Chapter XV.

HYMNS OF THE FATHERS.

“Our holy and beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee.”

HO, in his dreams of the past, has not sometimes found himself floating across the Mediterranean down to ancient Egypt, and there moving, as none but spirits can move, along the face of those venerable and mysterious deposits of the Delta over which Egyptian, Ethiopian, Assyrian, Persian, Roman, and Saracen, in successive generations, have passed before him? and whose imagination has not wandered up the Nile in quiet visionary fashion, now under the shadow of African palms, and now through lily banks by the side of gliding pelicans, and within sight of the giraffe and the gazelle freely rambling on the desert sands? Who has not in his dreams looked at the calcareous cliffs from which the generations of the Old World dug their lime? or at the sandstone quarries which supplied slabs and blocks for the temples that had fallen into ruin long before England began her course? or at the awful granite piles from whence came the materials for those gigantic sculptures which still overawe mankind? or

at the wilderness of ruins and sepulchres which, with their myriads of mummy forms, give to our hearts such lessons on human life? Who has not wandered there thinking of Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and his brethren, Jacob worshipping on his staff, his embalmment, and his funeral; and then of another Joseph and Mary, and the Holy Child; and then of the first Christian disciples, and their first flight to the desert? Our dreamy flights have sometimes led us from Egypt across the Red Sea to the base of Mount Colzim, just where its bend looks out through the desert pass of Mount Kallil towards the plain of Baccarah, there to look at a few palms, sustained by three brackish springs, with a little garden of potherbs, onions, and dourah; and to find a human form seated at the entrance of a recess dressed in wash-leather, with a sallow face expressive of quiet earnestness and high purpose, the lustrous depth of his upturned eye revealing the joy of his communion with heaven; the man who might be called the father of that recluse life which, though springing from perverted Christian principle, yet for so many ages swayed the movements of the Christian world, and gave out the precious streams of hymns and songs which helped to preserve the spiritual life of a cloistered church. Then, have there not been visions of old Alexandria? visions which, like dissolving views, have changed from brilliant palaces to libraries and lecture-halls, from close retired streets to old basilicas, from students' cells to crowded places filled with multitudes struggling and heaving amidst the processes of transition from old heathenism to a half-formed Christianity; and then our visionary path has been crossed by the shadows of such men as Clement, and Origen, and

Didymus, and their trains of disciples who peopled the first Christian schools of Alexandria. One would like to arrest the shade of Clement, and ask him to give us a few more hymns, or to sing to us some of the fragments that we have caught up from the ruins of his music-school, and to sing them as he and his scholars used to sing them both at home and in the church. It is difficult to catch even a dreamy outline of Clement's person and life; he has left a few touches. of his own character. At the end of the second century, Alexandria was like a great centre of telegraphic communication, mysteriously linking itself with all the outstanding points in the world of thought. In and around that centre many were running to and fro asking and answering questions, and voices from all nations were mingling in deeptoned inquiries after the supreme good. There, in the midst, was Clement, anxiously looking hither and thither, always intensely hungering and thirsting after truth. Now, he took lessons from the retreats of Lebanon, now from Assyria, and now from the Hebrew school of Tiberias. It was a weary search; but perfect sincerity is always honoured from above, and is sure of its goal. His heart found rest at last; where his heart rested, there the wants of his intellect were supplied. He says enough about himself and Christianity to prove that he had found the secret of Christian life, and that he had been "transformed by the renewing of his mind." Still, his long in and out and round-about search for truth, and the hard processes through which his mind and heart had passed in the course of his religious pursuit, gave a peculiar shaping to his mental and spiritual character as a Christian. Some of his peculiar views, his views of

Christian perfection, caught the attention of Wesley, who, stigmatized as a perfectionist himself, though coming very much nearer to the truth than the Alexandrian father, has ingeniously given a versified exposition of Clement's mistaken notion, and has embodied it in his collection of hymns and sacred poems. It seems fitting that one of the earliest hymnists among the Fathers should have his distinctive views thrown into a hymnic form by a modern Father of spiritual hymns and songs. Wesley sings "on Clement Alexandrinus's description of a perfect Christian :"

Here from afar the finish'd height

Of holiness is seen;

But oh what heavy tracts of toil,
What deserts lie between !

Man for the simple life divine
What will it cost to break,
Ere pleasure soft and wily pride
No more within him speak?

What ling'ring anguish must corrode
The root of nature's joy?

What secret shame and dire defeats
The pride of heart destroy?

Learn thou the whole of mortal state

In stillness to sustain;

Nor soothe with false delights of earth,
Whom God hath dcomed to pain.

Thy mind no multitude of thoughts,
Nor stupor shall distress;
The venom of each latent vice

Wild images impress.

Yet darkly safe with God thy soul
His arm still onward bears,

Till through each tempest on her face
A peace beneath appears.

'Tis in that peace we see and act
By instincts from above,

With finer taste of wisdom fraught,
And mystic powers of love.

Yet ask not in mere ease and pomp
Of ghostly gifts to shine,
Till death, the lownesses of man,

And pitying griefs are thine.

As an exposition of Clement's doctrine of Christian perfection, this is sufficiently clear to guard those whose service of song the author intended to regulate; while it is aptly made to fall off into that kind of haziness which indicates the uncertain theology of the Alexandrine Father. But whatsoever peculiar turn of thought Clement's mind might take on some theological points, Christianity had simplified his heart and kindled his poetic powers into hallowed devotion to his beloved Redeemer. The artless child seems to brighten into the praiseful seraph in his hymn "of the Saviour Christ." An English rendering, somewhat in imitation of the original metre, may help us to sing with Clement :

Lead, Holy One, lead!
The little ones need
The voice of their King.

The footprints of Jesus

Are shining before us,

His children to lead,

On the heavenly way their footsteps to bring.