Part 2 — Chapter XIII METRICAL PSALMODY

I. CALVIN’S CONCEPTION OF CONGREGATIONAL SINGING

While Luther recognized the value of hymns as pre-eminent in his work, he still left a large place for the Psalms, himself making some admirable versions and inciting others to do the same. But there were limits to his sympathy with an undue and merely formal emphasis of them. He canceled the obligation of repeating the whole Psalter once a week, instituted by Cardinal Quimonez, as “a donkey’s burden.” Luther was a reformer, changing only what needed changing in order to secure a deeper spirituality. Calvin and Zwingli were not reformers, but re-creators, setting wholly aside all the liturgy, the ecclesiastical organization, the clerical rules, and the distinctive doctrines of the Roman church, and building up an entirely new church with no other sanction than their interpretation of the Word of God.

Perhaps unconsciously, Calvin harked back to the Roman attitude of Gregory the Great, in insisting on purely Scriptural sources for the service of song. He was too good a Biblical scholar not to know that the Apostolic Church used “hymns and spiritual songs” as well as Psalms; indeed he never categorically forbade hymns of “human composure.” But the people had been forbidden the Bible. The Psalms had been 149 sung by the clergy alone in an already dead language. Calvin declared that “if a man sang in an unknown tongue, he might as well be a linnet or a popinjay.” So he reacted somewhat violently. He had a profound sense of the authority of the Word of God, and his mind was possessed by the idea of the divine sovereignty; hence religious rites of human origin seemed trifling and negligible.

This attitude was emphasized all the more by the Latin hymns sung and read in the churches, and on religious occasions, whose chief burden was worship of the Madonna, and even of the saints, against which his mind rose in outraged horror.

II. CALVIN’S FOLLOWERS MORE EXTREME

Human nature being what it is, it was inevitable that Calvin’s followers should carry his ideas to an extreme, and mechanically add the conclusion that hymns independent of the lyrics of the Scriptures should be forbidden.

While Luther stressed the Biblical content of the hymns and exalted the Psalms as the source of religious lyrical impulses, Calvin and his disciples added a rigid and almost superstitious regard for the mere form of the Scripture lyrics. They accepted their distortion and mutilation in giving them a metrical form as justified by the congregational necessity, and by the evident devotional results among the people.

III. MAROT’S SUCCESSFUL VERSIONS

Beneath his austerity Calvin evidently had an appreciation of literary beauty and grace, for he developed an ambition to clothe the Hebrew Psalms in a literary French metrical dress. It was while this problem was exercising his mind that there fell into his hands the French version of some of the Psalms by Clement Marot (1497-1544), who had come under the influence of Marguerite de Valois, the Huguenot princess, whose valet de chambre he was during his early twenties. It is possible 150 that he and Calvin met at Ferrara in 1535. Though the work of a Huguenot poet, these lyrics were admired in high political and social circles in France. Written in measures fitting them to popular tunes, they were very popular among the royal courtiers, Catholics as well as Protestants, and were soon introduced into other countries.

That he was later persecuted by the Roman ecclesiastics only recommended him the more to Calvin. Here was a poet of high reputation, a skillful versifier of the Psalms, a fellow-sufferer at the hands of the Roman hierarchy—why not commit to his hands the task of supplying Calvin’s new church with its needed book of Psalms? So Marot was called to Geneva.

IV. DEVELOPMENT OF THE GENEVAN PSALTER

In 1543, nineteen years after Luther’s first venture, the Acht Liederbuch, appeared, The Genevan Psalter was issued in the French language. It contained fifty psalms by Marot. Marot died in 1544. The completion of the Psalter was committed to Theodore Beza of Burgundy, who revised Marot’s verses, eliminating the classical allusions and offensive gaiety. With the help of Bourgeois, and later of Goudimel, in completing and harmonizing the tunes, he finished the Psalter in 1562.[1]

V. ENGLISH PSALM VERSIONS BEFORE STERNHOLD

There had been English versions of some of the Psalms before Sternhold undertook the task. Bishop Aldhelm of Sherborne, who died in 709 A.D., composed a complete psalter. Two versions were due to Lutheran influence. That of Miles Coverdale, Ghoostly Psalms and Spiritual Songs, appearing sometime between 1530 and 1540, used some of the German chorales, including the great “Ein’ feste Burg.”

The Wedderburn brothers of Dundee, Scotland, issued the Compendious Booke of Gude and Godlie Ballates, also known as Dundee Psalms, on the return of John Wedderburn, 151 soon after 1539, from Wittenberg, where he had been under the influence of both Luther and Melanchthon. Latin psalms and hymns had no value with young people, he insisted in his preface; “but when they hear it sung into their vulgar tongue, or sing it themselves, with sweet melody, then shall they love their God with heart and mind, and cause them to put away bawdry and unclean songs.” While considerably better than the songs the collection displaced, the new book was too cheaply popular, and undignified in many of its religious parodies of popular songs, to satisfy the elders of the Scottish Kirk (!) and they tried to suppress it.

