England's Antiphon Part 34

Most pure and holy are thine eyes, Most holy is thy name; Thy saints, and laws, and penalties, Thy holiness proclaim.

This is the devil's scourge and sting, This is the angels' song, Who _holy, holy, holy_ sing, In heavenly Canaan's tongue.

Mercy, that shining attribute, The sinner's hope and plea!

Huge hosts of sins in their pursuit, Are drowned in thy Red Sea.

Mercy is G.o.d's memorial, And in all ages praised: My G.o.d, thine only Son did fall, That Mercy might be raised.

Thy bright back-parts, O G.o.d of grace, I humbly here adore: Show me thy glory and thy face, That I may praise thee more.

Since none can see thy face and live, For me to die is best: Through Jordan's streams who would not dive, To land at Canaan's rest?

To these _Songs of Praise_ is appended another series called _Penitential Cries_, by the Rev. Thomas Shepherd, who, for a short time a clergyman in Buckinghamshire, became the minister of the Congregational church at Northampton, afterwards under the care of Doddridge. Although he was an imitator of Mason, some of his hymns are admirable. The following I think one of the best:--

FOR COMMUNION WITH G.o.d.

Alas, my G.o.d, that we should be Such strangers to each other!

O that as friends we might agree, And walk and talk together!

Thou know'st my soul does dearly love The place of thine abode; No music drops so sweet a sound As these two words, _My G.o.d_.

May I taste that communion, Lord, Thy people have with thee?

Thy spirit daily talks with them, O let it talk with me!

Like Enoch, let me walk with G.o.d, And thus walk out my day, Attended with the heavenly guards, Upon the king's highway.

When wilt thou come unto me, Lord?

O come, my Lord most dear!

Come near, come nearer, nearer still: I'm well when thou art near.

When wilt thou come unto me, Lord?

For, till thou dost appear, I count each moment for a day, Each minute for a year.

There's no such thing as pleasure here; My Jesus is my all: As thou dost shine or disappear, My pleasures rise and fall.

Come, spread thy savour on my frame-- No sweetness is so sweet; Till I get up to sing thy name Where all thy singers meet.

In the writings of both we recognize a straight-forwardness of expression equal to that of Wither, and a quaint simplicity of thought and form like that of Herrick; while the very charm of some of the best lines is their spontaneity. The men have just enough mysticism to afford them homeliest figures for deepest feelings.

I turn to the accomplished Joseph Addison.

He was born in 1672. His religious poems are so well known, and are for the greater part so ordinary in everything but their simplicity of composition, that I should hardly have cared to choose one, had it not been that we owe him much grat.i.tude for what he did, in the reigns of Anne and George I., to purify the moral taste of the English people at a time when the influence of the clergy was not for elevation, and to teach the love of a higher literature when Milton was little known and less esteemed. Especially are we indebted to him for his modest and admirable criticism of the _Paradise Lost_ in the _Spectator_.

Of those few poems to which I have referred, I choose the best known, because it is the best. It has to me a charm for which I can hardly account.

Yet I imagine I see in it a sign of the poetic times: a flatness of spirit, arising from the evanishment of the mystical element, begins to result in a worship of power. Neither power nor wisdom, though infinite both, could const.i.tute a G.o.d worthy of the worship of a human soul; and the worship of such a G.o.d must sink to the level of that fancied divinity. Small wonder is it then that the lyric should now droop its wings and moult the feathers of its praise. I do not say that G.o.d's more glorious attributes are already forgotten, but that the tendency of the Christian lyric is now to laudation of power--and knowledge, a form of the same--as _the_ essential of G.o.dhead. This indicates no recalling of metaphysical questions, such as we have met in foregoing verse, but a decline towards system; a rising pa.s.sion--if anything so cold may be called _a pa.s.sion_--for the reduction of all things to the forms of the understanding, a declension which has prepared the way for the present worship of science, and its refusal, if not denial, of all that cannot be proved in forms of the intellect.

