Hymns of Heaven
Fine hymn is the consummate flower of doctrine: I had rather be the author of “Rock of ages,” — that crown jewel of sacred minstrelsy, — than of either of President Edwards’s masterly treatises. Charles Wesley did more for Christ when he sang, —
“Jesus, lover of my soul!”
than if he had written fifty volumes of sound theology. A mere talk about that exquisite hymn, a few evenings ago, was blessed to the soul of one believer who had been under a cloud of despondency for months. The hymn itself would be enough to make Wesley’s and Calvin’s spirits embrace each other before the throne of their Redeemer, and weep that they had ever had a controversy while in the flesh.
It is natural that the theme of many of the richest hymns of the Church should be the Joys of Heaven. When Bunyan’s pilgrim was ^sked in the House Beautiful how he secured for himself “golden hours” in which he forgot his troubles, he answered: “When I think of what I saw at the cross, that will do it; when I look into the roll which I carry in my bosom, that will do it; and when my thoughts wax warm a3{?u, wMther I am going, thai yj do.” The sweet
Hymns of Heaven. in
thoughts of his expected home in gloiy drove away the devils of doubt and despondency — as they have driven them from many a tried Christian spirit ever since.
The earliest of the hymns of heaven is the old Latin composition, Urbs beata Jerusalem,^’ which had its roots in the meditations of that giant of the fifth centuryi Augustine of Hippo. This is the groundwork of all the numerous Jerusa/em-hymns of latter ages. In the time of Queen Elizabeth, a prisoner was shut up in the dreary old Tower of London, and to him, as to the captive in Bedford jail, was vouchsafed a bright vision of the “better country.” He composed a hymn in twenty-six stanzas, a manuscript copy of which is still preserved in the British Museum. It is entitled “A Song by F. B. P. to the tune of Diana.” The first verse is, —
“Jerusalem, my happy home,
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end?
Thy joys when shall I see?”
The closing verses are in that most rapturous strain of longing for that celestial paradise, where “the trees for evermore bear fruit,” and “where evermore the angels sit, and evermore do sing.” The name of this prisoner of Jesus Christ is lost in oblivion. A few years afterward, old David Dickson, of Scotland, altered the first line of the “Song of F. B. P.” to the quaint and tender words, “Oh! mother dear, Jerusalem” and he also added to it s sAvi .lxX^ n’?.^^ of his own. About the beginning of this century there appeared (from an unknown source) a beautiful variation of the hymn in six verses. This is the one which is found in all our collections of church music under the well-known name of “Jerusalem, my happy home.”
A Presbyterian clergyman in New Orleans once called to visit a young Scotchman who was lying very low, and talked to him about his soul. The young stranger gave him but little attention. During one of his visits the minister began to hum over to himself the lines, “Jerusalem, my happy home, name ever dear to me!” The youth burst into tears, and exclaimed, “I used to hear my dear mother sing those words when I was a child.” His heart melted under a strain that seemed to come back to him as from his cradle; and the heart thus softened, received ikit “faithful saying” with penitence and joy. I am persuaded that we ministers make too little use of the Gospel in metre as a means of awakening and conversion. A hymn often goes many fathoms deeper than a sermon.
Among the ancient hymns of heaven we must not overlook that noble lyric composed by old Bernard of Cluny. Its opening verse is, —
Jerusalem the golden I
With milk and honey blest,
Beneath thy contemplation
Sink heart and voice opprest I”
The wholt hymn reads Vike oiifc o lioVj Rutherford*s “Letters” turned into rhyme. It is rich in Scriptural imagery, without degenerating into the coarser sensuous language which disfigures some of the pious doggerel in our Sabbath-school music books. In fact some of these descriptions of heaven would answer about as well for Mohammed’s Paradise. They give children the idea that the glorified spirits on high are enjoying a sort of celestial picnic with no end of good things to eat, and of angels to sing to them under the green bowers.
In my own childhood I got a very different conception of the holy habitation of the redeemed, when I heard that glorious hymn of Isaac Watts:
“There is a land of pure delight
Where saints immortal reign,
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.”
As the inspired singer of this lay looked across Southampton Water to the verdant banks of the Isle of Wight, he caught a beautiful image of death as a “narrow sea” dividing the heavenly land from ours. He imagines the lovely island across the water to be a type of that land, and writes —
“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green;
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.”
Of many another hymn of heaven I wish I had time and space to write this morning. In our days several fine additions have been made to this celestial hymnology. Among them are *’ ‘R.es.X. fox Nha“^ s and Dr. Muhlenberg’s “I would not live alway,” and those lines of Miss Gary, commencing,
“One sweetly solemn thought
Comes to me o’er and o’er.”
That popular hjonn, “Shining shore,” is wedded to a noble tune, but the poetry itself is rather a clumsy piece of joiner- work.
For one of the grandest songs of the better land we are indebted to a member of that many-sided household of genius, the Beechers. When the Rev. Charles Beecher was in Switzerland he caught a sudden inspiration while gazing at the glittering peak of Mont Blanc with its coronal of ice. He dashed off a few verses, which were set to music by Mr. Zundel, and the tune took its name from the mpuntain which inspired the hymn. No piece is a greater favourite with my own people than this j its first lines are,
“We are on our journey home — Where Christ our Lord is gone.”
Let me quote, in closing, two of the ringing stanzas of this heaven-song:
**0h! glory shining far,
From the never-setting sun!
Oh, trembling morning-star!
Our journey’s almost done
To the New Jerusalem.
Our hearts are breaking now,
Those mansions fair to see:
O Lord! thy heavens bow
And raise us up with Thee
To the “New 3er<xs»3i3l’e,m”