The 1650 Psalter

The
Bible Psalmody

By
Taylor [or Tayler] Lewis, LL.D.

With an Article on
“The Imprecatory Psalms,” &c.

Pittsburgh:
United Presbyterian Board of Publication.
[1880]

————

The Old Scotch Psalmody.

The subject of hymnology has lately occupied much space in our religious newspapers. There have been Dr. Cuyler’s rich criticisms, no little discussion in respect to Sabbath school poetry, and, withal, something of a spicy controversy on the merits of that popular hymn, “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” Permission, therefore, may reasonably be asked for a few words on another department, which has either been wholly ignored or treated with contempt. Reference is had to the old Scotch Psalmody, still used by some churches in this country, as it is by all the Presbyterian churches in Scotland. It does not deserve the unworthy treatment it has received from some who have styled it “religious doggerel.” We are compelled to say this when we think of the strong Christianity—strong to act and strong to suffer—which has been nourished by that intensely scriptural style of devotional song which ignorance and prejudice are so much inclined to undervalue.

In these matters we are much influenced by association. The writer has some very precious early recollections connected with this kind of church music, and the peculiar methods of exposition to which it gave rise. It was the custom to expound the Psalm first selected, and to an extent almost equal to that of the sermon itself. This would not be tolerated now, as it was practiced fifty years ago by those old worthies, the venerable Alexander Proudfit, of Salem, N. Y.; the Rev. George Mairs, Sr., of Argyle, and Dr. Bullions, of Cambridge. Besides, it could not be done with our indiscriminate hymnology. There is so little in it to expound, even in its best effusions; whilst in others the very attempt would but reveal the thinness and poverty of their ideas for the soul, though so harmonious to the ear, and so pleasing, sometimes, to an undefined emotional sentimentality. A studied exegesis would only bring out their tautologies, their platitudes, the barrenness of their superabounding epithets. It was not so with the Scottish version of the Psalms of David. With all its seeming uncouthness, the translation it gave was most trustworthy. It was the Scripture itself on which the expounder was commenting. He could, therefore, safely proceed upon the hypothesis expressed in the Sacred Word, and often sung in their devotional service:

“The words of God are words most pure;
They be like silver tried
In earthen furnace, seven times
That hath been purified.”

Take a specimen from the 103d Psalm. It is selected as vividly mingling with some of those early and ineradicable associations:

“Oh thou my soul, bless God the Lord;
And all that in me is
Be stirred up, His holy name
To magnify and bless.”

Here there is no redundancy. Here every word is pure, every word is true, every word has a divine significance. The expounder could throw his soul into them: the people could confidently follow—getting into their hearts the rich melody of the thoughts before uttering them in song. Besides the lessons of gratitude, or the direct practical instruction, there were other ideas, lofty, profound and suggestive. In the Psalmist’s address to his soul there is the wondrous mystery of the human duality—the inner and the outer man. In the mention of God and his holy name there is no tautology, no empty parallelism. One refers to the very being of Deity, the other to everything in nature or in grace by which God is made known or his glory manifested.

“All thine iniquities who doth
Most graciously forgive:
Who thy diseases all, and pains,
Doth heal and thee relieve.”

God’s forgiveness and his healing mercy; the graciousness of both; the bodily a type of the spiritual salvation—such were the topics—not far-fetched, surely, but a true “opening of the Word,” regarded as divinely given for human study and the intelligent utterance of human praise. It was a standing rule of exposition that the lower or temporal salvation spoken of did not exhaust the significance of the language. Its sublime glow, which even the superficial reader can hardly fail to see, was evidence of something greater there. It was not an arbitrary “double sense,” but a mounting sense, an ever-rising, ever-expanding sense, having its base on earth, but reaching far above, carrying us ever from “the tabernacle” to the “Holy Hill,” from the earthly temple to that “House of God” in which healed souls should “dwell for evermore.” “If I may but touch the hem of his garment, I shall be made whole.” The words refer to a temporal evil; but, if uttered in a right faith, they embrace the whole essence, the whole “healing virtue” of the great Christian salvation.

With Bible ever in hand, the people followed their spiritual guide, as he made every separate verse and word an occasion for directing them to analogies in every part of the Scripture. It was a method of keeping the whole Bible ever before them—its historical, its supernatural, its ritual, its devotional ever in connection with the preceptive and the doctrinal.

