God gives to each flower its rich raiment, Will their God be forgetful of thee? The last of these three specimens of Swedish sacred song is from Franzén, Bishop of Hernösand, who died A.D. 1818, at the age of thirty-six. LOOKING UNTO JESUS. FRANZEN. (Jesum haf i ständigt minne.) Jesus in thy memory keep, Wouldst thou be God's child and friend; Still thy gaze on Jesus bend. Look to Jesus, till, reviving, Faith and love thy life-springs swell; Look to Jesus, prayerful, waking, Look to Jesus, when dark lowering By that band in terror cowering, Calm 'midst tempests, look on Him. See what He, the Holy, bore; Hear His prayer, and feel His peace! By want's fretting thorns surrounded, Does a scornful world despise ? Look to Jesus still to shield thee When no longer thou may'st live; Takes thee, then, with Him to be. Were it within the scope of this volume to give selections from living hymn-writers, many might be chosen from Sweden, where a fresh glow of Christian life is, in these days, awakening many a fresh stream of song, in a language which combines the homely strength of the German with the liquid music of the Italian. CHAPTER XII. ENGLISH HYMNS. THE Reformed Churches of France and French Switzerland seem to have had no literature corresponding to the hymns of Protestant Germany. The names connected with medieval hymn literature, on the other hand, are, as has been observed, chiefly French. Did the peculiar form which the Reformation took in France, then, tend to quench the spirit of sacred poetry, or what other causes brought about this result? To judge rightly on this subject, we must, in the first place, be clear what we mean by France, since, although the French monarchy is the oldest in Europe, the same antiquity can scarcely be assigned to the French nation as it now exists. The distracted aggregation of duchies and counties-Brittany, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Provençe, Languedoc-out of which the unity of modern France was gradually compressed, were scarcely more one with the France of to-day than the Greece of Marathon was with the Byzantine Empire. The southern regions were of the South, Romance, the northern were of the North, Teutonic, and neither were French. It is remarkable how many of the names of the medieval hymn-writers, connected by birth with France, are of German form. Bernard, with his brother Gerard, Marbod, Hildebert, seem more the natural predecessors of Martin Luther and Paul Gerhard than of Corneille or Clement Marot. Lineally, therefore, the German hymn literature may be said to be descended from the mediæval, and the sacred poetry, which seemed native to France, may perhaps rather be looked on as a branch of the great river of German sacred song. Yet when we remember that the same absence of an evangelical national hymn literature, springing up spontaneously as a natural growth of the Reformation, which characterises the Reformed Churches of France and French Switzerland, exists also in the sister Church of Scotland, it is impossible not to connect this fact with the similar form which the Reformation took in all these lands. None of the strictly Calvinistic communities have a hymn-book dating back to the Reformation. It cannot surely be their doctrine which caused this; many of the best known and most deeply treasured of the more modern hymns of Germany and England have been written by those who receive the doctrines known as Calvinistic. Nor can it proceed from any peculiarity of race, or deficiency in popular love of music and song. French and Scotch national character are too dissimilar to explain the resemblance; whilst France has many national melodies and songs, and Scotland is peculiarly rich in both. Is not the cause then simply the common ideal of external ecclesiastical forms which pervaded all the Churches reformed on the Genevan type? The intervening chapters of Church history were, as it were, folded up, as too blotted and marred for truth to be read to profit in them; and, next to the first chapter in the Acts of the Apostles, was to stand, as the second chapter, the history of the Reformed Churches. Words were to resume their original Bible meaning; nothing was to be received that could not be traced back to the Divine hand. Ecclesiastical order was to be such as St Paul had established or had found established; clearly to be traced, it was believed, in the Acts and Apostolical Epistles. And, since the inspiration which glowed on the gifted lips of apostolic days existed no longer, and the psalms and hymns and spiritual songs in which St Paul had delighted formed no part of the New Testament canon, recourse must be had to an older liturgy-inspired throughout-at once most human and most Divine. Thus the Book of Psalms became the hymn-book of the Reformed Churches, adapted to grave and solemn music, in metrical translations whose one aim and glory was to render into measure which could be sung the very words of the old Hebrew Psalms. By what ingenious transpositions and compressions of words and syllables this has been accomplished, in the case of Scotland, is known to these who attend the Scotch Presbyterian services. The labour must have been conscientiously and painfully accomplished; for although the result may, to the uninitiated, bear something of the same resemblance to poetry as the fitting of fragments of Hebrew temple and Christian church into the walls of Jerusalem bears to architecture,—columns reversed and mouldings disconnected, yet the very words are there, and the use to which they are applied is most sacred. At all events, the Scotch Psalms are David's Psalms, and not modern meditations on them; and with all the sacred associations which |