The spate of remarks in the press, and elsewhere, about the dark evenings into
which we have just fallen through our penchant for Greenwich Mean Time, perhaps
does reflect a conservative streak in the British temperament rather than any
consideration that lighter winter evenings could give us more time for
recreation or whatever, as has been suggested. To this writer, Charles Wesley's
hymn,
Christ whose glory fills the skies,
which has the lines:
Dark and cheerless is the morn,
Unaccompanied by Thee.
suggests another mode of sensitivity which undoubtedly in the darkness
(without street lighting) made the 18th century winter morning even more of a
hazard for the farm labourers or the factory worker in the new cities stumbling
to work in the (very) early morning.
It was the Reformation that sparked off hymn singing for the laity beginning
with metrical psalms quite early on in the 16th century. Choirs had previously
held the 'stage' with Gregorian plainsong wherever there was a church that had
the voices and the means. But Erasmus, in the introduction to his new Greek
Testament, wrote that he would that the words of scripture should be
translated,
for the ploughboy to sing them to himself as he follows the plow, the weaver to
hum them to the tune of his shuttle, the traveler to beguile with them the
dullness of his journey.
Despite the great changes in the vernacular worship of the early reformation
there would still have been quite a 'clerical' feel to the services, as has
been said, 'new presbyter is old priest writ large.' But then, in this
country, it was John Wesley's tremendously 'successful' ministry which sparked
off the hugely attractive hymns of Charles in which the New Testament was
mirrored in accessible verse. We haven't looked back since!
Today it is the tunes, some of them really quite splendid, which attract the
worshipper. Organists and choirs love them! But of course it is the words that
were intended to be more important and when you look at some of them today it
is plain that they are not just out of date, but quite misleading for an
understanding of Christian faith and life. Coming from a Cistercian, monastic
worship, where there was one hymn per Office, it is quite fascinating to
experience again both the attraction of the melodies and the problems of the
words! But let the last word be with Charles Wesley:
Fill me, radiancy divine,
Scatter all my unbelief;
More and more thyself display,
Shining to the perfect day.