in Fate,    Left free the human will:  What Conscience dictates to be done,    Or warns me not to do—  This, teach me more than hell to shun,    That, more than heaven pursue.  What blessings thy free bounty gives,    Let me not cast away;  For God is paid when man receives:    To enjoy is to obey.  Yet not to earth's contracted span    Thy goodness let me bound,  Or think thee Lord alone of man,    When thousand worlds are round.  Let not this weak, unknowing hand    Presume thy bolts to throw,  And deal damnation round the land    On each I judge thy foe.  If I am right, thy grace impart    Still in the right to stay;  If I am wrong, O teach my heart    To find that better way.  Save me alike from foolish pride    Or impious discontent,  At aught thy wisdom has denied,    Or aught thy goodness lent.  Teach me to feel another's woe,    To hide the fault I see:  That mercy I to others show,    That mercy show to me.  Mean though I am—not wholly so,    Since quickened by thy breath:—  O lead me wheresoe'er I go,    Through this day's life or death.  This day, be bread and peace my lot:    All else beneath the sun  Thou know'st if best bestowed or not,    And let thy will be done.  To thee, whose temple is all space,    Whose altar, earth, sea, skies,  One chorus let all being raise!    All Nature's incense rise!

And now we come upon a strange little well in the desert. Few flowers indeed shine upon its brink, and it flows with a somewhat unmusical ripple: it is a well of the water of life notwithstanding, for its song tells of the love and truth which are the grand power of God.

John Byrom, born in Manchester in the year 1691, a man whose strength of thought and perception of truth greatly surpassed his poetic gifts, yet delighted so entirely in the poetic form that he wrote much and chiefly in it. After leaving Cambridge, he gained his livelihood for some time by teaching a shorthand of his own invention, but was so distinguished as a man of learning generally that he was chosen an F.R.S. in 1723. Coming under the influence, probably through William Law, of the writings of Jacob Böhme, the marvellous shoemaker of Görlitz in Silesia, who lived in the time of our Shakspere, and heartily adopting many of his views, he has left us a number of religious poems, which are seldom so sweet in music as they are profound in the metaphysics of religion. Here we have yet again a mystical thread running radiant athwart both warp and woof of our poetic web: the mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of religious poetry; and although some of the seed had come from afar both in time and space, Byrom's verse is of indigenous growth. Much of the thought of the present day will be found in his verses. Here is a specimen of his metrical argumentation. It is taken from a series of Meditations for every Day in Passion Week.

WEDNESDAY

Christ satisfieth the justice of God by fulfilling all righteousness.

  Justice demandeth satisfaction—yes;  And ought to have it where injustice is:  But there is none in God—it cannot mean  Demand of justice where it has full reign:  To dwell in man it rightfully demands,  Such as he came from his Creator's hands.    Man had departed from a righteous state,  Which he at first must have, if God create:  'Tis therefore called God's righteousness, and must  Be satisfied by man's becoming just;  Must exercise good vengeance upon men,  Till it regain its rights in them again.    This was the justice for which Christ became  A man to satisfy its righteous claim;  Became Redeemer of the human race,  That sin in them to justice might give place:  To satisfy a just and righteous will,  Is neither more nor less than to fulfil.* * * * *

Here are two stanzas of one of more mystical reflection:

A PENITENTIAL SOLILOQUY

  What though no objects strike upon the sight!  Thy sacred presence is an inward light.  What though no sounds shall penetrate the ear!  To listening thought the voice of truth is clear.  Sincere devotion needs no outward shrine;  The centre of an humble soul is thine.  There may I worship! and there mayst thou place  Thy seat of mercy, and thy throne of grace!  Yea, fix, if Christ my advocate appear,  The dread tribunal of thy justice there!  Let each vain thought, let each impure desire  Meet in thy wrath with a consuming fire.

And here are two of more lyrical favour.

THE SOUL'S TENDENCY TOWARDS ITS TRUE CENTRE