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 Another Random Document on
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Also this translation of the Breviary recast of the Urbs beata
Hierusalem of the seventh or eighth century:

COELESTIS URBS JERUSALEM.

O heavenly town, Jerusalem,
Thou blessed dawn of peace,
How lofty from the living rock
Thy starry walls increase,
Where thousand, thousand angels stand,
And praises never cease.

O bride, whose lot is aye serene,

The Father’s state is thine;
Thou art the ever-fairest queen
Adorned with grace divine;
United unto Christ, thy Head,
Thy heavenly form doth shine.

How softly gleam thy pearly gates

Which open wide to all,
Here virtue entered long ago,
And unto men doth call,
Who loved the Lord through mortal pain,
And fought and did not fall.

Thy beauty came by chisel stroke

And many a hammer-blow;
The workman’s hammer wrought the stone
Which buildeth thee below;
And joined with bonds of aptest skill
Thy splendid turrets glow.

Then honor unto God most high 327

As it was due of yore;
And thus the Father’s only Son
 And Spirit we adore,
To whom be glory, power, and praise
Through ages evermore.

To these Dr. A. R. Thompson permits us to add, as a specimen of the

later hymns of the Latin Church, his translation of

CUR RELINQUIS, DEUS, COELUM.

O God, why didst thou put aside
For this vile earth thy heaven above?
Didst thou expect there would betide
Thee here the ministry of love?
That earth had honor, Lord, for thee?
Honor and love! nay, verily,
Lying in wickedness, earth knows
Not how to love thee, but thy foes.

Bethlehem proved what love for thee

This present evil world hath, when
She shut against thee cruelly
The doors left wide for other men,
And forced thee to the hovel, where—
Wide open to the winter air—
The very beasts could scarcely live;
No other shelter would she give.

Come, Jesus, from that hovel cold,

Exposed to all the winds that blow,
Chilled by discomfort manifold,
From the poor couch all wet with snow.
My all a couch for thee I make,
My heart the shelter thou shall take.
I give it all, I give my best,
That were for thee a better rest.
 My heart to love thee, Lord, desires,
And, loving, proffers love’s warm kiss.
The kiss, to give which she aspires,
Honor and adoration is.
Take thou from me this honor true;
Take thou the love which is thy due;
For this, my loyal offering,
Out of my very heart I bring.

My heart, all burning with the fire 328

Of love to thee, would cherish thine;
But thou that love canst kindle higher,
And thou wilt rather cherish mine.
For thou art Love, and canst inflame
The hearts of them that love thy name
With thine own self, and not with wood;
Thou art the very Fire of God.

Come, then, O Fire of God, to me!

Come, Love, and never more depart!
Enter the place prepared for thee,
The shelter of my loving heart!
I’ll spread thee there a couch of rest,
And deem myself supremely blest,
If I may evermore abide
Loving, belovèd, at thy side.

While we have to treat rather of hymns than of hymn-writers in

dealing with the Roman Breviary, there is much of personal interest
attaching to the Breviary of Paris, its great rival in hymnological
interest. A slight revision of the hymns of this Breviary was effected
in 1527—of which the Urbs Jerusalem beata is a type—and only with
the idea of correcting corruptions of the text. But the Roman revision
of 1568-1631 affected the Gallican Church’s services very slightly. In
no part of the Roman Catholic world were the rights of the national
Church guarded so carefully as in France, until Napoleon bargained
them away by the Concordat of 1801. The French bishops and
monastic orders continued to retain their old service-books long after
uniformity had been established, under plea of unity, in other parts
of the Church; and they made such alterations in them as they
thought necessary to the edification of their people.

It was the Order of Cluny which first took steps toward the
substitution of new hymns for those whose use had been sanctioned
by long tradition. The general chapter of that branch of the great
Benedictine family in 1676-78 charged Paul Rabusson and Claude de
Vert with the preparation of a new Breviary. On Rabusson, who was
teaching theology in the monastery of St. Martin des Champs in
Paris, the labor chiefly fell. He applied to Claude Santeul, a pensioner
of the ecclesiastical seminary attached to the Abbey of St. Magloire,
asking him to prepare the new hymns. Claude Santeul 329
(Santolius Maglorianus) agreed to do so, and made some
progress in the work. He finished six hymns, which were inserted in
the new Breviary, and at his death (1684) he left two manuscript
volumes of unfinished hymns among his papers. But he found that
his being selected had excited the jealousy of his younger brother,
Jean Santeul, a canon of the monastery of St. Victor (Santolius
Victorinus), who already was recognized as the finest, but by no
means the most edifying of the Latin poets of the France of his time.

