Wahr 12-5-28 18417

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

THE demand for a new edition of English Hymns, coming so soon after the first issue of three thousand copies, may well be a surprise to others, as it certainly is to myself. The past three months have been spent in a slow convalescence from dangerous illness induced by overwork, and no medicine could have been more salutary than the invariably kind reviews printed by various journals and the frequent and appreciative letters of my brethren in the ministry. If I am to believe what I read, I have done some service to the Church of Christ, even while my lips have been silent and my hands have "hung down." I ask, in return, the prayers of those to whom this book is helpful, that I may be fully able to renew my old and happy labor, and also to complete the manuscript of the Latin Hymn- Writers without undue delay. I can indeed make the final couplet of Doddridge's Last Hymn my own, and say:

"For 'tis a heaven begun to know,

To love, and serve my Lord below."

Mr. Hubert P. Main has again aided me (especially in the American chronology), and I owe particular thanks to Rev. T. W. Chambers, D. D., to Rev. C. S. Nutter, to the veteran hymnologist, David Creamer, and to Rev. G. W. Anderson, D. D., and his friend, Mr. Francis Jennings, for many annotations and suggestions. The very few real changes which these have rendered necessary are a source of wonder and delight" to one who hoped for accuracy and has done his utmost to secure it.

SAMUEL W. Duffield.

BLOOMFIELD, N. J., Sept. 15, 1886.

PREFACE.

I HAVE written this Preface, in waking and dreaming moments, a good many times. It is "borne in upon me”—as the Quakers say-that the Courteous Reader and I must make each other's acquaintance in the first person singular before we are separated by the editorial “ We."

I would not have him "mislike me for my complexion," or fancy that, because this is a somewhat elaborate-and, I hope, somewhat accurate-treatise on the Authors and History of English Hymns, it must therefore be dry reading and useless to all except the musty grubbers among old hymn-books.

Nor would I have him—or her, for I know as many women who love hymns as I do men !-think me capable of imposing on his credulity with every sort of ill-grounded or sentimental tradition concerning the origin or the use of these Hymns. The size of the present volume shows what has been omitted as well as included. And as this is in no sense either a work of fiction or of dead statistics, I have confined myself to the truth as I found it, and have mainly restrained a desire to indulge in the Comparison of Texts and the History of Alterations. I suppose I might add, too, that I have only plucked a few flowers from the outer limits of that great garden of Christian Biography wherein grow Solomon's rose, Christ's lily, Chaucer's daisy, and Robert Robinson's saffron-crocus.

It was when I was busy with the Latin Hymns that this work was peremptorily forced upon me by the exigencies of the case. Large as it was, I looked upon it only as the adytum or vestibule to that cathedral of ancient praise. But I soon found that English Hymnology afforded a very fruitful field, for, as a rule, in the immensity of material each editor has perforce taken a certain direction and dug his galleries and shafts to correspond. Such a thing as one General Guide to the whole subject of the Hymns themselves was not to be had. Especially there was a lack in

America, where we employ, more treely than does England, the sacred songs of "all peoples, nations, and languages." This catholicity and the publication of Laudes Domini, Dr. Robinson's latest and noblest collection of hymns, determined both the basis and the scope of the present work.

There are those who, in Hymns, as in Art and in Music, are clamorous nowadays for the new, the precise, and the aesthetic. But the "old wine" is good enough yet, and there is honey still in the lion-carcass of the field-preaching Church of Lady Huntingdon's day. I shall not defend archaic expressions, bad rhymes, and halting rhythm, but I shall constantly aver that Hymns are pre-eminently the utterance of Spiritual Life, and that what the Church Universal adopts and cherishes is, by that fact, removed both from the control of a picking pedantry and of a cold-blooded correctness.

The string with which I have bound these things together is undoubtedly mine own. I have not been satisfied merely to quote and to compile; but I must needs bring in more or less of my own tying of the knots. I feel like old "Democritus" Burton : "As I do not arrogate, I will not derogate." There is honest, hard labor here. And I take Burton's comfort to myself: "I shall be censured, I doubt not; for, to say truth with Erasmus, nihil morosius hominum judicis, there is naught so peevish as men's judgments; yet this is some comfort, ut palata, sic judicia, our censures are as various as our palates.''

I have paid particular care to our American Hymn-Writers, and have received from them much personal help. The Materials for Annotation, placed at my service, have been unusually fine-both as to Hymnologies (of which I have consulted all, without a known exception) and as to Hymn-Books and Original Editions. And yet I have scrupulously avoided a kind of dogmatic "Sir Oracle" method-which is to me one of the most unpleasant features of the study of these Texts and Origins. The best of men can be mistaken, and it does not conduce to confidence for any person to believe, or imply, that knowledge will perish with Good old Daniel Sedgwick is the suggestive "horrible example"-writing "Jeremiah Stegen" for "Gerard Tersteegen" and assigning R. Robinson's hymn to Lady Huntingdon !

I trust there is yet more light to break across this hymn