atristic writings that the
primitive years of the Christian Church were not only years of suffering
but years of song. That the despised and often persecuted "Nazarenes,"
scattered in little colonies throughout the Roman Empire, did not forget
to mingle tones of praise and rejoicing with their prayers could readily
be believed from the much-quoted letter of a pagan lawyer, written about
as long after Jesus' death, as from now back to the death of John Quincy
Adams--the letter of Pliny the younger to the Emperor Trajan, in which
he reports the Christians at their meetings singing "hymns to Christ as
to a god."

Those disciples who spoke Greek seem to have been especially tuneful,
and their land of poets was doubtless the cradle of Christian hymnody.
Believers taught their songs to their children, and it is as certain
that the oldest Sunday-school hymn was written somewhere in the classic
East as that the Book of Revelation was written on the Isle of Patmos.
The one above indicated was found in an appendix to the _Tutor_, a book
composed by Titus Flavius Clemens of Alexandria, a Christian philosopher
and instructor whose active life began late in the second century. It
follows a treatise on Jesus as the Great Teacher, and, though his own
words elsewhere imply a more ancient origin of the poem, it is always
called "Clement's Hymn." The line quoted above is the first of an
English version by the late Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter, D.D. It does not
profess to be a translation, but aims to transfer to our common tongue
the spirit and leading thoughts of the original.

Shepherd of tender youth,
Guiding in love and truth
Through devious ways;
Christ, our triumphant King,
We come Thy name to sing,
Hither our children bring
To shout Thy praise.

The last stanza of Dr. Dexter's version represents the sacred song
spirit of both the earliest and the latest Christian centuries:

So now, and till we die
Sound we Thy praises high,
And joyful sing;
Infants, and the glad throng
Who to Thy church belong
Unite to swell the song
To Christ our King.

While they give us the sentiment and the religious tone of the old hymn,
these verses, however, recognize the extreme difficulty of anything like
verbal fidelity in translating a Greek hymn, and in this instance there
are metaphors to avoid as being strange to modern taste. The first
stanza, literally rendered and construed,