Claude gladly gave place to his brother—who was accepted by the

Cluny Fathers—in the hope that the work of writing hymns would
divert him from the pagan poetizing, which was regarded as
unbecoming to his cloth. Jean Santeul is the oddest figure in the
annals of Latin hymnology, which is saying a good deal. He is “a man
of whom it is hard to speak without falling into caricature,” Sainte-
Beuve says (Causeries de Lundi, XII., 20-56). He combined the
talent of a poet of nature’s making with the simplicity of a child and
the vanity and wit of a genuine Frenchman. He recalls La Fontaine
by many of his traits, and, under the name of “Theodas,” he has
furnished La Bruyère with the materials for one of the cleverest
portraits in the Caractères (1687). His mode of life was a scandal to
De Rance and other severe Churchmen, who were laboring for the
restoration of strict monastic discipline. His love of good living and
the charm of his society and his talk carried him off from his
monastery and his hours, sometimes for weeks together. His Latin
inscriptions, which adorned the fountains, bridges, and public
monuments of Paris, at once gave him recognition as the poet
laureate and pensioner of the grande monarque, and as a priest
whose poetry dealt more in the pagan deities than in any
distinctively Christian references. He was not an immoral man in any
gross sense. Even as a bon vivant, he does not seem to have
transgressed what were recognized as the bounds of sobriety, and
his poetry is as free as was his life from licentiousness. But he was
frivolous, gay, reckless, and as worldly as was consistent with his
being a grown-up child. Everybody, even severe and silent De Rance
at La Trappe, liked him, but everybody shook his head over the
inconsistency of his life with his monastic vocation, and none more
sorrowfully than his good brother Claude at St. Magloire.

Now at last there seemed to be the opportunity to reclaim 330

him by occupying his mind and his art with serious subjects,
and by bringing him into edifying associations with good men. That
he was not enough of a theologian to discharge the task
satisfactorily of himself, was rather an advantage from this point of
view. The eloquent and learned Jansenist, Nicolas le Tourneux,
undertook the work of coaching him. The partnership worked
reasonably well. Of course hymns produced by this kind of division
of labor, in which one took care of the sense and another of the
expression, have the defects of their method. But Le Tourneux was
as careful of the poet as of his verse. His severe eye detected the
play of Santeul’s vanity even in the work of writing hymns. “Reflect,
my dear brother,” he wrote, “that while in the visible and militant
Church one may sing the praises of God with an impure heart and
defiled lips, it will not be so in heaven. You have burnt incense in
your verse, but there was strange fire in the censer. Vanity furnishes
your motive where it ought to be charity.” He objects to Santeul’s
calling himself “the poet of Jesus Christ,” while he admits that vain
glory leads him to write hymns. “If you and I were all we ought to
be,” wrote the severe Jansenist, “we would quake with fear at
having dared, you to sing and I to preach of the holiness of God,
without a right sense of it. We shall be only too happy if He pardon
our sermons and our verses.” Perhaps the severity was needed and
did good.

So Le Tourneux suggested and all but wrote the prayer in which

Santeul dedicated his hymns to our Lord: “Receive what is Thine;
forgive what is mine. Thine is whatever I have uttered that is good
and holy. Mine that I have handled Thy good things unworthily, and
not from desire to please Thee, but from an undue pride of poetry,
of which I am ashamed. Thou hast given me songs to praise Thee.
Give me prayers, give me tears to wash away the stains of a life less
than Christian.”

His hymns must have circulated in manuscript before their

publication, for we find De Rance in 1683 praising those in
commemoration of St. Bernard, while noticing that the old hymns, if
less excellent as literature, had a more reverential spirit. In 1685, a
year in advance of the new Breviary, Santeul published them in the
[21]
first collection he made of them. Their merits made a much
deeper impression than their defects. Scholars and 331
Churchmen alike were struck by their rhetorical vigor, the
frequent boldness of their conception, the beautiful succession of
sentiments and images, the exquisite clearness of the sense, and not
by the factitious character of their enthusiasm, as Sainte-Beuve puts
it, or the frequent monotony in the treatment of cognate themes.
The Breviary, in fact, had ceased to be the voice of the Christian
congregation. The supersession of Latin by the national languages of
Western Europe had made it the prayer-book of a class educated to
relish only the classic forms of Latin verse, and to regard the
simplicity of the early hymn-writers as barbarous. Santeul wrote for
priests whose tastes had been formed on Horace and Virgil, and he
brought into these rigid forms as much of genuine Christian feeling
and doctrine as the age required. He was all the happier in these
respects, as Le Tourneux, who himself contributed to the new
Breviary, was of that Jansenist school in which religion, belittled by
the pettiness and the casuistry of the Jesuits, once more presented
itself in its grandeur and its severity.

