History of American Christianity — Chapter XXI The Church in Theology and Literature, Part 2

* * * * * In one noble department of religious literature, the liturgical, the record of the American church is meager.

The reaction among the early colonists and many of the later settlers against forms of worship imposed by political authority was violent.

Seeking for a logical basis, it planted itself on the assumption that no form (unless an improvised form) is permitted in public worship, except such as are sanctioned by express word of Scripture.

In their sturdy resolution to throw off and break up the yoke, which neither they nor their fathers had been able to bear, of ordinances and traditions complicated with not a little of debilitating superstition, the extreme Puritans of England and Scotland rejected the whole system of holy days in the Christian year, including the authentic anniversaries of Passover and Pentecost, and discontinued the use of religious ceremonies at marriages and funerals.

[386:2] The only liturgical compositions that have come down to us from the first generations are the various attempts, in various degrees of harshness and rudeness, at the versification of psalms and other Scriptures for singing.

The emancipation of the church from its bondage to an artificial dogma came, as we have already seen, with the Great Awakening and the introduction of Watts's "Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament."

[387:1] After the Revolution, at the request of the General Association of Connecticut and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, Timothy Dwight completed the work of Watts by versifying a few omitted psalms,[387:2] and added a brief selection of hymns, chiefly in the grave and solemn Scriptural style of Watts and Doddridge.

Then followed, in successive tides, from England, the copious hymnody of the Methodist revival, both Calvinist and Wesleyan, of the Evangelical revival, and now at last of the Oxford revival, with its affluence of translations from the ancient hymnists, as well as of original hymns.

It is doubtless owing to this abundant intermittent inflow from England that the production of American hymns has been so scanty.

Only a few writers, among them Thomas Hastings and Ray Palmer, have written each a considerable number of hymns that have taken root in the common use of the church.

Not a few names besides are associated each with some one or two or three lyrics that have won an enduring place in the affections of Christian worshipers.

The "gospel hymns" which have flowed from many pens in increasing volume since the revival of 1857 have proved their great usefulness, especially in connection with the ministry of Messrs. Moody and Sankey; but they are, even the best of them, short-lived.

After their season the church seems not unwilling to let them die.

Soon after the mid-point of the nineteenth century, began a serious study of the subject of the conduct of public worship, which continues to this day, with good promise of sometime reaching useful and stable results.

In 1855 was published "Eutaxia, or the Presbyterian Liturgies: Historical Sketches.

By a Minister of the Presbyterian Church."

The author, Charles W. Baird, was a man peculiarly fitted to render the church important service, such as indeed he did render in this volume, and in the field of Huguenot history which he divided with his brother, Henry M. Baird.

How great the loss to historical theology through his protracted feebleness of body and his death may be conjectured, not measured.

This brief volume awakened an interest in the subject of it in America, and in Scotland, and among the nonconformists of England.

To American Presbyterians in general it was something like a surprise to be reminded that the sisterhood of the "Reformed" sects were committed by their earliest and best traditions in favor of liturgic uses in public worship.

At about the same time the fruitful discussions of the Mercersburg controversy were in progress in the German Reformed Church.

"Mercersburg found fault with the common style of extemporaneous public prayer, and advocated a revival of the liturgical church service of the Reformation period, but so modified and reproduced as to be adapted to the existing wants of Protestant congregations."

[388:1] Each of these discussions was followed by a proposed book of worship.

In 1857 was published by Mr. Baird "A Book of Public Prayer, Compiled from the Authorized Formularies of Worship of the Presbyterian Church, as Prepared by the Reformers, Calvin, Knox, Bucer, and others"; and in 1858 was set forth by a committee of the German Reformed Church "A Liturgy, or Order of Christian Worship."

In 1855 St. Peter's Presbyterian Church of Rochester published its "Church-book," prepared by Mr. L. W.

Bacon, then acting as pastor, which was principally notable for introducing the use of the Psalms in parallelisms for responsive reading--a use which at once found acceptance in many churches, and has become general in all parts of the country.

Sporadic experiments followed in various individual congregations, looking toward greater variety or greater dignity or greater musical attractiveness in the services of public worship, or toward more active participation therein on the part of the people.

But these experiments, conducted without concert or mutual counsel, often without serious study of the subject, and with a feebly esthetic purpose, were representative of individual notions, and had in them no promise of stability or of fruit after their kind.

