ascertain, that of the primitive Christians. It is even more important, that in three passages of the apostolic writings, in which psalmody is mentioned, Ephes. v. 19, 20. Colos. iii. 16, 17. James v. 13. it is invariably connected with thanksgiving. Our reformers appear to have entertained similar sentiments. The attitude prescribed for supplication is on our knees; we stand up to praise and glorify. It is a fair inference, that our singing was not intended to be supplicatory, since the attitude of prayer is not enjoined, and, indeed, would be awkward and inconvenient. All that can be said, on the other hand, is to appeal to practical effect. The influence of music is equally powerful over the soft and tender emotions, as over those which raise and exhilarate the soul. If psalmody can melt as well as elevate, subdue, as well as excite the heart, why confine and limit the force of so useful an auxiliary to devotion? Why in one case gladly admit, in the other proscribe and reject its aid? We might as well at once build our organs without the softer stops, and we ought clearly on days or periods of general humiliation, during the whole of Lent for instance, entirely to omit this part of our service, if it may not assume a tone in unison with the rest of our liturgy. We have heard strong objections made to a practice, adopted in many churches, of singing the responses after the commandments. If we may speak of the effect, we should acknowledge that the too frequent repetition of the same words in the same key is much against it; were this not the case, it would be extremely affecting and impressive. Where the commandments have been read from the altar with a clear and solemn voice, and from the farthest end of the church, the Lord have mercy upon us,' has come back in a subdued and supplicatory tone, particularly when led by a well-trained female school, we have listened with delight, and, we hope, not without advantage. Nothing again can be more touching than the litany in our cathedral service, when it is chaunted with feeling and propriety. The early admission of the penitential psalms may, in some slight degree, invalidate the general consent of antiquity; and although our first reformers gave no opinion on the subject, yet those rulers of the church who admitted Sternhold and Hopkins, seem likewise to have authorized the pathetic Complaint of a Sinner,' which is subjoined to all the early collections of the psalms, and appears, though considerably modernized, in the collection of Bishop Heber, for the eleventh Sunday after Trinity. Having thus stated the case on each side, we are not without embarrassment as to the course which it would be expedient to pursue in an authorized collection. In deference to antiquity, we should be inclined to assign the predominance to the more exalting strains of praise and thanksgiving; 6 giving; yet we should be unwilling, especially where the services of the church are of a more mournful and humiliating cast, to exclude the more tender and pathetic language of petition and supplication. We would not allow the psalmody to encroach on the peculiar province of the prayers, but, where it is expedient, we would harmonize them as far as possible, and enable them to conduce to one general impression. We make no apology for the length of this article: the minutest part of the service in the national church is a subject of national interest. Our suggestions have been advanced solely with a view to general utility; we have refrained from all strictures on existing collections, but we cannot disguise our opinion, that not one approximates to that perfection which would command its general adoption. We are not bigoted to our own principles; we throw them out for general consideration. In conclusion, we must warn all those who take an interest in the subject, against indulging too lofty expectations of any collection which may be made. On no point are men in general so completely the slaves of old associations and habitual feelings, as in whatever relates to their public devotions. Hence, the compiler must lay his account for a certain degree of disappointment and dissatisfaction in almost all. Many will imperiously demand novelty and originality; but novelty and originality, if attainable on such subjects, would be dangerous, and, unless regulated by the severest judgment, decidedly objectionable. Not to mention those whom nothing less warm than the theopathic strains of early Moravianism, or Methodism, will excite, whose Bible is contained in the Song of Solomon, more sober-minded Christians have not unfrequently contracted an unaccountable affection for certain words, or lines, or tunes, which appear almost necessary to their devotion. They will require a new collection, not merely to accord with their judgment, but to harmonize with their feelings; every one will impatiently demand the admission of his favourites, like other favourites, not so much on account of their real merit, which he would find it difficult to point out, as from personal attachment or habitual regard. Hence, our disinclination to commit episcopal authority, further than by recommendation, even if a more perfect collection than we dare anticipate should ever be made. We doubt whether its unexceptionable character would not at first impede its general and immediate adoption-but it would work its way, if slowly, yet surely. Good sense and judgment may suffer partial and local deliquium in the established church; but when the paroxysm is passed, they will silently resume their authority. But we repeat, that too much must not be expected: however inaccurate many of the positions may appear in a celebrated passage of Johnson's Life of Waller, which has been recently much canvassed, we suspect, that much that is inapplicable to religious and even devotional poetry will be found strictly true, as regards the public praise and adoration of God. The topics of devotion (in which a whole congregation can reasonably join) are few; but few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression.' We are inclined to admit the former of these limitations; and even if we were to deny the latter, the poet is confined to a very inferior branch of his art, who can only invest common thoughts with appropriate or graceful language. Yet, will the writer of hymns, which are to convey the feelings of praise or supplication common to a multitude of believers, dare to advance farther, particularly in a religion so spiritual as Protestant Christianity, and so entirely divested of that pomp and circumstance, which in the Jewish, and even in the Roman Catholic church, furnished the poet with his most splendid illustrations and magnificent images? Those who appeal to the poetical sublimity of the public hymns of the Hebrews, should call to mind, not merely their inspiration, but likewise their abundant treasures of description, allusion, and amplification, the perpetual