University of Virginia Library

2. HYMN TUNES AND GRAVE-YARDS.

I WENT to church one night last week,

as Horace has it; and into what shrine of shrines should my
sinful feet be led, but into the freshly hallowed tabernacle of
the new free Chapel. It was Carnival week among the Presbyterians,
the season of Calvinistic Pentecost; and one of
the Missionary Societies in the celebration of its blessed triumphs,
bulged out, on that night, from the windows of the
gigantic meeting-house, like the golden glories of thickly-crowded
wheat-sheafs from the granary of a heaven-prospered
garnerer. Not, however, did the zeal of a Crusader against
the Paynim, nor the expected rehearsal of the victories of the
Christian soldier, draw me, unaccustomed, upon holy ground.
Wherefore did I, just now, pricked by conscience, stop short
in the middle of that line from Flaccus. I could not add
“Meus mos” stuck in my throat. It was no good grace of
mine. Non nobis. Reader, I confess to thee that I was
charmed into the Tabernacle by a hymn tune.

Now, before I ask for absolution, let me declare, that my
late unfrequent visitation of the Church is to be attributed to
no lack of disposition for faithful duty, but to the new-fangled
notions and fashions of the elders and preachers, and to my
dislike for the new church music.

It had been an unhappy day with me. My note lay over in
the Manhattan; and I had ascertained that some “regulated”
suburban “building lots,” which I had bought a few days before,
unsight unseen, upon the assurance of a “truly sincere

friend,” were lands covered with water, green mud, and blackberry
bushes, in the bottom of a deep valley, untraversable and
impenetrable as a Florida hammock. Abstracted, in uncomfortable
meditation, I threaded my unconscious pathway homeward,
the jargon of the confused noises of Broadway falling
upon my tympanum utterly unheard. In this entranced condition,
I came abreast of the steps of the covered entrance to
the Tabernacle. Here was done a work of speedy disenchantment.
A strain of music came floating down the avenue.
It was an old and fondly remembered hymn. It was the favorite
tune of my boyhood. It was the first tune I ever
learned. It was what I loved to sing with my old nurse and
my little sisters, when I used to pray. It was the tune that
even now always makes my heart swell, and brings tears into
my eyes. It was Old Hundredth.

Fellow-sinner, peradventure, thou hast never sung Old
Hundredth. Thou wert not blessed with pious parents. The
star of the reformation hath not shone upon thee. Thou hast
not been moved and exalted by the solemn ecstasy of Martin
Luther. Perhaps thou hast had eunuchs and opera-singers
to do thy vicarious devotions, in recitative, and elaborate cantatas;
scaling Heaven by appoggiaturas upon the rungs of a
metrical ladder. Lay down this discourse. Such as thou
cannot—yet I bethink me now how I shall teach thee to comprehend
and feel. Thou hast seen and heard Der Frieschutz?
I know that thou hast. Be not ashamed to confess it before
these good people. They play it at the play-house, it is true;
but what of that? What else is it than a German Camp-meeting
sermon set to music? It is a solemn drama, showing,
terribly, the certain and awful fate of the wicked. There is a
single strain of an anthem in that operatic homily—worth all
the rest of the piece;—dost thou not remember the harmony

of the early matin hymn unexpectedly springing from the choir
in the neighboring village church, which, faintly beginning,
swells upon your ear, and upon poor Caspar's too, pleading
with his irresolute soul, just as the old head-ranger has almost
persuaded the unhappy boy to renounce the Devil, and to become
good? Dost thou not remember, as the tune grows upon
his ear, the strong resolution suddenly taken, the subdued joy,
the meek rapture that illumine the face of the penitent; and
how, with head bowed down and humble feet, he follows his
old friend to the fountain of pardon and to the altar of reconciliation?
I see that thou rememberest, and—thou art moved;
—“Be these tears wet?”

Here I am happy to receive the congratulations of the
reader, that the similarity of Caspar's case and my own is at
an end. Poetical justice required that Von Weber's Zamiel
should carry off repenting Caspar from the very entrance to
the sanctuary;—the civil sexton of the Tabernacle asked me
to walk in, and showed me to a seat.

The hymn went up like the fragrance of a magnificent sacrifice.
Every voice in that crowded house was uplifted, and
swelled the choral harmony. The various parts fell into each
other like mingling water, and made one magnificent stream
of music; but yet you could recognize the constituent melodies
of which the harmonious whole was made up; you could
distinguish the deep voice of manhood, the shrill pipe of boys,
and the confident treble of the maiden communicant,—all singing
with earnestness and strength, and just as God and religion
taught them to sing, directly from the heart. To me,
one of the best recommendations of Old Hundredth is, that
every Protestant knows it, and can sing it. You cannot sing
it wrong. There is no fugue, nor da capo, nor place to rest
and place to begin, nor place to shake, nor any other meretricious

affectation about it. The most ingenious chorister—and
the church is cursed with some who are skilful to a wonder
in dampening people's piety, by tearing God's praises to tatters—cannot
find a place in Old Hundredth where he can introduce
a flourish or a shake. Deo gratias for the comfortable
triumph over vain glory. It would be as easy for a schoolmaster
to introduce a new letter into the alphabet; and Old
Hundredth may be said, in some sense, once to have been the
alphabet of Christian psalmody. I remember a time when it
was a sort of A B C for Protestant children learning to sing.
It was the universal psalm of family worship. But its day
has gone by. It is not a fashionable tune. You seldom hear
it except in the country churches, and in those not noted for
high-priced pews and “good society.”

