-each at the sound of its first syllable brought its own music to every singer's tongue, and all-male and female-were sopranos together. This habit in singing those rude liturgies of faith and fellowship was recognized by the editors of the Revivalist, and to a multitude of them space was given only for the printed melody, and of this sometimes only the three or four initial bars. The tunes were the church's rural field-tones that everybody knew.

Culture smiles at this unclassic hymnody of long ago, but its history should disarm criticism. To wanderers its quaint music and "pedestrian" verse were threshold call and door-way welcome into the church of the living God. Even in the flaming days of the Second Advent following, in 1842-3, they awoke in many hardened hearts the spiritual glow that never dies. The delusion passed away, but the grace remained.

The church-and the world-owe a long debt to the old evangelistic refrains that rang through the sixty years before the Civil War, some of them flavored with tuneful piety of a remoter time. They preached righteousness, and won souls that sermons could not reach. They opened beven to thousands who are now rejoicing there.

CHAPTER VIII.

SUNDAY-SCHOOL HYMNS.

SHEPHERD OF TENDER YOUTH.

Στόμιον πώλων ἀδάων

We are assured by repeated references in the patristic writings that the primitive years of the Christian Church were not only years of suffering but years of song. That the despised and often persecuted "Nazarenes," scattered in little colonies throughout the Roman Empire, did not forget to mingle tones of praise and rejoicing with their prayers could readily be believed from the muchquoted letter of a pagan lawyer, written about as long after Jesus' death, as from now back to the death of John Quincy Adams—the letter of Pliny the younger to the Emperor Trajan, in which he reports the Christians at their meetings singing "hymns to Christ as to a god."

Those disciples who spoke Greek seem to have been especially tuneful, and their land of poets was doubtless the cradle of Christian hymnody. Believers taught their songs to their children, and

it is as certain that the oldest Sunday-school hymn was written somewhere in the classic East as that the Book of Revelation was written on the Isle of Patmos. The one above indicated was found in an appendix to the Tutor, a book composed by Titus Flavius Clemens of Alexandria, a Christian philosopher and instructor whose active life began late in the second century. It follows a treatise on Jesus as the Great Teacher, and, though his own words elsewhere imply a more ancient origin of the poem, it is always called "Clement's Hymn." The line quoted above is the first of an English version by the late Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter, D.D. It does not profess to be a translation, but aims to transfer to our common tongue the spirit and leading thoughts of the original.

Shepherd of tender youth,

Guiding in love and truth
Through devious ways;
Christ, our triumphant King,
We come Thy name to sing,
Hither our children bring

To shout Thy praise.

The last stanza of Dr. Dexter's version represents the sacred song spirit of both the earliest and the latest Christian centuries:

So now, and till we die
Sound we Thy praises high,

And joyful sing;

Infants, and the glad throng
Who to Thy church belong

Unite to swell the song

To Christ our King.

While they give us the sentiment and the religious tone of the old hymn, these verses, however, recognize the extreme difficulty of anything like verbal fidelity in translating a Greek hymn, and in this instance there are metaphors to avoid as being strange to modern taste. The first stanza, literally rendered and construed, is as follows: Bridle of untaught foals,

Wing of unwandering birds,
Helm and Girdle of babes,
Shepherd of royal lambs!
Assemble Thy simple children
To praise holily,

To hymn guilelessly

With innocent mouths

Christ, the Guide of children.

Figures like

Catching the chaste fishes,
Heavenly milk, etc.,

-are necessarily avoided in making good English of the lines, and the profusion of adoring epithets in the ancient poem (no less than twenty-one different titles of Christ) would embarrass a modern song.

Dr. Dexter might have chosen an easier metre for his version, if (which is improbable) he intended it to be sung, since a tune written to sixes and fours takes naturally a more decided lyrical movement and emphasis than the hymn reveals in his stanzas, though the second and fifth possess much of the hymn quality and would sound well in Giardini's "Italian Hymn."

More nearly a translation, and more in the cantabile style, is the version of a Scotch Presbyterian minister, Rev. Hamilton M. Macgill, D.D., two of whose stanzas are these:

Thyself, Lord, be the Bridle
These wayward wills to stay;
Be Thine the Wing unwand'ring,
To speed their upward way.

*

Let them with songs adoring
Their artless homage bring

To Christ the Lord, and crown Him
The children's Guide and King.

The Dexter version is set to Monk's slow harmony of "St. Ambrose" in the Plymouth Hymnal (Ed. Dr. Lyman Abbott, 1894) without the writer's name-which is curious, inasmuch as the hymn was published in the Congregationalist in 1849, in Hedge and Huntington's (Unitarian) Hymn-book in 1853, in the Hymnal of the Presby terian Church in 1866, and in Dr. Schaff's Christ in Song in 1869.

Clement died about A.D. 220.

Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter, D.D., for twentythree years the editor of the Congregationalist, was born in Plymouth, Mass., Aug. 13, 1821. He was a graduate of Yale (1840) and Andover Divinity School (1844), a well-known antiquarian writer and church historian. Died Nov. 13, 1890.