But the lines of religious, social, doctrinal, and political influence connected England and Scotland with France and Geneva so closely that it happened that the new English and Scotch psalmody was based on the work of Marot and Calvin and not on that of Luther. To human minds with some sense of literary dignity and style and of a more spontaneous expression of religious life and experience, it seems a great pity!

The first response in England to the new version of Marot was the Latin version of George Buchanan in 1548. Latin was an entirely dead language to the commonalty, but was quite generally familiar to people of scholarship and culture. This version, in the scholarly language of all Europe (like the Mandarin in China), found wide appreciation in intellectual circles and many editions of it were issued. Of course, the mass of the English people was not affected by it, and it had little or no influence on the development of English psalmody.

That there were vernacular versions already in use, is quite certain. Robert Cowley anticipated Sternhold and Hopkins in the versifying of the whole Psalter, issuing his work in 1549. In the preface to this collection he refers to previous versions which had passages “obscure and hard.” Probably they were Lollard or Wycliffite in origin, for these “sweet singers,” precursors 152 of the Reformation to come, worked among the lower classes in the Low Countries as well as in England, singing the Gospel in the vernacular.

VI. VERSION OF STERNHOLD AND HOPKINS

Undoubtedly it was the French Psalms of Marot, and their great popularity in the highest circles in France, that incited Thomas Sternhold to undertake a like version in the English language. His first issue, probably in 1547 and 1548, contained nineteen Psalms. In 1549 he published another edition containing thirty-seven Psalms. Sternhold died in 1549, leaving but nineteen additional Psalms unpublished. Another poet, John Hopkins, a near neighbor in Gloucestershire, contributed to the edition of 1551. In 1562 the psalter was completed. Of the one hundred and fifty Psalms, Sternhold had supplied fifty-one, Hopkins sixty, all in common meter, and the rest were contributed by various writers. It also contained metrical versions of the Canticles, the Ten Commandments, the Athanasian Creed, the Te Deum, the Lord’s Prayer, an English version of the festival hymn, “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” and several original English hymns.

This psalter had a popularity equaled only by Hymns Ancient and Modern and the Gospel Hymns series in the recent past. Within half a century more than fifty editions were issued. By 1841 no less than six hundred and fifty different editions had been absorbed by the religious public—more than all other metrical versions combined.

This version was adopted by the Church of England in 1562 and continued to be used for nearly two hundred and fifty years, despite its notorious crudities and imperfections, and despite the many efforts made to supersede it by other versions and by hymns. The singing of Psalms became universal. At St. Paul’s Cross, after the service, there were sometimes six thousand persons engaged in singing Psalms. It was a time of genuine community singing.

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VII. THE SCOTCH VERSION

In 1556, John Knox issued his Anglo-Genevan Psalter, based on the 1551 edition of Sternhold and Hopkins, with some alterations and additions. It naturally was greatly influenced by Calvin’s Genevan Psalter. The Anglo-Genevan Psalter is significant chiefly because of its influence on the Scotch Psalter. Through that, it is the source of some psalms and tunes still in use—notably, “All people that on earth do dwell” and “Old Hundredth” to which the Long Meter Doxology is sung.

The Scotch Psalter developed on a different line. The Psalm editors of the Scottish Church accepted eighty-seven of the Anglo-Genevan Psalms, added and somewhat altered forty-two from the final Sternhold and Hopkins editions, and supplied twenty-one from their own versifiers. It appeared in 1564 and was adopted by the General Assembly as its authorized Psalm book.

In 1600 James I began a revision and himself wrote thirty-five of the Psalms before his death. This psalter was completed by William Alexander and was issued in 1630, being known as the Royal Psalter. Charles I bound up a revised edition of it with a new liturgy prepared by the Scotch bishops in 1536, and ordered its exclusive use. But the Scotch clergy declined with thanks, having no use for “the mass in English.”

But the question of a revision of this Psalter having been raised, its deficiencies, which had been passively accepted, rose up into consciousness. Rous’ version, adopted by the Westminster Assembly in 1643, and hence widely used in England, was made the basis of the new Scotch Psalter and, after seven years of amending and revision, was adopted in 1650. It is still used in Scotland and in American Presbyterian churches whose eyes look back reverently to Scotland.