The hymn which has led to these remarks is still good, although, like the loveliness of the red and lowering west, it gives sign of a gray and cheerless dawn, under whose dreariness the child will first doubt if his father loves him, and next doubt if he has a father at all, and is not a mere foundling that Nature has lifted from her path.

The s.p.a.cious firmament on high, With all the blue etherial sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim.

The unwearied sun from day to day Does his Creator's power display; And publishes to every land The work of an almighty hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale; And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth; Whilst all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets, in their turn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all Move round the dark terrestrial ball?

What though no real voice nor sound Amidst their radiant orbs be found?

In reason's ear they all rejoice, And utter forth a glorious voice, For ever singing as they shine: "The hand that made us is divine."

The very use of the words _spangled_ and _frame_ seems--to my fancy only, it may be--to indicate a tendency towards the unworthy and theatrical.

Yet the second stanza is lovely beyond a doubt; and the whole is most artistic, although after a tame fashion. Whether indeed the heavenly bodies _teach_ what he says, or whether we should read divinity worthy of the name in them at all, without the human revelation which healed men, I doubt much. That divinity is there--_Yes_; that we could read it there without having seen the face of the Son of Man first, I think--_No_. I do not therefore dare imagine that no revelation dimly leading towards such result glimmered in the hearts of G.o.d's chosen amongst Jews and Gentiles before he came. What I say is, that power and order, although of G.o.d, and preparing the way for him, are not his revealers unto men. No doubt King David compares the perfection of G.o.d's law to the glory of the heavens, but he did not learn that perfection from the heavens, but from the law itself, revealed in his own heart through the life-teaching of G.o.d. When he had learned it he saw that the heavens were like it.

To unveil G.o.d, only manhood like our own will serve. And he has taken the form of man that he might reveal the manhood in him from awful eternity.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE PLAIN.

But Addison's tameness is wonderfully lovely beside the fervours of a man of honoured name,--Dr. Isaac Watts, born in 1674. The result must be dreadful where fervour will poetize without the aidful restraints of art and modesty. If any man would look upon absurdity in the garb of sobriety, let him search Dryden's _Annus Mirabilis_: Dr. Watts's _Lyrics_ are as bad; they are fantastic to utter folly. An admiration of "the incomparable Mr. Cowley" did the sense of them more injury than the imitation of his rough-cantering ode could do their rhythm. The sentimentalities of Roman Catholic writers towards our Lord and his mother, are not half so offensive as the courtier-like flatteries Dr.

Watts offers to the Most High. To say nothing of the irreverence, the vulgarity is offensive. He affords another instance amongst thousands how little the form in which feeling is expressed has to do with the feeling itself. In him the thought is true, the form of its utterance false; the feeling lovely, the word, often to a degree, repulsive. The ugly web is crossed now and then by a fine line, and even damasked with an occasional good poem: I have found two, and only two, in the whole of his seventy-five _Lyrics sacred to Devotion_. His objectivity and boldness of thought, and his freedom of utterance, cause us ever and anon to lament that he had not the humility and faith of an artist as well as of a Christian.

Almost all his symbols indicate a worship of power and of outward show.

I give the best of the two good poems I have mentioned, and very good it is.

HAPPY FRAILTY.

"How meanly dwells the immortal mind!

How vile these bodies are!

Why was a clod of earth designed To enclose a heavenly star?

"Weak cottage where our souls reside!

This flesh a tottering wall!

With frightful breaches gaping wide, The building bends to fall.

"All round it storms of trouble blow, And waves of sorrow roll; Cold waves and winter storms beat through, And pain the tenant-soul.

"Alas, how frail our state!" said I, And thus went mourning on; Till sudden from the cleaving sky A gleam of glory shone.

My soul all felt the glory come, And breathed her native air; Then she remembered heaven her home, And she a prisoner here.

Straight she began to change her key; And, joyful in her pains, She sang the frailty of her clay In pleasurable strains.