There is much solemn effect in the accompaniment of vocal
music by a discreetly played organ; but in my ears Old Hundreth
suffers by the assistance. The hired organist and bellows
blower, have each his quota of duty to perform, and they
generally do it with so much zeal, that the more excellent
music of the human voice is utterly drowned. And then there
is a prelude, and a running up and down of keys, which
takes off your attention, and makes you think of the flippancy
of the player's fingers, and that your business is to listen and
not to sing. No; if you would hear, and sing Old Hundreth
a-right, go into one of the Presbyterian meeting houses that
has retained somewhat of the simplicity and humility of the
early church; or into the solemn aisles of the temples which
the Creator hath builded in the woods for the methodists to
go out and worship in. There you may enjoy the tune in its
original, incorrupt excellence, and join in a universal song of
devotion from the whole assembled people.

To Martin Luther is ascribed the honor of writing Old Hundredth.

But the tune was older than he. It took its birth
with the Christian church. It was born in the tone and inflection
of voice with which the early Christians spoke their
Saviour's praise. Martin Luther never did more than to catch
the floating religion of the hymn, and write it in musical letters.
It was such music that the poor of the world, out of
whom the church was chosen, used to sing for their consolation
amid the persecutions of their Pagan masters. It was
such simple music that Paul and Silas sang, at midnight, in
the prison-house. It was such that afterwards rang from crag
to crag in the mountain fastnesses of Scotland, when the
hunted Covenanters saluted the dawning Sabbath. Such simple
music was heard at nightfall in the tents of the Christian
soldiery, that prevailed, by the help of the God of battles, at
Naseby and Marston Moor. Such sang our puritan fathers,
when, in distress for their forlorn condition, they gave themselves,
first to God and then to one another. Such sang they
on the shore of Holland, when, with prayers and tears, their
holy community divided itself, and when the first American
pilgrims trod, with fearful feet, the deck of the precious-freighted
May flower.

Where are all the old hymn tunes that the churches used
to sing? Where are “Majesty,” and “Wells,” and “Windham,”
and “Jordan,” and “Devises,” and other tunes,—not
all great compositions, but dear to us because our fathers
sang them?

The old-fashioned church music has been pushed from its
stool by two sets of innovators. First, from the rich, sleepy

churches, it has been expelled by the choristers, who seem
to prefer to set a tune which only themselves can warble, as
if the better to show forth their clear alto voices and splendid
power of execution. No objection is made to this monopoly
of the musical part of the devotion of the congregations,
for it is getting to be the fashion to believe that it is not polite
to sing in church. Secondly, from the new-light conventicles,
the expulsion has been effected by those reformers of
the reformation, who have compelled Dr. Watts, not pious
enough, forsooth, to stand aside for their own more spiritual
performances. The old hymn tunes will not suit these precious
compositions. But with genuine good taste in their
adaptation of melodies to words, they have made a ludicrous
enough collection of musical fancies, of all varieties, of tragedy
and farce. Some of their ecstacies are intended to
strike sinners down by wild hoopings copied from the incantations
of Indian “medicine feasts,” bringing present hell before
the victim, and of which his frightened or crazed, but not
converted nor convinced soul, has an antetaste in the howling
of the discord. Of this sort of composition there is one which
ought to be handed over to the Shaking Quakers to be sung
with clapping of hands and dancing; I mean that abortion of
some fanatic brain which is adapted to the horrid words of

Some preachers have thought it would be a good plan to
circumvent the Devil by stealing some of his song tunes; as
though profane music could win souls to love piety better than
the hymns of the saints; and accordingly they have introduced
into their flocks such melodies as “Auld Lang Syne,”
and “Home, sweet Home!” O! could it be permitted to

John Robinson, the pastor of the New-England pilgrims; to
John Cotton, he who, in the language of his biographer, was
“one of those olive trees which afford a singular measure of
oil for the illumination of the Sanctuary”—to John Fisk, who
for “twenty years did shine in the golden candlestick of
Chelmsford”—to Brewster—to Mather—to any of those fathers
of the American church, to revisit this world, what
would they not lament of the descendants of the Pilgrims!

I have conjured up spirits! I am compelled, by an impulse
which I cannot resist, to go on. I seem to hear some wailing
ghost cry aloud—“There are more sorrowful changes in
the body and spirit of the reformed church than in the fashion
of the hymn tunes! Where are the ministers of religion,
who occupied the pulpits a few years since? where are their
churches? where are the altars which our fathers builded,
and where are the graves and bones of our fathers?”

