Affliction is a stormy deep

 

I’ve accidently come across A collection of psalms and hymns for public worship now used in all the parishes churches of the city of Lincoln and in general use in neighbouring village.  Several editions were printed from the 1830s, and the fifth edition qualifies all the parish churches of Lincoln by with one exception.  Similar local volumes were being produced elsewhere in the period, which was a generation before the national success of the first Hymns Ancient and Modern published in 1861. 

It begins with a small selection of metrical psalms, which at one time had been all that was approved of for congregational use in the Church of England.  The young John Wesley’s small collection of hymns (including the work of his father Samuel and his brother Samuel, and his own translations of Moravian hymns) was among the things involved in his falling out with some of those to whom he ministered as an SPCK missionary in Savannah in the 1730s.

Most of the rest of the hymns feel like the less inspiring devotional poems of the Eighteenth Century.  They ranged from Affliction is a stormy deep (the author of which was a doctor who treated William Cowper) to While to the graves our friends are borne (by a female Baptist poet).  But some of the greatest Eighteenth Century work is there too, from the nonconformist Philip Doddridge and Isaac Watts to the Anglican Thomas Ken, Charles Wesley and John Newton (the last of whose Olney Hymns for his own parish in 1779 is his own work alongside some of Cowper’s).

I was sufficiently intrigued to compare indices.  I find that 20 of the 273 hymns in the first Hymns Ancient and Modern had been in the Lincoln book thirty years earlier.  Two centuries later I am used to singing almost all of these 20.

All people that on earth do dwell (Sixteenth Century metrical psalm)

Awake my soul and with the sun (Ken)

Father of heaven whose love profound (relatively new, the only hymn of Edward Cooper still in common use)

Glory to thee, my God, this night (Ken)

God moves in a mysterious way (Olney Hymns – in this case Cowper)

Great God, what do I see or hear? (Thomas Cotterill, who also produced an initially controversial local hymn book in Sheffield until its 1820 edition gained the Archbishop’s sanction)

Hark the glad sound, the Saviour comes (Doddridge)

Hark the herald angels sing (Wesley)

How sweet the name of Jesus sounds (Olney Hymns – Newton’s own)

Jerusalem my happy home (the only hymn by Joseph Bromehead still in common use)

Jesus Christ is risen today (Wesley)

Lo! He comes with clouds descending (Wesley)

My God and is thy table spread (Doddridge)

O God of hosts, the mighty Lord (Seventeenth Century metrical psalm – Tate and Brady)

Rock of ages, cleft for me (the only hymn of Augustus Toplady still in common use)

Spirit of mercy, truth and love (from the Foundling Hospital Collection)

Sweet the moments, rich the blessing (James Allen, who is hardly sung today)

The day of wrath, that dreadful day (relatively new, Walter Scott’s translation of the Dies Irae)

Through all the changing scenes of life (Seventeenth Century metrical psalm – Tate and Brady)

When I survey the wondrous cross (Watts)

I also spotted two well known Watts hymns (Come let us join and There is land of pure delight) and two such Wesley hymns (Love divine and Rejoice the Lord is King) in the Lincoln book but not in the first Hymns Ancient and Modern.

I wonder how long before the 1830s hymn singing other than metrical psalms would have begun in the city’s parish churches.  And how the various incumbents and churchwardens were then brought to agree or share a particular locally printed selection.

I find that Bishop Kaye’s correspondence mentions the incumbent of Wainfleet from 1817 having tried to introduce a set of hymns despite Bishop Tomline (Bishop to 1820) having objected.  This is contemporary with the 1819/20 controversy in Sheffield mentioned above. 

But by 1834 it has the incumbent of Tetney thanking Kaye for sending Buckden hymn books to him.  And I find that the catalogue of the Cathedral Library lists both an 1840 edition of the Lincoln book I’d come across and what appears to be a Boston equivalent from the 1830s.

Most references to hymns in Bishop Kaye’s correspondence are from the 1840s and centre on the nuisance of Primitive Methodists (‘Ranters’) singing hymns ‘adapted to their own persuasion’ at burial services in churchyards and even, as a perceived provocation, at some Sunday church services.