The excellence of Santeul’s hymns at once created a demand for

their introduction in other churches and dioceses, and for his
services as a hymn-writer. Several of the best were introduced by
Archbishop Harlay into the later editions of his revised Paris Breviary,
which had appeared in 1680. So the bishops of many other French
dioceses—Rouen, Sens, Narbonne, Massillon of Clermont, and others
—adopted his hymns into their breviaries after his death. And as he
gallantly said, he had the pleasure while still living of hearing them
“sung by the angels at Port Royal.” Other orders begged him to
commemorate their founders and their especial saints; dioceses and
churches in other parts of France invoked his good offices. 332
Hence it is that of his two hundred and twenty-eight hymns
not one in five is occupied with the great festivals of the Church
year, but are specific or general hymns to the honor of the saints,
martyrs, and doctors of the Church of France especially.

The rush of popularity—not unaccompanied by solid rewards, for the

good fathers of the Cluny Order gave him a pension—seems to have
turned Santeul’s not very well-balanced head. Le Tourneux’s
admonitions were forgotten. He ran from church to church to hear
his hymns sung, and scandalized congregations by his
demonstrations of delight or disgust as the music was appropriate or
otherwise; he declaimed them in all sorts of places, suitable and
unsuitable, to extort the admiration he loved so dearly. He did not
forget to tell that even the severe De Rance had written from La
Trappe to thank him for his hymn on St. Bernard, but that for his
own part he valued the general hymn on the Doctors of the Church
above any other. Naturally he had little good to say of the hymns his
were to displace. If anything could make a pagan of him, it would be
the bad grammar of those old monkish poets, who sacrificed sense
and grammar alike to their stupid rhymes. And so he would run on
by the hour to anybody who would listen, with an egotism whose
very childishness and frankness made it inoffensive.

Of course he claimed the distinction of being the best Latin poet in

France. French poetry he despised, as being written in a language
incapable of the terse elegance of Latin. But in Latin verse he would
hear of no rival. Du Périer, who had quite as much vanity, with only a
fraction of his genius, challenged his pretensions. The two poets
wrote verses on the same theme, and then set out to find an arbiter.
The first friend to whom they appealed was Ménage, who evaded
the responsibility by declaring them equally excellent. The next they
met was Racine. He first got possession of the stakes and deposited
them in the poor’s box at the door of a church near by, and then
gave the poets a round scolding for their absurd rivalry!

The hymns of Santeul are best known to English readers through

Hymns Ancient and Modern, which contain some very fine versions,
original and selected. Not included there is that which Sainte Beuve
pronounces his finest hymn, and for whose retention in the 333
Breviary he pleads against the crusaders, who in the name of
antiquity insist on replacing Santeul and Coffin by Strada and
Galucci. Out of respect for the greatest of modern critics, we reprint
it, with a translation from the pen of Dr. A. R. Thompson. It
commemorates the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple.

Stupete gentes, fit Deus hostia:

Se sponte legi Legifer obligat:
Orbis Redemptor nunc redemptus:
Seque piat sine labe mater.

De more matrum, Virgo puerpera

Templo statutos abstinuit dies.
Intrare sanctam quid pavebas,
Facta Dei prius ipsa templum?
Ara sub una se vovit hostia
Triplex: honorem virgineum immolat
Virgo sacerdos, parva mollis
Membra puer, seniorque vitam.

Eheu! quot enses transadigent tuum

Pectus! quot altis nata doloribus,
O Virgo! Quem gestas, cruentam
Imbuet hic sacer Agnus aram.

Christus futuro, corpus adhuc tener,

Praeludit insons victima funeri:
Crescet; profuso vir cruore,
Omne scelus moriens piabit.

Sit summa Patri, summaque Filio,

Sanctoque compar gloria Flamini:
Sanctae litemus Trinitati
Perpetuo pia corda cultu.

Wonder, ye nations! divine is the sacrifice.

Lo, his own law the Lawgiver obeys!
Now the Redeemer redeemed is, and purifies
Herself the mother pure. Look with amaze!

All the days set by the law for a mother,

She from the temple of God hath delayed.
Why should she stay without, as might another,
She who the temple of God hath been made?

At the one altar threefold is the sacrifice. 334

Mother, who offers her pure virgin heart;
Babe, his fair body that in her fond arms lies;
Aged saint, life, ready now to depart.

Oh but what sword through her heart shall be going!

Oh to what sorrow is born her fair child!
 Over what altar his blood will be flowing!
He whom she bears, the Lamb holy and mild.

Christ, in his infantile body so tender,

Spotless in purity, here hath foreshown,
Sign of the sacrifice he shall yet render,
Dying the sin of the world to atone.

Now to the Father in glory supernal,

Now to the Son, and the Spirit above,
Now to the Triune, all holy, eternal,
Worship be ever in faith and in love!

