John Brownlie - Hymns of the Early Church

But it may not be generally known that many of the earliest service-books of the Continental and Scottish Churches had hymns appended to the Psalms in metre, some of which were versions in the vernacular of old Latin compositions. The French Psalter, edited by Marot in 1543, had the Ave Maria along with the Decalogue, the Belief, and the Lord’s Prayer. The Dutch Psalter of 1640 had the Te Deum , as well as metrical renderings of the Decalogue, the Song of Zacharias, of Mary, of Simeon, and of Elizabeth.

In the case of the Church of Scotland, the first edition of the Book of Common Order, published in 1564, gave only the Psalms; but the Bassandyne edition of the same book, published eleven years afterwards, contained five “Spiritual Songs;” that of 1587 gave ten, while some subsequent reprints have no fewer than fourteen. Among these, “commonly used in the Kirke and private houses,” will be found “The Song of Simeon, called Nunc Dimittis ,” “The Song of Blessed Marie, called Magnificat ,” and Veni, Creator . The English of the last named is taken from the First Prayer Book of Edward VI., published in 1549, and is the version of this old hymn which occurs in “The Fourme of Ordering Priestes,” the longer and older of the two renderings already referred to.

How it has fared with Latin hymns in Protestant service-books from Reformation times to the present day is too wide a field of inquiry to enter upon at the close of this brief introduction. This it is safe to affirm, that no hymnal with any claim to completeness will be found to omit such sacred and classic pieces as, “Brief life is here our portion,” “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,” “Jerusalem the golden,” “Jesus! the very thought of Thee,” “Jesus, Thou joy of loving hearts,” “O come, all ye faithful,” “O Jesus, King most wonderful;” and all these are translations or paraphrases of early Latin hymns.

With the increase of interest in all that concerns the praise of God’s children, which is so marked a feature of recent times, there has come an ever-growing appreciation of the grandeur and beauty, the spiritual depth and longing wistfulness that characterise the great body of Latin hymnology; and, as the result of this appreciation, the finest and sweetest products are finding a larger place in quarters from which, at no very far back point of time, they were altogether excluded. Of this we have a striking illustration in the contents of the most recent attempt to construct a hymnal for use in Presbyterian Churches. In the “Draft Hymnal,” prepared by a joint-committee of the three leading denominations in Scotland, there are 557 hymns. Of these, five are confessedly translations from the Greek, and twenty-six from the Latin. With the Latin renderings the names of Bishop Cosin, Dryden, Sir Walter Scott, Caswall, Chandler, Neale, and Ray Palmer stand honourably associated.

Ayr, October 12, 1895.

By Charles Coffin , born at Ardennes in 1676; Rector of the University of Paris, 1718; died, 1749. The most of his hymns appeared in the Paris Breviary of 1736. In that service-book this is the hymn for Sunday at Matins.

The oldest text known of this hymn is from a tenth-century MS. It is in the Sarum Breviary (1495), also in that of Aberdeen (1509), which is substantially that of Sarum, and one of the very few surviving service-books of the Pre-Reformation period in Scotland.

Attributed by some, but with a small degree of probability, to Gregory the Great . The hymn occurs in all the editions of the Roman Breviary, as also in the Sarum, York, and Aberdeen Breviaries.