Preface by the Rev. John Edgar, D.D., LL.D.
James Dodson
I HEARTILY approve of the re-publication of the American volume entitled “THE TRUE PSALMODY.” The eminent names associated with its publication in the United States are a sufficient guarantee for its Scriptural character and genuine worth. It contains an invaluable amount of sound criticism, unanswerable argument, and historic research. In a spirit truly Christian, and with resistless force of truth, it discusses and settles “THE CHURCH’S ONLY MANUAL OF PRAISE.”
It is the right book at the right time. It will greatly strengthen and comfort pious spirits, who have been vexed by the obtrusive confidence and flippant assertion of “them that are given to change.” They will be built up and established in their most holy faith, “abounding therein with thanksgiving,” by a complete vindication of the perfect book of inspired psalms, from calumnies heaped on it by hymn-singers, under pretext of pouring contempt on the Scottish version, prepared by the Westminster Assembly, and, after earnest examination and repeated revision, appointed to be used in the public and family worship of the Church of Scotland.
Trashy rhymes, called hymns (though often not even rhyme), have long been a sore infliction, and have too
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long, alas! and too largely, usurped the place of inspired psalms. It is full time that, in all public worship, God’s own book of sacred song should occupy the place to which it was divinely appointed, and for which it alone is qualified. It is full of Christ, full of heavenly gospel truth, and of sublime expressions of adoring praise, worthy of the only object of all religious praise to dictate and to receive.
Christian experience and taste have been degraded by the frivolous, empty, puny things—puny in expression, and barren in thought—with which, under the name of hymns, different sections of the church have been enfeebled and deluged. The Chairman of the committee on psalmody, in the most influential church of the New World, honestly confessed that, after having read six or seven times their revised book of hymns, he thought it “the meanest book he had ever seen.”
It is sad to think how, under a profession of enlarging the sphere of sacred song, it has, by the intrusion of human writings, been wretchedly curtailed; and that, with a countless gathering of compositions from Romish, Unitarian, and similar sources—whether from the pen of Watts, who wished to see “David converted into a Christian,” or Logan, or Romish Pope, or Moore, or Miss Martineau, the issue has extensively been the exclusion of praise entirely from the worship of God, except as conducted by an organ and hired choir.
The Scottish version of the psalms is not perfect, nor is the English translation of the Bible; but both are so near perfection, and so interwoven with Christian faith and feeling, that it is a question of the gravest
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character whether either of them should be changed. Independent of inspiration and the highest sanctions, and of very many tender, holy, and sublime associations, the Book of Psalms, in the Scottish version, is incomparably superior to any book of sacred song that the world ever saw. To my own heart it is very dear; to my own ear it is poetic, spiritual, and sublime; and in my own mind, it is associated with the sunniest memories of the sacred past, recalling testimonies to its excellence from those who sing now before the throne, and triumphant quotations from its heavenly pages, as I drew the last curtain round the bed of death.
JOHN EDGAR, D.D.