Hence arose a peculiar language, which appears most prominent in their peculiar Psalmody: The House of God, the People of God, the Chosen of God, the mighty works of God in his dealings with them. Under this head there comes up a reminiscence of the Rev. George Mairs, the elder, and of his manner of expounding the 114th Psalm.

“When Israel out of Egypt went,
And did his dwelling change;
When Jacob’s house went out from those
Who were of language strange.”

Here, of course, the spiritual interpretation was prominent; the Egyptian bondage, the spiritual slavery; the Egyptian dialect of the world, the new and heavenly speech of the redeemed. But these topics did not shut out the fair attention due to the historical exegesis and the poetical sublimities of the passage. They were dwelt upon with all fidelity, and without any of that fastidiousness with which some might now regard its strange comparisons or its most daring apostrophe:

“Like rams the mountains, and like lambs
The hills skipped to and fro.
O sea, why fledd’st thou? Jordan back
Why wast thou driven so?”

Some may smile at this. It may be spoiled for them by fantastic associations. It was not so, however, with the men—most pious, learned and intelligent men, like Erskine, Witherspoon and Chalmers—who listened to or who taught this exegetical Psalmody. They were at home in the scriptural figures. They had no need to change rams into fallow deer or skipping lambs into gazelles, even if that would seem to help its picturesqueness or its euphony. They were not shocked by the bold apostrophe, so faithfully versified:

“O sea, why fledd’st thou? Jordan back
Why wast thou driven so?”

The abrupt inversion only gave it the greater power, and prepared the better for the sublime answer that follows:

“O! at the coming of the Lord,
Earth, tremble thou with fear.”

It is not a tautology, but an attempt to render the Hebrew hhuli, denoting a convulsive shuddering. It was the awe of Nature at the appearance of her Lord, her shrinking dread of “Him who sitteth on the great white throne, from whose face the earth and heaven flee away, and there is found no place for them.” It was in this manner that the great Bible ideas, facts and images were ever kept before the minds of the people. And thus was there trained up a peculiar class of Bible Christians, having a knowledge of the Scriptures the like of which is not now acquired from the best teachings of the modern pulpit.

The rich instruction ended, then “sang they to the Lord, and made a joyful noise.” From young and old went up the strain, borne on the notes of the quick-ascending “Mear,” or the wavering “St. Martin’s,” or the swelling “Dundee,” or in the majestic movements of “Winchester” and “Old Hundred.” Or was it a Psalm of Zion’s desolations; then did it rise mournfully in the minor modulations of the wailing “Bangor,” or of the “plaintive Martyrs worthy of the name.” To the ear laid close there might have seemed discords in the tremolo of the old man’s quivering voice, or in the sharp note of the child; but in its blended fullness it rose smooth and glorious, because beneath it all there lay the deep “fundamental bass,” the “music in the heart unto the Lord,” as they thus sang his praises “with the spirit and with the understanding.”

In this old Scotch version there are doubtless not a few unmusical lines. Its frequent division of ti-on into two syllables, its quaint and sometimes inadmissible inversions may excite our surprise, or even make us smile; but they are very far from justifying that epithet which has so basely been applied to it. It still challenges respect for its substantial Hebrew strength, its exhibition of the grand Hebrew thought, and as a medium of that Biblical form of praise for which no other can be an adequate substitute. Another feature is its clear objectiveness, or the striking contrast it presents to that extreme subjectiveness which makes much of our most modern hymnology so feeble, because so vague. The former has ever some glorious outward object, or idea, drawing the soul out of itself. Even the expression of individual misery, or of individual joy, is connected with some real outward calamity or some real outward deliverance, driving the soul to earnest prayer or rousing it to rapt thanksgiving. Hence the difference of phraseology and the objective terms before alluded to as peculiar to the one species of pious song. The other is characterized either by a wholly subjective rapture, or by a continual moaning, a continual self-questioning about inward frames and feelings. Take for a few examples the hymns beginning:

“I love to steal away.”

“Far from the world, O Lord, I flee.”

“I am weary of straying, O fain would I rest.”

“There is an hour of calm repose.”

Very sweet and soothing are such hymns at times. They may be channels, too, of grace; but how different from those more churchly strains which the Scriptures give us; how different, too, from any conception we can from of the hymns that Paul and Silas most probably sang at midnight in the jail of Philippi!

