Let us see what the hymn mender has made of this truly sublime effusion: Jesus, transporting name. The keystone of the poetic arch is taken out at once. It is no longer the name that harmonizes celestial and terrestrial things, it simply transports angels. Need we wonder at what follows? It charms the hosts above, They look upon his heavenly face, The commonplaces of this couplet have always interfered with our comfort in singing this jubilant Christian song. No one can doubt that whoever changed the couplet, he failed to reach the poet's original conception. The verse, His name the sinner hears, we are permitted to sing as it was written. We are thankful for this privilege, and can only express regret that it had not been extended somewhat farther. Not so, however: the compiler fails again to apprehend the creations of the poet's imagination. The idea conveyed in the words, "As Moses lifted up the serpent," &c., he moulds into a verse quickening and hope-inspiring; a verse which thousands and myriads of believers have sung with the most ecstatic emotions: "See there!" the highest expression of ecstasy. See him lifted up! It is a sight of Jesus (0 that you too could behold him!) which has healed my poisoned, perishing spirit. "See there!" I see him lifted up upon the cross for ME. By the healing vigor with which the look at Jesus has inspired me, I not only hear the glad sound-"Look unto me and be ye saved"-I am conscious of his power to rescue me,― I hear, I FEEL he died for me! Compared with such a couplet, it is tame to say The triumphant climax with which the hymn closes, is completely set aside. Our readers shall determine between the new version and the original. O for a trumpet voice On all the world to call! For all, for all my Saviour died! He is the propitiation, not for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world. Instead of the poet's language, we are made to sing the two last lines thus : : Inspire with praise each human tongue, We should like to ask the compiler and improver, who or what is to inspire every tongue, and to wake up a song? Is it the trumpet that is invoked? Surely not; the poet, in the previous lines, is calling out in soliloquy. Is it the Lord? He is not supplicated from one end of the hymn to the other. It is really bad English to insert such a couplet without a previously expressed antecedent or subject. Granted, we are told, that this hymn is "Wesley's altered," but if we must have changes, let us have some doctrinal or tasteful ground for them; and let them be undertaken by men who can appreciate the beauty and the power of true poetry. That grand objective hymn of Tersteegen, "Lo! God is here! let us adore," &c., to which we have before referred as worthy of insertion in all our books; though lofty and unexceptionable throughout, is reduced in the Plymouth and Congregational collections from eighteen to eight couplets. In our Presbyterian compilations it has no place whatever. We transcribe some of those couplets which have been omitted by Messrs. Nason and Beecher : Disdain not, Lord, our meaner song, Who praise thee with a stammering tongue. Gladly the toys of earth we leave, Wealth, pleasure, fame, for thee alone; To thee may all our thoughts arise, It is positively amusing to mark the caricatures which have been supplied, of the well-known hymn, by Zinzendorff, usually ascribed to John Wesley, though he was only the translator,— Jesus, thy blood and righteousness, One of our books has it Lord, thy imputed righteousness! Two or three others Jesus, thy robe of righteousness. The following couplet of Doddridge has been greatly weakened He drew me, and I followed on, The idea is that of being drawn as by an irresistible impulse, and the reference is to the Scripture, "they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely." Why, then, should it be amended to read "Glad to confess the voice divine?" A most wretched transformation has been effected in the last stanza of the Moravian hymn-"Give to the winds thy fears." In a Book of Psalms and Hymns that lies before us, we read, It was written, Thou comprehend'st him not, Yet earth and heaven tell, What though thou rulest not, Yet heaven and earth and hell In another hymn, the line, For thee, not without hope, I mourn, has been changed to, To him, with penitence, I mourn. What means mourning to Christ? It certainly is not English. In the same hymn, by the same compiler, we read Oh! freely my backslidings heal, instead of And freely my backslidings heal, And love the faithless sinner still. A most appropriate epithet, peculiarly applicable to the sin of backsliding-faithless—changed for a general, and in this connection, an unmeaning one, " dying"-rather is he a returning and hoping, than a dying sinner; but most of all he is a faithless sinner, having backslidden from his God. We content ourselves with recording these few of the almost numberless examples of literary unfaithfulness that are before us. We feel sure that our readers will thank us for drawing attention to the subject of this Article, at a time when additions are to be made to our Presbyterian Psalmody. Glad shall we be, and more than repaid for our research, if these strictures tend to check the hand of some ruthless compiler, who might be tempted to follow the example of his predecessors, many of whom seem to have imagined no hymn, or scarcely any, worthy of a place in our books, without submitting it to greater or less "emendation." Our Christian lyrical authors might well exclaim, "Save us from our friends!" Dr. Johnson's attack on the sacred poetry of Watts has not been, by any means, so injurious to his character as a lyrist as have been those cuttings and clippings and changes and caricatures which have been inflicted by the Hymn-mender upon the writings of the Hymn-maker. |