New Hymnal

For three years a joint commission representing the Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodist Episcopal Church, South and the Methodist Protestant Church has been working on a revised hymnal and psalter. One group studied words, another music. This week the full commission was to meet at Cincinnati to join the efforts of the two groups, ratify the changes recommended by each.

To a gathering of Methodist ministers in Manhattan last week Dr. John William Langdale, secretary of the commission, revealed the additions and deletions in the hymnal of 1905 which the words group would propose at the Cincinnati meeting. To many moderns, Dr. Langdale explained, the "imagery of blood" in oldtime hymns is distasteful. As the kind of thing the commission would put out of the revised hymnal he read a stanza from "The Gospel," by Isaac Watts, 18th Century hymn-writer:

To the blest fountain of thy blood,

Incarnate God, I fly:

Here let me wash my spotted soul

From crimes of deepest dye.

The Manhattan ministers agreed it was "too bloody." Then Dr. Langdale offered this lugubrious one, also by Watts:

The pains, the groans, the dying strife,

Fright our approaching souls away;

And we shrink back again to life,

Fond of our prison and our clay.

It, too, faced elimination. One preacher said he liked the fourth stanza of "Welcome, Sweet Day of Rest" by Watts which is on the commission's list for rejection. But the others giggled when Dr. Langdale read:

My willing soul would stay

In such a frame as this,

And sit and sing herself away

To everlasting bliss.

In the revised hymnal 44 of the 121 hymns by Charles Wesley are tentatively to be dropped. Isaac Watts, who wrote some 600 hymns in all, has 53 in the pres-ent book, of which 14 have tentatively been rejected and nine challenged. John Wesley's 19 hymns are to be reduced by six or seven. Several hundred other hymns are too antiquated, sentimental or infrequently sung to merit retention. But no old favorite, like "Reck of Ages" or "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" is to be dropped.

Most modern hymns, said Dr. Langdale, are disappointing. But the words group found a number worthy of inclusion in the new hymnal. Professor Henry Hallam Tweedy of Yale Divinity School contributed this rollicking one:

Eternal God, whose power upholds

Both flow'r and flaming star,

To whom there is no here nor there,

No time, no near nor far,

No alien race, no foreign shore,

No child unsought, unknown,

O, send us forth, thy prophets true,

To make all lands thine own!

Tentatively included for the first time in the Methodist Hymnal, which will draw upon all faiths in its selections, are Poet John Greenleaf Whittier's "All Things Are Thine," and the hymn of St. Francis of Assisi which begins:

All creatures of our God and King,

Lift up your voice and with us sing

Hallelujah, Hallelujah!

Thou burning sun with golden beam,

Thou silver moon with softer gleam,

O praise Him, O praise Him,

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah! Amen.

Declared Dr. Langdale to the Methodist ministers who heard the proposed changes: "You might as well make up your minds that there will not be universal satisfaction in the new hymnal."

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