VIII. ROUS’ VERSION

Rous’ version was made by Francis Rous, Provost of Eton 154 College, Oxford, a Presbyterian lawyer and a man of public affairs. It was an improvement on Sternhold and Hopkins, but still left much to be desired in smoothness of versification and grace of diction, owing to the continued loyalty to the original phraseology of the Psalms. Hence it had some “awful examples,” to use Matthew Arnold’s phrase, whose repetition here might amuse but not edify. But it also had some happy stanzas that we still are glad to sing, e.g.:

Compare this with Archbishop Parker’s version of the Shepherd Psalm written in 1557:

But with the blindness of the versifiers to the need of diversifying their meters in the interest of varied and attractive tunes, all the psalms were written in Common Meter.[2]

IX. TATE AND BRADY’S “NEW VERSION”

A new version by two Irishmen, Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, appeared in 1696. Tate was a literary man, a playwright, a poet, and finally poet laureate. Brady had a rather varied clerical career in Ireland and in England, becoming chaplain to King William. This will partly explain why this version received royal endorsement and gradually replaced Sternhold and Hopkins in the English Church. It was adopted by the Protestant Episcopal Church of America in 1789. The fact that the Nonconformist churches remained faithful to the “Old Version” and to Rous’ version, no doubt 155 had its bearing on the final acceptance of the “New Version” by the Established Church.

This “New Version” was a little smoother than the “Old Version,” and had a little more literary grace, but still was shackled by devotion to “purity”—to the exact thought and phraseology of the Hebrew Psalms. Nevertheless, as Gillman says, “this book contained a plentiful supply of chaff, but perhaps a few more grains of golden corn than Sternhold’s.” “As pants the hart for cooling streams” and “Through all the changing scenes of life” are still highly prized, and Tate’s Christmas Carol, “While shepherds watched their flocks by night” (which appeared in a supplement to the “New Version”) is a masterly adaptation of the Nativity story. On the other hand, Montgomery, in comparing the “New Version” with the “Old Version,” remarks: “It is nearly as inanimate as the former, though a little more refined.” Of the “Old Version” he says: “The merit of faithful adherence to the original has been claimed for this version and need not be denied, but it is the resemblance which the dead bear to the living.” Old Thomas Fuller wittily says of Sternhold and Hopkins that “They are men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon.” Thomas Campbell even more harshly exclaims: “With the best intensions and the worst taste, they degraded the spirit of Hebrew poetry by flat and homely phraseology, and, mistaking vulgarity for simplicity, turned into bathos what they found sublime.” From the literary point of view these dicta are correct enough, but they overlook what is vastly more important—the high moral and spiritual uses which these homely versions so amply served.

X. AMERICAN PSALMODY

The Pilgrims brought with them from Leyden Ainsworth’s version of the Psalms, published in Amsterdam—Genevan rather than English in character. Its use was largely confined 156 to the Pilgrims and their descendants. Presently the copies of both versions became rare and the service of song depended on the “lining out” of the verses.

The first book printed in America was the Bay Psalm Book, an independent version of the Psalms made by Thomas Welde, Richard Mather, and John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, a committee appointed in 1636. It was proposed to make it more scriptural than either of the previous versions used. It appeared in 1640. Its preface consisted of a discourse urging that psalm-singing was both lawful and necessary. During the next century and a half no less than seventy editions were printed. It was improved by Dunster and Lyon and reprinted in Great Britain, eighteen editions being called for in England and twenty-two in Scotland. This was America’s first contribution to the song service of the Mother Country, but by no means the last.

It may be interesting to see just what literary style this Bay Psalm Book could display, and a few specimens are herewith given. The one hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm, for instance, was given the following form:

Cotton Mather’s rhymeless version was much more sensible in its form, for it eliminated the chief handicap in producing a literal version in metrical form.

As in the Psalm versions of England and Scotland, there was a vivid consciousness of literary and poetic shortcomings; but the sense of obligation to supply a literal translation of the Hebrew overrode all impulses toward a smoother rendering. The preface frankly states the position of the committee: “If therefore the verses are not always so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect; let them consider that God’s altar needs not our polishing (Ex. 20), for we have respected rather a plaine translation, than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry, in translating the Hebrew words into English language and David’s poetry into English meetre.”

There were other American Psalm versions, but the only versions worth considering are the revisions of Isaac Watts’ Psalms, which will come up in introducing American hymnody later.

XI. THE VALUE OF THE PSALM VERSIONS

In smiling over this rude psalmody of England, Scotland, and America, it is always to be remembered that these versions were not a literary endeavor. Their ambition was to secure ‘purity,’ loyalty to the rather prosaically conceived doctrines of the originals. There was no thought of poetry or of literary finish. The meter and rhyme were practical devices to make congregational singing possible.

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