The fact that during the early years of the nineteenth century Methodist congregations, meeting in halls and the open air, were attracting increasing numbers from parish churches was an important incentive to Anglican clergy to make hymn singing an integral part of their own services. A late eighteenth-century hymn-singing Evangelical movement within the Church of England was also influential and, as the century advanced, a widespread belief arose that the church’s worship needed to be renewed and enhanced by greater congregational participation. All these factors combined to open the doors to a degree of spontaneous change that transformed the experience of worship in England’s parish churches. The rise of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement later contributed a rich supply of ancient hymns drawn from medieval sources and brought alive by fine translations from the Latin.
The Methodists were prolific hymn writers and one of their number, Charles Wesley, who never left the ministry of the Church of England, held a high doctrine of the Eucharist. He combined the essential gifts of the hymn writer – deep religious insight, confirmed by personal experience and expressed through the gifts of the poet – to the level of genius and wrote no fewer than 4,000 hymns. These, together with those of Isaac Watts, another genius of Independent church allegiance, and many others, became immediately available to enterprising Anglican parsons. Initially, they were not welcome everywhere: the gentry tended to regard them as vulgar and some bishops declared hymns to be illegal inasmuch as no provision for them was made by the rubrics of the Prayer Book.
Nonetheless, once started, the use of hymns became unstoppable. By 1840 about 40 different hymn books, mainly local productions, were in use and one of these, consisting of 146 hymns, edited by a Sheffield vicar and, after a struggle, authorized by the Archbishop of York, ran to 29 editions, circulating among many parishes in the north of England.
Reginald Heber
Often described as ‘the father of the modern hymn book’, Heber was a child of the eighteenth century, born into a Yorkshire family of landed gentry, though his father was also a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Reginald had a brilliant career at the same college, winning a number of poetry prizes and election to a fellowship of All Souls’ College. After two years of travelling in Europe, he was ordained in 1804 and immediately appointed Rector of Hodnet, a family living in Shropshire, which had been kept vacant for two years until his return to England. He was also squire of the parish and his father-in-law, who was Dean of St Asaph, secured for him a prebend of that cathedral. His scholarship was recognized by appointment as Bampton Lecturer at Oxford, and his income further augmented by the preachership of Lincolns Inn, in London.
In 1822 he was offered the bishopric of Calcutta, which at first he declined, but later was persuaded to accept. For the next four years he was an exemplary missionary bishop. His diocese covered the whole of British India and he travelled extensively, preaching, confirming and generally encouraging the small, scattered expatriate communities. But in 1826, after conducting a Confirmation and visiting a school, he sought to cool down in a swimming pool and died from drowning.
In the following year, Heber’s widow managed at last to obtain permission from the Archbishop of Canterbury for the publication of a hymn book compiled by her husband during his years at Hodnet. Soon after his arrival in the parish he perceived that hymns might be useful for illustrating the Bible readings in the Sunday services and at the same time involve the congregation more closely in the worship. Until then the only collection of hymns known to him was Olney Hymns – a product of the Evangelical movement in 1779 – which included items by important poets such as John Newton, William Cowper and Augustus Toplady.
Heber, although a High Churchman, wrote about his experience of using hymns in this way in an evangelical magazine, the Christian Observer, and decided that hymns were also needed to illustrate the Christian year – possibly some appropriate to every Sunday. He therefore made a collection of 98 hymns, including 57 composed by himself and another 13 by his friend H. H. Milman, a distinguished church historian who eventually became Dean of St Paul’s and is best remembered for his Palm Sunday hymn ‘Ride on, ride on, in majesty’. The remainder included the work of some of the greatest English poets, but neither the Bishop of London nor the Archbishop of Canterbury was willing to authorize the book’s use and its editor never saw it in print. Of his own hymns, it is hard to imagine any hymn book lacking ‘Holy, holy, holy’ or ‘Brightest and best of the sons of the morning’ or ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’, though the use of this last hymn is now problematical.
A decisive factor in the overcoming of episcopal opposition was the work of a number of Oxford Movement scholars who demonstrated that hymns, far from being a recent Methodist invention, went back to some of the church’s earliest liturgies and played an important part in the worship and devotion of the medieval church.
John Mason Neale
Chief among these scholars and an adornment of the Victorian church was John Mason Neale, whose translations from Greek and Latin and own compositions contributed 72 items – one-tenth of the whole – to The English Hymnal and brought enrichment to Anglican worship everywhere.
He was born in 1818, his father, an evangelical clergyman, being also a brilliant mathematician and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. John, having lost his father when he was only five, went as a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, and became the best Classic of his year. Following ordination, he stayed on as chaplain and assistant tutor of Downing College and won many prizes for poetry. He also came under the influence of a High Church movement, parallel to the developing Oxford Movement, and in 1839, in company with two undergraduates, founded the Cambridge Camden Society (later renamed the Ecclesiological Society), to be concerned with Tractarian worship. In 1841 a periodical, The Ecclesiologist, began publication in order to demonstrate the implications of the new movement for church architecture. For better or (almost certainly) worse this had immense influence, leading among other things to the placing of choirs in chancels. The aim was to restore the ceremonial and vesture of medieval times, together with early Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony.
In 1842 Neale began work as a curate in Guildford (then in Winchester Diocese) but Bishop Charles Sumner, an evangelical, refused to license him because of his high church views, and it was left to the Bishop of Chichester to present him to the small living of Crawley in Sussex. Ill health, however, precluded his taking this up and during the next three years he divided his time between Penzance and Madeira. On his return to Sussex in 1846 he became Warden of Sackville College, East Grinstead – a charity home for 30 people. The buildings were badly dilapidated and he took the opportunity to rebuild the chapel, furnishing it according to Camden Society principle. The bishop denounced this as ‘frippery’ and ‘spiritual haberdashery’, but, since the chapel was outside his jurisdiction, he could do no more than inhibit Neale from ministering in the diocese. This inhibition remained in force for the next 16 years until Bishop Samuel Wilberforce persuaded his episcopal colleague to revoke it. Thereafter bishop and warden got on rather well.
In any case, Neale had many other interests to occupy his time. He founded a religious order for women, the Society of St Margaret, which began as a nursing order but quickly extended to include an orphanage, a girls’ boarding school and a home ‘for the reformation of fallen women’. Its work continues in a modified form today, with outposts in London, Sri Lanka and Boston, USA. With a wife and five children to support, his income of £30 p.a. needed considerable augmentation and from 1851–53 he employed his literary skill and encyclopaedic knowledge in the writing of three leading articles a week for the Morning Chronicle. He spoke 20 languages and an extraordinary number of books came from his pen on church history, liturgy, patristics, the Eastern Church, and children’s interests.
But his chief life’s work – he died when only 48 – was the recovery and translation of hymns from the past for which his scholarship, linguistic skill and poetic gift perfectly equipped him. A steady stream of work, including hymns of his own composition, became available – hymns chiefly medieval on the Joys and Glories of Paradise (1865), Hymns for Use during the Cattle Plague (1866), The Invalid’s