ISABEL RIVERS and DAVID L. WYKES (eds). Dissenting Praise. Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales.
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 261 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/res/hgs007
ISSN1471-6968
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
ResumoIn 1801, the Baptist artist Robert Bowyer's sister, Mrs. Leek, whom he had earnestly tried to convert, lay dying from cancer. The last verse of Samuel Pearce's hymn, ‘Bless'd there with a weight of glory’, was read to her: ‘She then said Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah! These were her last words’ (p. 121). In the same year, in Dinajpur, the missionary John Thomas repeated ‘in a very impressive manner, those lines in Dr Rippon's Selection; “Jesus, lover of my soul, &c”’ before succumbing to a painful death. Thomas, like so many others of his generation, was drawing on John Rippon's enormously popular A Selection of Hymns from the best Authors. Intended to be an Appendix to Dr. Watts's Psalms and Hymns [1787]; Mrs. Leek was using the tenth, enlarged, edition of 1800. Both obituary stories, reported and analysed in this volume by Ken R. Manley, testify to the extraordinary power of dissenting hymns, and hymn collections, used for private meditation as well as public worship, at home and abroad. Hymns offer, in the words of Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, a ‘model of dynamic interaction between reader and text’ (p. 68): binding a congregation, and a community, together. This is all the more necessary in the case of dissent, where hymns and hymnals helped bind denominations more closely together and create a coherent religious identity, extending even to the far reaches of the Empire, and across the Atlantic. The power of dissenting hymns often far exceeded sectarian boundaries, too. This is certainly true of famous examples, such as Sarah Flower Adams's ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’; it would not be too much to assert that it is also true of the genre and culture of the hymn itself, and its very introduction into public worship.
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