My church had a clearout of cupboards recently, and I volunteered a home for a selection of ancient hymn books. It’s not just the old music typefaces I love (often clearer than in modern hymn books) but the snapshot of moral and social assumptions each one contains.
The urgent work of converting Heathens occupies many of the hymn books from the late 19th to early 20th century:
The Heathen perish day by day
Thousands and thousands pass away!
O Christians to their rescue fly
Preach Jesus to them ere they die
(J Montgomery)
When not bowing down to idols of wood and stone, Heathens are assumed to be weeping copiously over the state of their unsaved souls:
Hark! What accents of despair
Tis the heathen’s dying pray’r
The inhabitants of Africa and India seem to be the main focus of this missionary concern, though the conversion of the Jews is another urgent cause, and poor Greenland’s icy mountains seem to need attention too, though I think this is more for geographical symmetry than anything else.
Children are expected to contribute from an early age to this essential work:
Hear the pennies dropping
Listen while they fall
Ev’ry one for Jesus
He shall have them all
Child mortality was still high in the late 19th century, so warning:
I’m not too young to sin, I’m not to young to die
was probably quite pertinent, and of course, Sunday School couldn’t slip by without asking Jesus to:
Teach me to do as I am told
And help me to be good as gold
From Little Me (William Canton)
Quite a few children’s hymns wallow in whimsy:
Where did you come from baby dear?
Out of the ev’rywhere into here
Where did you get your eyes so blue?
Out of the sky as I came through
(George Macdonald)
though things get more robust as they get older, with hymns for Boys’ Meetings (not for Girls’ I notice) which exhort to Dare to be a Daniel! or:
Yield not to temptation
….dark passions subdue
Look ever to Jesus,
He’ll carry you through
(HRP)
The missionary work was not only needed overseas, as:
The streets of the city are full
Of poor little perishing souls
Who wander away from the light
In places that Satan controls!
All this urging of parents and teachers to reap, sow, and gather in the sheep and lambs to the fold (amongst other agricultural metaphors) leaves you quite exhausted.
We want the young for Jesus…
For e’en the tiniest jewel
Shall shine in Jesus’ crown…
Though a tone of exasperation occasionally sets in:
Convert our children, Lord!
Their evil hearts subdue
And by Thy grace and Spirits’s pow’r
Create them all anew.
(J K Starling)
Much of this burning ardour is surely wishful thinking on behalf of the writers and editors, rather than the reality on the ground. But it’s easy to scoff at the naive aspirations (not to mention tedious racism) presented in these hundred year old books – how comical may aspects of our own contemporary hymn books seem in a hundred years’ time? The clunky earnestness of some 70s and 80s hymns is already showing its age, and the careful rewriting of older hymns to suit modern, inclusive sensibilities has emasculated some of the poetry. Playing hymns, though, is still one of the pleasures of being an organist for me – there’s something about their sturdy musical predictability which is very reassuring, even while I wonder at the words.