As a poet Santeul fell from grace in 1689, when he fell back on his
pagan divinities in a poem addressed to the keeper of the royal
gardens. Bossuet made a great ado over it, but Fénelon and others
judged him more gently. Next year he goes to see La Trappe, and
writes a fine poem on Holy Solitude (Sancta Solitudo), which
extorted fresh praise from De Rance, and afterward from Sainte-
Beuve. But four years later he got into the worst scrape of his life by
a flattering epitaph on the great Arnauld, who died in 1694. Santeul
always had been more or less associated with the Jansenist party, a
fact which was not forgotten when his hymns were expelled from
the churches of France in our own century. There is preserved an
account of a visit he paid to Port Royal, in which he chattered to the
nuns with equal freedom of his own hymns and of their virtues. But
he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. The Jesuits had
the king’s ear, and he was a pensioner of the king’s bounty. They
assailed him for his eulogy of the arch-Jansenist, and threatened him
with the disfavor of Louis XIV.; and he hastened to make amends in
a poetical epistle, of which he made two copies. By the adroit
change of the tense of a single word he made the copy for the
Jesuits retract his praises of his great friend, while that for the
general public did nothing of the sort. As a consequence he came off
with no credit on either side. Both Jesuits and Jansenists 335
resented his duplicity, and a fine shower of squibs and
pamphlets fell on him from both the hostile forces, until he was
forced to cry for quarter, and Bourdaloue made his peace.

He died in 1697 in Burgundy, whither he had accompanied the

younger Condé to the meeting of the Estates. St. Simon has told a
very unpleasant story of the cause of his death. He ascribes it to
Condé’s having made him drink a bowl of wine into which he had
emptied his snuff-box, “just to see what would come of it.” But the
prince of scandalmongers has been disproven on this point. Santeul’s
death was due to no such cause, but to an inflammation of the
bowels and to the malpractice of his doctors, who gave him emetics
under the false impression that he was suffering from a surfeit. He
made a good end, dying with resignation, and begging pardon for
the scandal his life had caused.

His hymns were not without their critics in his own age. Jean
Baptiste Thiers, a parish priest of great learning and bad temper,
assailed the Breviary of Cluny (in his Commentarii de novo Breviario
Cluniacensi, Brussels, 1702), and did not spare Santeul’s hymns,
which he declared to be much inferior to those which had come
down from the earlier days of the Church. He declared that Santeul
had a greater abundance of words than of sense, that he had almost
no powers of thought, and that some of his images, such as that in
which he wreathes a garland of stones for the martyr Stephen, were
simply ridiculous. He was answered not by Rabusson, but by his
associate, Claude de Vert, after what fashion I do not know.

It was in 1736 that the Breviary of the Diocese of Paris was

published in its third and final revision by a commission of three
ecclesiastics: François-Antoine Vigier, François-Philippe Mesengui,
and Charles Coffin. It is a significant fact that the second belonged
to that Jansenist party in the Church which the relentless efforts of
the Pope, the hierarchy, and the kings of France had not been able
to exterminate. Archbishop de Vintimille was as eager to accomplish
that as his predecessors had been, and he was ably seconded by
that pious and orthodox prince, Louis XV. But this revision, like that
of 1670-80, was a concession to the historical criticism which the
Jansenists had brought to bear upon the Church books both 336
as to the legends of the saints and the extravagances of the
growing devotion to the Mother of our Lord. Mesengui had been
dismissed from the post Coffin had given him in the University of
Paris for his opposition to the bull Unigenitus, which condemned
Quesnel’s Jansenist Reflections on the New Testament. Coffin’s
sympathies lay in the same direction.

Charles Coffin is the man of the three who chiefly concerns us here.
Born at Buzancy, hard by Rheims, in 1676, he very early
distinguished himself as a Latin poet and an educator. He graduated
at Paris in 1701, and became a teacher in the College of Dormans-
Beauvais, and then its principal in 1713. Five years later he was
chosen to succeed Rollin as Rector of the University of Paris. He at
once showed his force of character by revolutionizing the relation of
the university to the public through abolishing the fees exacted of
the students. To replace them he extended and developed the
system of posts and messages, which the university had established
in the thirteenth century and which coexisted with the post-office
system of the government, of which it was the forerunner. He
devoted its revenues to the support of the colleges. He must have
been a character of great administrative capacity, as his plans had
entire success, and probably did much to foster the development of
the post-office system of France. After remaining rector for three
years, he went back to his place at the head of the Dormans-
Beauvais College, and remained there till his death.

It was in 1727 that Charles Coffin published his first volume of Latin
poetry. The most notable piece in the collection was a fine ode in
praise of Champagne. So much were the people of the Champagne
country pleased with it, that they sent him a hamper of every
vintage as long as he lived, which was twenty-two years. He also
had a hand in carrying Cardinal de Polignac’s great poem, Anti-
Lucretius, to the state of completeness in which it was given to the
public in 1745, three years after its author’s death. He undertook the
work of revising the old hymns and preparing new with great
reluctance, yielding only to the entreaties of the archbishop.