Only, by the increasing number of them, they have given proof of an unrest on this subject which at last is beginning to embody itself in organization and concerted study and enterprise.

A fifty years of mere tentative groping is likely to be followed by another fifty years of substantial progress.

The influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church upon this growing tendency has been sometimes favorable, sometimes unfavorable, but always important.

To begin with, it has held up before the whole church an example of prescribed forms for divine worship, on the whole, the best in all history.

On the other hand, it has drawn to itself those in other sects whose tastes and tendencies would make them leaders in the study of liturgics, and thus while reinforcing itself has hindered the general advance of improvement in the methods of worship.

Withal, its influence has tended to narrow the discussion to the consideration of a single provincial and sectarian tradition, as if the usage of a part of the Christians of the southern end of one of the islands of the British archipelago had a sort of binding authority over the whole western continent.

But again, on the other hand, the broadening of its own views to the extent of developing distinctly diverse ways of thinking among its clergy and people has enlarged the field of study once more, and tended to interest the church generally in the practical, historical, and theological aspects of the subject.

The somewhat timid ventures of "Broad" and "Evangelical" men in one direction, and the fearless breaking of bounds in the other direction by those of "Ritualist" sympathies, have done much to liberate this important communion from slavish uniformity and indolent traditionalism; and within a few years that has been accomplished which only a few years earlier would have been deemed impossible--the considerable alteration and improvement of the Book of Common Prayer.

It is safe to prognosticate, from the course of the history up to this point, that the subject of the conduct of worship will become more and more seriously a subject of study in the American church in all its divisions; that the discussions thereon arising will be attended with strong antagonisms of sentiment; that mutual antagonisms within the several sects will be compensated by affiliations of men like-minded across sectarian lines; and that thus, as many times before, particular controversies will tend to general union and fellowship.

One topic under this title of Liturgics requires special mention--the use of music in the church.

It was not till the early part of the eighteenth century that music began to be cultivated as an art in America.

[391:1] Up to that time "the service of song in the house of the Lord" had consisted, in most worshiping assemblies on this continent, in the singing of rude literal versifications of the Psalms and other Scriptures to some eight or ten old tunes handed down by tradition, and variously sung in various congregations, as modified by local practice.

The coming in of "singing by rule" was nearly coincident with the introduction of Watts's psalms and hymns, and was attended with like agitations.

The singing-school for winter evenings became an almost universal social institution; and there actually grew up an American school of composition, quaint, rude, and ungrammatical, which had great vogue toward the end of the last century, and is even now remembered by some with admiration and regret.

It was devoted mainly to psalmody tunes of an elaborate sort, in which the first half-stanza would be sung in plain counterpoint, after which the voices would chase each other about in a lively imitative movement, coming out together triumphantly at the close.

They abounded in forbidden progressions and empty chords, but were often characterized by fervor of feeling and by strong melodies.

A

few of them, as "Lenox" and "Northfield," still linger in use; and the productions of this school in general, which amount to a considerable volume, are entitled to respectful remembrance as the first untutored utterance of music in America.

The use of them became a passionate delight to our grandparents; and the traditions are fresh and vivid of the great choirs filling the church galleries on three sides, and tossing the theme about from part to part.

The use of these rudely artificial tunes involved a gravely important change in the course of public worship.

In congregations that accepted them the singing necessarily became an exclusive privilege of the choir.

To a lamentable extent, where there was neither the irregular and spontaneous ejaculation of the Methodist nor the rubrical response of the Episcopalian, the people came to be shut out from audible participation in the acts of public worship.

A movement of musical reform in the direction of greater simplicity and dignity began early in this century, when Lowell Mason in Boston and Thomas Hastings in New York began their multitudinous publications of psalmody.

Between them not less than seventy volumes of music were published in a period of half as many years.

Their immense and successful fecundity was imitated with less success by others, until the land was swamped with an annual flood of church-music books.

A thin diluvial stratum remains to us from that time in tunes, chiefly from the pen of Dr. Mason, that have taken permanent place as American chorals.

Such pieces as "Boylston," "Hebron," "Rockingham," "Missionary Hymn," and the adaptations of Gregorian melodies, "Olmutz" and "Hamburg," are not likely to be displaced from their hold on the American church by more skilled and exquisite compositions of later schools.

But the fertile labors of the church musicians of this period were affected by the market demand for new material for the singing-school, the large church choir, and the musical convention.

