Old
Testament is informed with the life and transfigured in the language of
the New, must have been like a glow of sunlight breaking in upon a gray
and cloudy day. Few pages of biography can be found more vividly
illustrative of the times and the men than the page in which Samuel
Hopkins recites the story of the sufferings of his own somber and
ponderous mind under the rebuke of his college friend David Brainerd. He
walked his solitary room in tears, and (he says) "took up Watts's
version of the Psalms, and opened it at the Fifty-first Psalm, and read
the first, second, and third parts in long meter with strong affections,
and made it all my own language, and thought it was the language of my
heart to God." There was more than the experience of a great and simple
soul, there was the germ of a future system of theology, in the
penitential confession which the young student "made his own language,"
and in the exquisite lines which, under the figure of a frightened bird,
became the utterance of his first tremulous and faltering faith:

Lord, should thy judgment grow severe,
I am condemned, but thou art clear.

Should sudden vengeance seize my breath,
I must pronounce thee just in death;
And if my soul were sent to hell,
Thy righteous law approves it well.

Yet save a trembling sinner, Lord,
Whose hope, still hovering round thy word,
Would light on some sweet promise there,
Some sure support against despair.

The introduction of the new psalmody was not accomplished all at once,
nor without a struggle. But we gravely mistake if we look upon the
controversy that resulted in the adoption of Watts's Psalms as a mere
conflict between enlightened good taste and stubborn conservatism. The
action proposed was revolutionary. It involved the surrender of a
long-settled principle of Puritanism. At the present day the objection
to the use of "human composures" in public worship is unintelligible,
except to Scotchmen. In the later Puritan age such use was reckoned an
infringement on the entire and exclusive authority and sufficiency of
the Scriptures, and a constructive violation of the second commandment.
By the adoption of the new psalmody the Puritan and Presbyterian
churches, perhaps not consciously, but none the less actually, yielded
the major premiss of the only argument by which liturgical worship was
condemned on principle. Thereafter the question of the use of liturgical