The subjective solitariness, so inconsistently loquacious, often in its minute recitals, pervades many of the hymns sung as favorites in our churches, but it is very much the same as though each individual worshipper were singing them at home in his own parlor or study. Very tender and touching are they; but there is in them no “communion of saints.” They are not in the style of Scripture. They give us none of those great ideas of the people and city of the Most High, which have ever been the accompaniments of a strong Christianity. But listen now to the silver trumpet of Zion in one of her glorious “Songs of Ascension:”

“I joyed when to the House of God
Go up, they said to me.
Jerusalem, within thy gates
Our feet shall standing be.

“To Israel’s testimony there,
To God’s name thanks to pay;
Let them that love thee and thy peace
Have still prosperity.

“Now, for my friends’ and brethren’s sakes,
Peace be in thee, I’ll say;
And for the House of God our Lord
I’ll seek thy good alway.”

Again the divine security of this chosen people—how much better is it expressed than in the feeble plaints with which we might compare it?

“They in the Lord that firmly trust
Shall be like Zion hill,
Which at no time can be removed,
But standeth ever still.

“As round about Jerusalem
The mountains stand alway,
The Lord his folk doth compass so
From henceforth and for aye.”

The selfish individual joy and grief lose themselves in these allusions to Zion and her sons. Therefore it is that the best of our hymns, such as

“I love thy kingdom, Lord,”

have it for chief merit that they are mainly paraphrases of this glorious Scripture language.

But let us make a clearer contrast by means of the popular hymn before alluded to—“Nearer, my God, to Thee.” We would not join in the censure that one has pronounced upon it for not having the name of Christ. It may, however, be more justly said that the “nearness to God” is not sufficiently recognized as itself the divine drawing. It is the soul looking to itself, talking to itself, dreaming to itself; the objective dream of Jacob made subjective by being dreamed over again:

“Darkness comes over me,
Daylight all gone!
Yet in my dream I’d be
Nearer, my God, to thee,
Nearer to thee.”

Very beautiful, very touching; but all from within. Its cross is the soul’s sorrow, something borne instead of bearing. This is a Scriptural use of the word, indeed; but it is not the cross of Christ, the objective cross, the great uplifted sign to which all must look who would be healed of the deadly serpent’s bite. Equally subjective is its “house of God,” built from itself:

“Out of my stony griefs
Bethel I’ll raise.”

This self-contemplation—or introspection, rather—is carried along even in its lofty soarings:

“Sun, moon and stars forget
Cleaving the sky.”

This was written by a pious as well as a gifted soul. We must, therefore, suppose that there was present to it the mediatorial feeling, at least, if not the expressed idea. For without it, surely, it would be but an Icarian flight, thus to approach, on self-made waxen wings, the burning Sun of Righteousness.

Now turn we to a strain similar in its leading thought, but from that older Psalmody in which the Christian soul will ever find something for all its wants. It is from the once desponding author of the 73d Psalm—the man “whose feet were almost gone, whose steps had well nigh slipped.” He was falling into an abyss of skepticism in respect to the divine providence; he was confounded by the prosperity of evil men, until he learned wisdom by going into the sanctuary of God. Such was his method of approaching the Infinite Help, and this was the way in which a sense of the adored presence affected his soul:

“Yea, surely, it is good for me
That I draw near to God.
In God I trust that all thy works
I may declare abroad.

“Thou, with thy counsel, while I live,
Wilt me uphold and guide;
And to thy glory afterward
Receive me to abide.

“Whom have I in the heavens high
But thee, O Lord, alone?
And in the earth, whom I desire
Besides thee, there is none.

“My flesh and heart doth faint and fail,
But God doth fail me never;
For of my heart God is the strength,
And portion forever.”

It is the most lowly dependence—a seeking to get hold of the hand that holds us (see Phil. 3:12, in the Greek). This is expressed in another verse, more irregular than the rest, notwithstanding a few slight emendations:

“Nevertheless continually
O Lord, I am with thee;
Thou dost me hold by my right hand,
And still upholdest me.”

The question is left with the reader. But the writer would not shrink from expressing the opinion that there is something unsound in that religion which would prefer the popular hymn to the ancient Psalm, even in a rhythmical dress so plain as that which is given in this old Scottish version.