Alas! poor ghost! thou knowest not that “the age of
bargaining is come,” and that the Reformed church is a trafficker
in the market, selling her sanctuaries for gold, and
committing sacrilege for silver. The pious dead shall sleep
no more in quiet graves. “Requiescat in pace!” shall
henceforth be quoted in the price-current! The departed
brethren in communion, who were committed to the earth beneath
the shadows of those sacred walls where first they
knew the glad offices of the gospel, shall be turned out of
their narrow tenements to make room for bankers and speculators!
Do I speak lies? Go to the Wall-street church and
get the flagrant proof. “It smells to Heaven!” That christian
church draws a revenue from suits of offices for trade
and barter which she has erected upon the graves of her children;
and brokers and attorneys—how can I speak it—find

the way to the temple of a heathen goddess,—not the altar of
Fortune nor the temple of Fame,—paved with old grave-yard
stones of the members of a christian congregation?

Dr. Romeyn! come not back to look for thy church in Cedar
Street! It is clean gone. The merchants, who bought it,
bade a liberal price. They sing no hymn tunes there now.
The ground is consecrated to cotton, coffee, and dry goods.
The congregation have gone up town and built a splendid
cathedral. Go thou there, and see how glorious be the scarlet,
and gilt, and fine chased work of this reformed church.
But tell that minister to doff his humble suit of black. It
accords not with his pulpit. See! looks he not like a beetle
in a gold snuff box?

McLeod! departed thunderer against the Pope, sleep on!

Hear not the whispered horror. There are pictures hung
up behind thine ancient altar—and candles are burned there in
the day-time,—and strange tunes are played upon an organ
—and Latin is chanted there—and a silver bell is tinkled—
and frankincense is burned before the people; but there is
not a bible nor a Scotch hymn book in the church! and the
people do not sing. but they cross themselves! Sleep on,—
sleep on, sweet shade; too happy to have bee ncalled away.[1]

Garden Street Church is a heap of burned ruins. But the
number of building lots has been counted, and the elders
already feel the price within their grasp, and the name shall
no longer be “Garden Street Church,” but “Exchange Place
Hotel!”

The Old Middle Dutch yet stands. O, may not that church

be spared! May there not remain one unviolated tabernacle
in this part of the city; if for nothing else than to remind us
that there were Christians here in old times, and out of respect
and regard for the memory of our forefathers?

The Brick Church.—I wish that I might be spared this
task. But I cannot—I cannot forget that they, too, have agreed
to sell their church and grave-yard,—to be used for a public
post office—and that a decree has gone forth that the officers
of the customs shall sit in the vault of my grandmother! The
city corporation have absolved the trustees from their contract
with them perpetually to keep sacred the land for a
burial-ground. But have the people been released from their
covenant to God, to respect the sepulchres of their brethren?
Who has given them a dispensation to break open the cave
of Macpelah? Or is there no moral or religious obligation—

Is the word “sacrilege” abolished from our language?

But to what plea does this church fly for excuse? Can
she complain that she is crowded out by the storehouses of
trade and commerce, and that her people live so far off that
they cannot walk to meeting? No, no. The brick church
stands exactly where it should,—in the centre of the city—
near the halls of Justice—on the public park; and it is isolated,
and occupies an entire block, having no next door
neighbors to annoy it or to hide it. Its familiar steeple towers
where strangers and sojourners will naturally see it, and it is
in the way of such as may inquire, “Where is a Presbyterian
church?” The temples of God ought to be built in public
places. They should not be hid behind dwelling-houses, like
Chatham Chapel and the Tabernacle, nor in narrow lanes,
like that one amid the pollution of Duane and Church streets.

Pull down the old Brick Church! That church known
all over the christian world as a highly favored church,—a

church of eminent graces! It would be a fit work for the
infidels who razed Jerusalem—and to disturb the grave-yard—
the proper office of hyenas! O! if the bond be not sealed,
if the bargain be not irrevocably concluded, let the church
save herself from the sin of this eternal condemnation. Let
her send back the wretched pieces of silver!

Tears—tears—tears!—I fear I have said too much.

“And all this bold wrath comes out of a dissertation on
hymn tunes!” I think I hear my reader say. And I see
some austere person rising and preparing to censure the
plainness of my speech to the churches. He is learned, and
well armed with all sorts of weapons of argument. He
comes at me first in Latin, quoting Terence:

which being interpreted freely, means, “is not this a flagitious
piece of impudence in an unknown layman like you
to get up in the synagogue and lecture the elders,—to be wise
and pious about other people's crimes, while by your own
confession you are an unannointed reprobate?” Spare me,
spare me—most merciful inquisitor. I waited until all those
who had a right to speak before me, might speak; but they
were silent. I felt it my duty then to disburthen my heart.
Sinner as I am, I do yet take deep interest in the welfare
and honor of the reformed republican church. I am a descendant
of the pilgrims, and it is not I, but their blood, that
speaks. The cause is the cause of patriotism as well as
piety. With one of the departed saints I feel and say,—and
I commend this as part of his testament,—to those who are
trying to improve upon God's institutions, “I shall count
my country lost, in the loss of the primitive principles, and
the primitive practices, upon which it was first established.”