It was in 1736 that the Breviary Commission finished their labors

and the archbishop gave to the diocese the new Breviary, which was
adopted by more than fifty French dioceses. Its general character
does not concern us here. It is with its hymns alone we have 337
to do. About seventy of the primitive and mediaeval hymns
still held their place in the Breviary of 1680, nearly half of them the
work of Ambrose and his school. The revisers spared very few of
these. Only twenty-one hymns of the earlier period were left, while
eighty-five of Jean Santeul’s, nearly a hundred by Coffin himself—
including some recasts of old hymns—and ninety-seven by other
authors, chiefly Frenchmen of later date, were inserted. There were
eleven by Guillaume de la Brunetière, a friend of Bossuet’s; six each
by Claude Santeul, Nicolas le Tourneux, and Sebastian Besnault, a
priest of Sens; five by Isaac Habert, Bishop of Vabres; four by the
Jesuit Jean Commire; two each by the Jesuit Francis Guyet and
Simon Gourdan of the Abbey of St. Victor; one each by Marc Antoine
Muretus, Denis Petau, and Guillaume du Plessis de Geste; one (or
three) by M. Combault, a young friend of Charles Coffin’s. This was
modernism with a vengeance! New hymns were nearly thirteen to
one in proportion to those from the great storehouse of the ages
before the Reformation. It is not wonderful that so extreme a policy
called forth a reaction as soon as the Romanticist movement, with its
juster appreciation of the Middle Ages, had reached France. But by
the end of the eighteenth century the old Latin hymns were
banished practically from France.

As compared with Jean Santeul, Charles Coffin displays much less

poetic audacity than his predecessor. You do not feel that poetry
filled the same place in his intellectual existence, or that he was
under the same necessity to write it. He has less genius, but a great
talent for verse. And—what the critics of that age valued the most—
he was more correct in his handling of the vocabulary and the metre
of Latin versification. Santeul found classic Latin, much as he
admired it, something of a fetter to the free movement of his genius.
It was a dead language he was trying to put intense life into—an old
bottle for his new wine—and at times the bottle burst. Just because
Charles Coffin’s wine is not so new, his inspiration not so fresh, the
bottle holds out better. And then he had the greater advantage of a
closer familiarity with the ideas he wished to embody in his hymns,
and with their sources in the Scriptures, and a more practical
capacity for the application of his powers to the object in hand. His
hymns are always in place; they are hymns of the Breviary, not
brilliant poems on Breviary subjects by a poet writing for 338
glory. I do not say that Charles Coffin was the better man;
God only knows; and I must confess to a liking for “the gay canon of
St. Victor” which the rector of the university does not inspire in me.
There is a Burns-like humanity in him and his harmless vanities
which wins our love still, as it did that of his contemporaries. But
Charles Coffin had a certain suitableness to his work which Jean
Santeul lacked. He was an eminently dignified, respectable, and
useful character, who impressed himself upon a whole generation of
young Frenchmen, many of whom rose to eminence at the bar, in
the public service, and even in the army. They all looked back to him
with great respect. I wonder if they loved him as Mark Hopkins and
George Allen are loved by those who studied under them. And in
Charles Coffin’s hymns you meet the same admirable traits as in his
public work. He is a man of enlightenment, dignity, devoutness, and
eminent usefulness, without a touch of Rabelaisian abandon to
remind you of Béranger’s saying: “All we Français are children of the
great François.” Of that he reminds you only in his sparkling,
effervescent ode to Champagne, in reply to Bénigne Grenan’s
overpraise of Burgundy. It was to be expected that when the
advocates of liturgical uniformity made their attack upon the Paris
Breviary, beginning with Gueranger’s Institutions Liturgiques (1840-
42), it was Santeul whom they especially attacked, although not he
but Coffin was responsible for its hymnology.
Charles Coffin’s hymns have a high level of excellence, which makes
it difficult to anthologize among them. Certainly not the worst are
the four Advent hymns (Instantis adventum Dei; Jordanis oras
praevia; Statuta decreto Dei; and In noctis umbra desides); that for
Christmas (Jam desinant suspiria) and the Vesper hymn (O luce qui
mortalibus); the Passion hymn (Opprobriis Jesu satur); the fine
series of seven hymns for the nocturn services throughout the week,
based on the seven days of Creation; and the hymn for Epiphany
(Quae stella sole pulchrior). These and most of his acknowledged
hymns are known to us in the translations of Williams, Chandler, and
Mant, and several of these are in Hymns Ancient and Modern.

As an editor he altered and even tinkered, as well as adapted and

wrote hymns. Even Jean Santeul did not escape his hand. 339
One of the hymns ascribed to him in the Paris Breviary is a
cento from no less than twelve of his own hymns. From the wrath he
showed when such changes were made in his lifetime, we may infer
that he would have liked this as little as did John Wesley. And the
older hymns were handled in the same way. A good example of
Charles Coffin’s method of recasting old hymns is furnished by his
version of the Ad coenam Agni providi, which already has been given
in its original shape and in that of the Roman Breviary. With these
the reader may compare Coffin’s revision, which will be seen to vary
very widely from the old text of the ninth century:

Forti tegente brachio,

Evasimus Rubrum mare,
Tandem durum perfidi
Jugum tyranni fregimus.