The music thus introduced into the churches consisted not so much of hymn-tunes and anthems as of "sacred glees."

[392:1] Before the middle of the century the Episcopal Church had arrived at a point at which it was much looked to to set the fashions in such matters as church music and architecture.

Its influence at this time was very bad.

It was largely responsible for the fashion, still widely prevalent, of substituting for the church choir a quartet of professional solo singers, and for the degradation of church music into the dainty, languishing, and sensuous style which such "artists" do most affect.

The period of "The Grace Church Collection," "Greatorex's Collection," and the sheet-music compositions of George William Warren and John R. Thomas was the lowest tide of American church music.

A healthy reaction from this vicious condition began about 1855, with the introduction of hymn-and-tune books and the revival of congregational singing.

From that time the progressive improvement of the public taste may be traced in the character of the books that have succeeded one another in the churches, until the admirable compositions of the modern English school of psalmody tend to predominate above those of inferior quality.

It is the mark of a transitional period that both in church music and in church architecture we seem to depend much on compositions and designs derived from older countries.

The future of religious art in America is sufficiently well assured to leave no cause for hurry or anxiety.

* * * * * In glancing back over this chapter, it will be strange if some are not impressed, and unfavorably impressed, with a disproportion in the names cited as representative, which are taken chiefly from some two or three sects.

This may justly be referred in part, no doubt, to the author's point of view and to the "personal equation"; but it is more largely due to the fact that in the specialization of the various sects the work of theological literature and science has been distinctively the lot of the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, and preëminently of the former.

[394:1] It is matter of congratulation that the inequality among the denominations in this respect is in a fair way to be outgrown.

Special mention must be made of the peculiarly valuable contribution to the liturgical literature of America that is made by the oldest of our episcopal churches, the Moravian.

This venerable organization is rich not only in the possession of a heroic martyr history, but in the inheritance of liturgic forms and usages of unsurpassed beauty and dignity.

Before the other churches had emerged from a half-barbarous state in respect to church music, this art was successfully cultivated in the Moravian communities and missions.

In past times these have had comparatively few points of contact and influence with the rest of the church; but when the elements of a common order of divine worship shall by and by begin to grow into form, it is hardly possible that the Moravian traditions will not enter into it as an important factor.

A combination of conditions which in the case of other bodies in the church has been an effective discouragement to literary production has applied with especial force to the Roman Catholic Church in America.

First, its energies and resources, great as they are, have been engrossed by absolutely prodigious burdens of practical labor; and secondly, its necessary literary material has been furnished to it from across the sea, ready to its hand, or needing only the light labor of translation.

But these two conditions are not enough, of themselves, to account for the very meager contribution of the Catholic Church to the common religious and theological literature of American Christendom.

Neither is the fact explained by the general low average of culture among the Catholic population; for literary production does not ordinarily proceed from the man of average culture, but from men of superior culture, such as this church possesses in no small number, and places in positions of undisturbed "learned leisure" that would seem in the highest degree promotive of intellectual work.

But the comparative statistics of the Catholic and the Protestant countries and universities of Germany seem to prove conclusively that the spirit and discipline of the Roman Church are unfavorable to literary productiveness in those large fields of intellectual activity that are common and free alike to the scholars of all Christendom.

It remains to be seen whether the stimulating atmosphere and the free and equal competitions of the New World will not show their invigorating effect in the larger activity of Catholic scholars, and their liberation from within the narrow lines of polemic and defensive literature.

The republic of Christian letters has already shown itself prompt to welcome accessions from this quarter.

The signs are favorable.

Notwithstanding severe criticisms of their methods proceeding from the Catholic press, or rather in consequence of such criticisms, the Catholic institutions of higher learning are rising in character and in public respect; and the honorable enterprise of establishing at Washington an American Catholic university, on the upbuilding of which shall be concentrated the entire intellectual strength and culture of this church, promises an invigorating influence that shall extend through that whole system of educational institutions which the church has set on foot at immense cost, and not with wholly satisfactory results.

Recent events in the Catholic Church in America tend to reassure all minds on an important point on which not bigots and alarmists only, but liberal-minded citizens apostolically willing to "look not only on their own things but also on the things of others," have found reasonable ground for anxiety.

The American Catholic Church, while characterized in all its ranks, in respect of loyal devotion to the pope, by a high type of ultramontane orthodoxy, is to be administered on patriotic American principles.