miracles and wonders of their history, the supposed actual and visible presence of the divinity in the Shechinah within the temple; the sensible interference of the God of Israel in all their national, almost in all their individual transactions. When Christianity transfers these to its own use, that in which their poetical merit mainly consists, their propriety, truth, and distinctness, must materially suffer. They have lost their reality, and are become metaphors and figures; not that the facts of Christianity are wanting in sublimity, but they are few, and in our public worship we dare not go beyond what is written; and what is written is so expressed, as not merely by its sanctity to prohibit, but by its simple beauty to defy competition. The Christian poet abroad may draw as largely as he pleases on the boundless poetical faith of his reader, as largely as Dante, Milton, and Tasso have done; the writer of hymns must not venture beyond the religious faith of those whose thoughts and feelings he is to express, and that faith is strictly limited to the ideas, if not the words of revelation. We are convinced that this distinction between the province of religious and devotional poetry, and that of hymn-writing, must be distinctly kept in view, both to moderate the ambition of the writer, and the expectations of the Christian public. Unborn poets may yet appear,-exoriatur aliquis! is our devout ejaculation,-who may surpass all that has yet been composed for this purpose; but they will scarcely succeed by outstepping stepping those limits, which the nature of their design, and the purpose for which their poems are intended, have unalterably fixed. Would that he, whose mind was so deeply interested in this subject, had survived to pass his judgment on the considerations which we have presumed to offer; he, from whose perfect candour, if just, they would have met immediate approbation, and by whose exquisite taste, if erroneous, their fallacy would immediately have been detected! But it was otherwise decreed; the name of Heber could scarcely be further endeared to the heart of every pious and enlightened Christian; and if the completion of this important national work should be reserved for other hands, few would be able, out of the abundance of their claims upon the gratitude and admiration of all Christians, to spare so well this further title to the thankful remembrance and affectionate veneration of the Church. ART. III.-1. Ireland: its Evils and their Remedies. By Michael Thomas Sadler. London. 1828. 2. The Real State of Ireland in 1827. London. 1827. 3. Letters from the Irish Highlands. London. 1825. 4. Observations on the Necessity of a Legal Provision for the Irish Poor. By John Douglas, Esq. London. 1828. THE work which we have placed first at the head of this article deserves to be generally and attentively read. The author has brought together a body of facts, and discusses, with great clearness and ability, principles of extreme importance with reference to the various remedies which have, from time to time, been suggested for the evils and miseries under which Ireland is acknowledged to labour. Mr. Malthus has contrived, as our readers are well aware, to revive and elevate into popularity a theory originally broached by a philosophical infidel of the seventeenth century. He maintains that, by a law of nature as general and irresistible in its operation as the force of gravity, mankind increases faster than the means of subsistence; that this increase can only be kept in check by moral restraint, by vice or by misery. Hence it is inferred, that the misery and privation of the human race must increase in every country in the exact ratio of the multiplication of the species. In a work which he is now preparing for the press, and of which the present publication was originally designed to form a supplement, Mr. Sadler proposes to demonstrate that this theory is as unphilosophical and false as it must be allowed to be melancholy; that the fecundity of human beings is, cæteris paribus, in the inverse ratio of the condensation of their numbers; and that the variation in that fecundity fecundity is effectuated not by the wretchedness, but by the happiness and prosperity of the species.' Upon the consideration of this subject, we shall not enter at present: a more convenient opportunity will probably occur, when Mr. Sadler's forthcoming work shall have made its appearance. Until we have seen the whole of the case which he proposes to establish, it would be obviously premature to express an opinion on the point in issue between him and Mr. Malthus. In the mean time, we may venture to state our conviction that no member of the community will rejoice more heartily than Mr. Malthus himself, if it can be satisfactorily shown that the power which establishes the relation subsisting between the number of the human race, and the supply of food provided for their subsistence, is to be looked for, not in the misery and privation, but in the happiness and affluence of mankind. In the teeth, to all appearance, of the Malthusian theory, Mr. Sadler has already proved, by indisputable evidence, that the present condition of the peasantry of Ireland, however destitute and miserable, is still much superior to that of the population of the same island some centuries ago, when the number of the people did not exceed one million. Spenser describes them as inhabiting 'sties rather than houses, which are the chiefest cause of the farmer's so beastly manner of life and savage condition, lying and living together with his beast, in one house, in one room, in one bed, that is, clean straw, or rather a foul dunghill.' In 1672, Sir William Petty computed that the inhabitants of Ireland amounted to about one million three hundred thousand. Their habitations, he says, 6 are lamentable wretched cabins, such as themselves could make in three or four days, not worth five shillings the building,'-and filthy and disgusting to a degree which renders it necessary for us to refrain from quoting his description. Out of the two hundred thousand houses of Ireland,' says this eminent writer on political arithmetic, one hundred and sixty thousand are wretched cabins, without chimney, window or door shut, even worse than those of the savages of America.' Their food, at the same period, fully corresponded with the wretchedness of their dwellings. It consisteth,' states Sir William Petty, of cakes, whereof a penny serves for each a week; potatoes from August till May; mussels, cockles, and oysters near the sea; eggs and butter made very rancid by keeping in bogs: as for flesh, they seldom eat it; they can content themselves with potatoes.' About half a century afterwards (1712), Dobbs, a man particularly conversant with the general condition of Ireland, estimated that its population had increased to two millions. He states that the common people are very poorly clothed, go barelegged half |