Nunc ergo laetas vindici

Grates rependamus Deo;
Agnique mensam candidis
Cingamus ornati stolis.

Hujus sacrato corpore,

 Amoris igne fervidi,
Vescamur atque sanguine:
Vescendo, vivimus Deo.

Jam Pascha nostrum Christus est,

Hic agnus, haec est victima
Cruore cujus illitos
Transmittit ultor angelus.

O digna coelo victima,

Mors ipsa per quam vincitur,
Per quam refractis inferi
Praedam relaxant postibus.

Christi sepulchri faucibus

Emersus ad lucem redit;
Hostem retrudit tartaro,
Coelique pandit intima.

Da Christe, nos tecum mori

Tecum simul da surgere:
Terrena da contemnere;
Amare da coelestia.

It will be observed that while the ideas, and even to some 340
extent the phraseology of the old hymn are retained in the
first six verses, their order is so changed as to suggest that we have
an original hymn before us, if we do not look closely. But the last
verse is altogether different. The old poet prayed that the paschal
joy might be made unending through the deliverance of the
regenerate from the death eternal. The modern prays that we may
share mystically in the death and resurrection of Christ, and learn
thereby to set our affections on things above. Similar are his recasts
of the Salvete flores Martyrum of Prudentius, and the Ambrosian
Jam lucis orto sidere.
Mr. Duffield has left only one completed version of a hymn from the
Paris Breviary, and that one whose authorship I am unable to
determine. It attracted him as one of the surprisingly few hymns in
which the comparison of the Christian life to a warfare, so frequently
used by our Lord and the Apostle Paul, is employed as a leading
idea. His interest in such hymns no doubt was first awakened by his
father’s admirable and popular one:

“Stand up, stand up for Jesus,”

suggested by the dying words of Dudley Tyng. We give both the

Latin and his English version:

Pugnate, Christi milites,

Fortes fide resistite:
Immensa promisit Deus
Pio labori praemia.

Non ille fluxas ac leves

Palmas dabit vincentibus;
Sed lucis aeternae decus,
Et pura semper gaudia.

Mentes beatas excipit

Formosa coelitum domus:
Hic turba, coelis altior,
Subjecta calcat sidera.

Caduca vobis praemia

Offert levis mundi favor:
Vultus ad astra tollite;
Hic ipse fit merces Deus.

Qui nos coronat, laus Patri,

Laus qui redemit, Filio;
Alma juvans nos gratia,
Sit par tibi laus, Spiritus.
 Fight on, ye Christian soldiers,
And bravely keep the faith,
For great reward shall follow,
As God’s own promise saith.

Not palms that wave and flutter

Shall be the victor’s crown,
But grace of light eternal,
And joy of pure renown.

That blessed heavenly mansion

Shall take each happy soul;
Their throng, high raised in glory,
Shall tread the starry pole.

Earth’s honor is but failing,

Her gifts are light as air;
Lift up your eyes to heaven,
For God’s reward is there.

Praise God, who crowns the battle,

And Christ, who comes to save,
And praise the Holy Spirit,
Whose grace our spirits crave.

By kindness of Dr. A. R. Thompson we add two translations 341

from Charles Coffin’s hymns:

QUA STELLA SOLE PULCHRIOR.

What star is this whose glorious light
Outshines the morn,
The herald of the King new-born!
Its radiance bright,
A heavenly sign,
Streams o’er the cradle of the Babe divine.

Faith, standing with the prophets old,

Sees down the skies
The promised Star from Jacob rise.
The sign foretold
She knows full well,
And straightway seeks the wondrous spectacle.

The lustrous star gives warning fair

To all the earth,
But chiefly men of Eastern birth,
With pious care,
The warning heed,
And seeking Christ upon their journey speed.

Their eager love knows no delay;

Danger nor toil
Their purpose resolute can foil.
They haste away
From home and kind,
And country, at God’s call, the Christ to find.

O Christ our Lord, thy star of grace

Leads us to thee!
Help these dull hearts of ours to be
First at the place,
Intent to prove
To thee, O Lord, our faith and hope and love.

LABENTE JAM SOLIS.

Now with the declining sun,
Day to night is passing on.
So doth mortal life descend
Swiftly to its destined end.
 From the cross, thine arms spread wide 342
Fold the world, O Crucified!
Help us love the cross. In thy
Dear embrace help us to die!

Glory to the Eternal One,

Glory to the only Son,
Glory to the Spirit be,
Now and through eternity.

