The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and SangLorenz, Edmund S. (Edmund Simon)
Religion
The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang
Lorenz, Edmund S. (Edmund Simon)
Hymns -- History and criticism
Another great hymn that made its premier appearance in _Spiritual
Songs_ was “My faith looks up to Thee,” by Dr. Ray Palmer (1808-1887),
set to one of Lowell Mason’s best tunes, “Olivet.” Meeting Dr. Palmer
on the street, Mason asked him whether he had not an appropriate hymn
for his forthcoming book; young Palmer remembered he had some verses
in his pocketbook and handed them to Mason. Meeting Palmer a few days
afterwards on the street, Mason with great earnestness exclaimed: “Mr.
Palmer, you may live many years and do many good things, but I think
you will be best known to posterity as the author of ‘My faith looks
up to Thee!’” The prophecy, so literally fulfilled, speaks well for
Mason’s critical acumen. Ray Palmer, despite Bishop Wordsworth’s
objection to the pronouns of the first person, wrote “My faith,” “I
pray,” “my guilt,” for his hymn was not intended to be sung, but
simply to express his own spiritual experience. It was a personal
prayer none the less that it took a metrical form. It is one of the
great factors in its world-wide appeal that it becomes the personal
expression of every individual who sings it.
But Dr. Palmer was not the author of only a single song: he wrote many
others of almost equal value. Writing a sermon on the words of Peter,
“Jesus Christ, whom having not seen ye love,” he was suddenly
overwhelmed by his rapture of love for the Christ, and, the sermon
forgotten, he wrote down the hymn the church will never allow to die:
“Jesus, these eyes have never seen
That radiant form of thine;
The veil of sense hangs dark between
Thy blessed face and mine.
I see thee not, I hear thee not,
Yet art thou oft with me;
And earth hath ne’er so dear a spot
As where I meet with thee.”
In his dying hour he was heard to repeat with broken voice the last
stanza of this hymn:
“When death these mortal eyes shall seal,
And still this throbbing heart,
The rending veil shall thee reveal,
All glorious as thou art.”
Other important hymns of Dr. Palmer’s are: “Come, Jesus, Redeemer,
abide Thou with me,” “O Jesus, sweet the tears I shed,” “Take me, O my
Father, take me,” “O Christ, the Lord of heav’n, to Thee,” “Come, Holy
Ghost, in love.” His translation of “Jesu, dulcedo cordium,” the Paris
cento of “Jesu, dulcis memoria,” by an unknown Spanish abbess, is most
highly esteemed: “Jesus, Thou joy of loving hearts.” This cento is
made up of selected verses from “Jesu, dulcis memoria,” from which
Edward Caswell took his admirable “Jesus, the very thought of Thee.”
Dr. Leonard Bacon (1802-1881), the son of a missionary among the
Indians of Michigan, is noteworthy in two particulars: he issued, at
the age of twenty-one, the first collection of missionary hymns
printed in America, and he wrote the New England patriotic hymn still
used in our churches,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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