The brief term of service of Monsignor Satolli as papal legate clothed with plenipotentiary authority from the Roman see stamped out the scheme called from its promoter "Cahenslyism," which would have divided the American Catholic Church into permanent alien communities, conserving each its foreign language and organized under its separate hierarchy.

The organization of parishes to be administered in other languages than English is suffered only as a temporary necessity.

The deadly warfare against the American common-school system has abated.

And the anti-American denunciations contained in the bull and syllabus of December 8, 1864, are openly renounced as lacking the note of infallibility.

[396:1] Of course, as in all large communities of vigorous vitality, there will be mutually antagonist parties in this body; but it is hardly to be doubted that with the growth and acclimatization of the Catholic Church in America that party will eventually predominate which is most in sympathy with the ruling ideas of the country and the age.

FOOTNOTES:

[377:1] For fuller accounts of "the Mercersburg theology," with references to the literature of the subject, see Dubbs, "The Reformed Church, German" (American Church History Series, vol. viii.

), pp. 219, 220, 389-378; also, Professor E. V.

Gerhart in "Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia," pp. 1473-1475. [384:1] See above, p. 375. [386:1] The program of Yale Divinity School for 1896-97 announces among the "required studies in senior year" lectures "on some important problems of American life, such as Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism;

Races in the United States; Immigration; the Modern City; the Wage System; the Relations of Employer and Employed; Social Classes; the Causes, Prevention, and Punishment of Crime; and University Settlements."

[386:2] Williston Walker, "The Congregationalists," pp. 245, 246. [387:1] See above, pp. 182-184. [387:2] The only relic of this work that survives in common use is the immortal lyric, "I love thy kingdom, Lord," founded on a motif in the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm.

This, with Doddridge's hymn, "My God, and is thy table spread?"

continued for a long time to be the most important church hymn and eucharistic hymn in the English language.

We should not perhaps have looked for the gift of them to two Congregationalist ministers, one in New England and the other in old England.

There is no such illustration of the spiritual unity of "the holy catholic church, the fellowship of the holy," as is presented in a modern hymn-book.

[388:1] Professor Gerhart, in "Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia," p. 1475. [391:1] "Massachusetts Historical Collections," second series, vol. iv.

, p. 301; quoted in the "New Englander," vol. xiii.

, p. 467 (August, 1855).

[392:1] This was the criticism of the late Rev. Mr. Havergal, of Worcester Cathedral, to whom Dr. Mason had sent copies of some of his books.

The incident was freely told by Dr. Mason himself.

[394:1] For many generations the religious and theological literature of the country proceeded almost exclusively, at first or second hand, from New England.

The Presbyterian historian, Professor Robert Ellis Thompson, remarks that "until after the division of 1837 American Presbyterianism made no important addition to the literature of theology" ("The Presbyterians," p. 143).

The like observation is true down to a much more recent date of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Noble progress has been made in both these denominations in reversing this record.

[396:1] So (for example) Bishop O'Gorman, "The Roman Catholics," p. 434. And yet, at the time, the bull with its appendix was certainly looked upon as "an act of infallibility."

See, in "La Bulle _Quanta Cura_ et la Civilisation Moderne, par l'Abbé Pélage" (Paris, 1865), the utterances of all the French bishops.

The language of Bishop Plantier of Poitiers seems decisive: "The Vicar of Jesus Christ, doctor and pastor charged with the teaching and ruling of the entire church, addressed to the bishops, and through them to all the Christian universe, instructions, the object of which is to settle the mind and enlighten the conscience on sundry points of Christian doctrine and morals" (pp. 103, 104).

See also pp. 445, 450. This brings it within the Vatican Council's definition of an infallible utterance.

But we are bound to bear in mind that not only is the infallible authority of this manifesto against "progress, liberalism, and modern civilization" disclaimed, but the meaning of it, which seems unmistakably clear, is disputed.

"The syllabus," says Bishop O'Gorman, "is technical and legal in its language, ...

and needs to be interpreted to the lay reader by the ecclesiastical lawyer" (p. 435).

A seriously important desideratum in theological literature is some authoritative canon of the infallible utterances of the Roman see.

It is difficult to fix on any one of them the infallible authority of which is not open to dispute within the church itself; while the liability of them to misinterpretation (as in the case of the _Quanta Cura_ and _Syllabus_) brings in still another element of vagueness and uncertainty.

CHAPTER XXII.