Of the other writers of the Breviary only a few need detain us. Most
of them are poets of the conventional sort, whose verse evidences
the care taken with their education rather than their possession of
any native genius, although Jean Commire (1625-1702) was of wide
reputation in his day. Even of good Claude Santeul the best that can
be said is that several of his hymns have passed for the composition
of his brother, and that the two Trinity hymns (Ter sancte, ter potens
Deus and O luce quae tua lates) and the three on Lazarus (Redditum
luce, Domino vocante, Panditur saxo tumulus remoto, and Intrante
Christo Bethanicam domum) deserve the honor. They make us regret
the loss of these two manuscript volumes. An unfinished translation
of one of these, left by Mr. Duffield, has been completed for us by
Dr. A. R. Thompson. The asterisk marks the transition from the one
translator to the other—

O LUCE QUAE TUA LATES.

O hidden by the very light,
O ever-blessed Trinity,
Thee we confess, and thee believe,
With pious heart we long for thee!

O Holy Father of the saints,

O God of very God, the Son,
O Bond of Love, the Holy Ghost,
Who joinest all the Three in One!
 That God the Father might behold
Himself, *coeval was the Son;
Also the Love that binds them both;
So, God of God, the perfect One.

Complete the Father in the Son,

The Son, the Father in complete,
And the full Spirit in them both;
The Father, Son, and Paraclete.

As is the Son, the Spirit is. 343

Each as the Father, verily.
The Three, One all transcendent Truth,
One all transcendent Love, the Three.

Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost

Eternally, let all adore;
Who liveth and who reigneth, God,
Ages on ages, evermore!

Next we have Nicolas le Tourneux (1640-1686), the severe

Jansenist, whose preaching drew such crowds in Paris that the King
asked the reason. “Sire,” replied Boileau, “your Majesty knows how
people run after novelty; this is a preacher who preaches the
Gospel. When he mounts the pulpit, he frightens you by his ugliness,
so that you wish he would leave it; and when he begins to speak,
you are afraid that he may.” It was his Année Chrétienne which
suggested the Christian Year to John Keble. We have seen how he
coached Jean Santeul both as to the matter of his hymns and the
right spirit for a Christian poet. But the great preacher’s own hymns
are sermoni propriores, “properer for a sermon,” to borrow Lamb’s
mistranslation. Verse was a fetter to him, not a wing. His best are
the Ascension hymn, Adeste, Coelitum chori, and that on the Baptist,
Jussu tyranni pro fide. The former we give in the excellent
translation of Rev. A. R. Thompson, D.D.:
 ADESTE COELITUM CHORI.
Hither come, ye choirs immortal,
Singing joyful canticles!
Christ hath passed the grave’s dark portal,
With the dead no more he dwells.

All in vain doth malice station

Watchful guards the tomb before,
All in vain the faithless nation
Sets the seal upon the door.

Fruitless terror, from this prison

None have stolen him away,
But by his own strength arisen,
Victor, ends he death’s dread fray.

Prisoned, and the seal unbroken, 344

He can leave at will the tomb,
As at first—behold the token—
He could leave the Virgin’s womb.

When he on the tree hung dying,

Raving men, who round him stood,
“Come down from the cross,” were crying,
“Then we own thee Son of God.”

But, his Father’s will obeying

Even unto death, he dies;
Priest and Victim, ’tis the slaying
Of the world’s great Sacrifice.

Nay, the cross was not forsaken;

Dead, yet greater thing did he,
By himself, his life retaken
Proved him Son of God to be.
 With thee dying, with thee rising,
Grant, O Christ, that we may be,
Earthly vanities despising,
Choosing heaven all lovingly!

Praise be to the Father given,

To the Son, our Leader. He
Calleth us with him to heaven;
Spirit, equal praise to thee!

A man of very different powers is the Abbé Sebastian Besnault, of

whom nothing is told us except that he was chaplain of the parish of
St. Maurice in Sens, and died in 1726. The six hymns ascribed to him
in the Paris Breviary are among the finest in that collection. Three
are hymns on the Circumcision (Debilis cessent elementa legis; Felix
dies, quam proprio; and Noxium Christus simul introivit); one is an
Ascension hymn (Promissa, tellus, concipe gaudium), and two are
Dedication hymns (Ecce sedes hic Tonantis and Urbs beata, vera
pacis), the latter being a recast of the Urbs beata Hierusalem. Quite
justly does A. Gazier (in his thesis De Santolii Victorini Sacris Hymnis,
Paris, 1875) say that if Besnault equalled Jean Santeul in the volume
of his hymns, he would not rank below him as a sacred poet, since
he quite equals him in his Latinity and is his superior as a spiritual
writer. We give Dr. A. R. Thompson’s version of his recast of 345
the Urbs beata Hierusalem:

URBS BEATA, VERA PACIS.

Blessed city, vision true
Of sweet peace, Jerusalem,
How majestic to the view
Rise thy lofty walls, in them
Living stones in beauty stand,
Polished, set, by God’s own hand.

