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III.

Veni Creator Spiritus.

MONG the few hymns of antiquity which

have not suffered by the ravages of time is

the celebrated Veni Creator Spiritus. It has been in constant use for almost ten centuries, and in the value of its service to the Church it is surpassed only by The Te Deum, and possibly the Doxology. It has been rendered into English a greater number of times than any other Latin hymn, excepting perhaps The Dies Irae. Fifty-four English translations and paraphrases are known to have been made, and yet "the noble hymn has not been stripped of all its dignity." The version in common use was made by John Cosin, Bishop of Durham, England, in 1627, and was introduced into the Book of Common Prayer in 1662, and is as follows:

Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,

And lighten with celestial fire;

Thou the anointing Spirit art,

Who dost Thy sevenfold gifts impart:
Thy blessed unction from above
Is comfort, life, and fire of love.

Enable with perpetual light

The dullness of our blinded sight:
Anoint and cheer our soiled face
With the abundance of Thy grace:

Keep far our foes, give peace at home;
Where Thou art Guide no ill can come.

Teach us to know the Father, Son,
And Thee, of Both, to be but One;
That through the ages all along

This may be our endless song,

Praise to Thy eternal merit,

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

John Dryden, the monarch of the literary world in the seventeenth century, made a paraphrase that begins,

Creator Spirit, by whose aid,

which was preferred by John Wesley and Augustus M. Toplady, and the former placed it in his hymnal as early as 1738. But the version that has gained the wider currency in the United States is that by Bishop Cosin. However, there are several noted translations of the hymn, and in one form or another, it is found in almost every prominent hymnal in Great Britain and America.

It is not strange that so much uncertainty gathers about the origin of some of the noblest of our ancient hymns. Their journey down the ages has been long, and beset with many perils. While empires were being overturned and governments were crumbling to pieces, the names of some of the sacred singers were lost in the wreck of transitory things, but their songs have withstood the storms of time, and are now safely lodged in the heart of the Church.

The world will never know who first sang the magnificent Te Deum, or the sweet Veni Sancte

Spiritus, or Jerusalem, my Happy Home; and Veni Creator Spiritus, which has so deeply attracted the hearts of men, has its genesis involved in mystery. Some believe that it is the work of St. Ambrose, and often it has been attributed to Gregory the Great, to whom England is indebted for her first lesson in Christianity.

There is a pretty little legend associated with this hymn which is worth re-telling. In 870, or thereabout, a monk named Balbulus Notker, lived in the monastery of St. Gall, Switzerland; and one night he became sleepless, and from his dormitory could hear the constant groaning of a water-wheel whose supply was running low, and this suggested to him. the idea of setting its melancholy moaning to music. Thereupon he composed the Sequence on the Holy Spirit, which he sent to Charlemagne, and the Emperor returned the compliment by presenting Notker with the words of Veni Creator Spiritus. Lord Selborne, who wrote the article on Hymnology for the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, seems to believe that there is an air of truth in this story on account of its dramatic character, but suggests that it was not Charles the Great to whom Notker sent the Sequence, but his grandson Charles the Fat, known among German Emperors as Charles III., and with whom the monk was on terms of friendship.

In 1896, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Henry C. Potter, Bishop of New York, delivered an important lecture under the auspices of the Church Club of that city, on The

Hymns of the Ordinal, in which he pays a fine tribute to Veni Creator Spiritus. While admitting that no more interesting page can be found in Christian history than that on which the story of this hymn is written, the Bishop expresses himself unable to settle in his own mind the question of authorship. There are two points, however, on which most writers think alike-first, that it is a great hymn; and second, that the earliest instance on record as to its use is A. D., 898.

For a thousand years Veni Creator Spiritus has been used in public worship, and on such inspiring occasions as the coronation of Kings and Queens, the consecration of Bishops, the ordination of priests, the convening of synods, and the opening of Conferences. The late Dr. Hemenway of the Garrett Biblical Institute, believed that no hymn has had a more honorable recognition in the service of both Protestant and Catholic divisions of the Church than Veni Creator Spiritus.

After the Reformation Veni Creator Spiritus was one of the first of the ancient hymns to be translated into English and German. It is the only metrical hymn of the many in use in the Church of England before the Reformation, which, sanctioned by the authorities of both Church and State, has found a place in the venerable Liturgy of that Church.

T

IV.

The Dies Irae.

WENTY-FIVE hundred and thirty years ago, Zephaniah, one of the Minor Proph

ets, uttered a prophetic description of the "Great Day of the Lord." It was an awful picture of the impending doom of Judah, a foretelling of the fall of Nineveh, and the destruction of Jerusalem. It is supposed that the fifteenth and sixteenth verses of the first chapter of that prophecy inspired the greatest judgment hymn of the ages-a hymn that has allured and eluded more translators than any other poetical composition in any language.

In the closing part of the twelfth century, possibly about 1185, a monk named Thomas was born in the town of Celano, now found in the province of Aquila, in Central Italy, and to him is ascribed the authorship of The Dies Irae, the most solemn and dramatic song of the Middle Ages. Thomas of Celano, as he is universally known, was a member of the Franciscans, an order founded by St. Francis of Assisi, whose biography he wrote at the request of Pope Gregory IX. Francis was a man of remarkable personality, and Protestants as well as Catholics speak of him as one of the most beautiful figures in the history of the Ancient Church. Thomas calls him the most perfect realization of the Christian