Every several gate of thine

 Of one pearl effulgent is,
Golden fair thy wall doth shine,
Blended lustrously with this,
And thy wall doth rest alone
Upon Christ the Corner-stone.

Thy sun is the martyred Lamb,

God thy temple. Angels vie
With the saints, a joyful psalm
Ever lifting up on high,
And the Holiest worshipping,
Holy, Holy, Holy sing.

Evermore stand open wide,

Heavenly city, all thy gates.
But, who would in thee abide,
Who thy walls to enter waits,
Must, that meed of life to win,
Agonize to conquer sin.

To the Father, to the Son,

Endless adoration be!
Spirit, binding both in One,
Endless worship unto thee!
Hallowed by thy chrism divine,
We become thy living shrine.

Along with Coffin should be named one of his friends, a young

advocate named Combault, who possessed something of the spirit
and energy of Jean Santeul. How far he contributed to the Breviary
of 1736 I am unable to say, but a well-founded tradition designates
him as the author of a splendid rhetorical hymn in commemoration
of the Apostles Peter and Paul (Tandem laborum gloriosi 346
Principes), which has been much admired. Combault died in
1785.
The whole impression which this school of hymn-writers makes upon
us is like that of the Greco-French architecture of our own age. Both
reflect the critical and useful, but somewhat exclusive spirit of the
Renaissance. Both are capable of fine effects, great structural
beauty, and a certain grandeur not of the highest order. But a Greco-
French church will not bear comparison with Notre Dame; and the
hymns of Santeul and Coffin will hardly better endure a comparison
with the Christian singers who wrote when Notre Dame was new.

347
 CHAPTER XXIX.
THE UNKNOWN AND THE LESS KNOWN HYMN-WRITERS.
[Fourth to Tenth Century.]

The known is but a fragment broken from the unknown. This is

eminently true as regards the authorship of the Latin hymns. When
we have dealt as tenderly as the historical conscience will permit
with the traditions which assign hymns to this and that author, we
still find ourselves unable to affix any name to the great majority.
And while it is true that the most part of the very great hymns are
not left in this plight of anonymity, it is true that no small number of
the best are on the record like Melchizedek—“without father or
mother,” and many of them also “without beginning of years,” for we
can determine only approximately the century of their origin. Nor is
this at all surprising. Fame was neither the object nor the
expectation of the writers of the Latin hymns of the early and Middle
Ages. Their utmost expectation, probably, was to be valued a little
by their brethren in their own and their sister monasteries as the
author of a fine sequence or an appropriate hymn for a yearly
festival. It was enough for that purpose that the report of their
authorship passed from mouth to mouth in the choir, without any
record made of it. The love of glory as a literary motive, came in, as
Mr. Symonds reminds us, with the Renaissance, which borrowed it
from the old pagans. Many a devout singer of the centuries before
that practised the wisdom of à Kempis’s saying, Ama nesciri, “Love
to be unknown.” They wrote not for gain in renown, but for use in
the edification of their brethren and of the Church. And to live for
use rather than gain is to live Christianly, for, as Swedenborg says,
“The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom of uses.”
This and the next chapter we shall give partly to some of these
orphaned hymns, touching only on the greatest. And as we come
down the centuries we shall speak also of the less notable hymn-
writers, some of them not less notable as men or as 348
Churchmen, but such as have made less of a mark in
hymnology.

At the outset we are met by two of the greatest of the sacred songs
of the Church, which are none the less hymns although classed
technically as canticles. Who wrote the Gloria in Excelsis and the Te
Deum laudamus? As everybody knows, the opening words of the
former are the song of the angels who brought the good news to the
shepherds—words which authenticate their heavenly origin by their
simplicity, beauty, and force—“a master-song,” as Luther says,
“which neither grew nor was made on earth, but came down from
heaven.” But the much longer supplement, which evidently reflects
the situation of the Church in the days of the Arian controversy,
must either have originated in the fourth century and in the East, or
must have been altered to adapt it to that time. The original still
exists in Greek, but in three forms, which differ somewhat; and the
Latin version is defective in that it follows a later form than that
which is given in the so-called Apostolical Constitutions; and, of
course, the English follows the Latin, except in the part taken from
the Gospel, where “good will to men” takes the place of “to men of
good will” (hominibus bonae voluntatis), the latter being the reading
adopted by the English translators of 1611, but rejected by the
[22]
revisers of 1883.

Who made the Latin version? An untrustworthy tradition ascribes it

to Telesphorus, who was Bishop of Rome in 128-38. It is possible
that he prescribed the chanting of the Scripture words in the Church
service; but the whole hymn is of later date in Latin. There is much
more likelihood that it was, according to a tradition recorded by
Alcuin in the ninth century, the work of Hilary of Poitiers, the first
Latin hymn-writer.
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