The Church of Scotland has recently published a new edition of its hymnary, the first for 30 years. A committee of ministers had the difficult task of deciding which of the old hymns to reject in order to make room for the new songs — many of them from Africa and South America — which have ‘enlivened worship’ over the last few decades. John Bell, who convened the committee, tells us in his introduction that the aim was ‘to combine the best of the new hymnary with the cherished and rich tradition that had nourished and sustained previous generations, and so sound forth the eternal gospel in a world constantly changing in customs and culture’. Bell is himself a distinguished composer and hymn-writer. Among his contributions is the accompaniment to a Zimbabwean hymn, based on a traditional English folk tune.
The Hymnary begins with a section devoted to psalms, many of them metrical, and continues with hymns arranged ‘according to aspects of faith and life which closely correspond to the three persons of the Trinity’. The book ends with a number of Short Songs and Doxologies.
The very first of the 825 items is a beautiful translation from the Hebrew of Psalm 1 by Charles Robertson, the recently retired minister of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, where scholarship is still thriving:
How blest are those who do not stray
Led by the wicked’s talk …
These psalms, which give such a characteristic flavour to the services of the Church of Scotland, are an unchanging aspect of the ‘customs and culture’ of the country. They have an interesting history.
The early Protestant reformers believed in the importance of worshipping God in the words of the Bible, but in their own language. Many Protestant divines from England and Scotland fled to Geneva in the mid-1550s to escape persecution at home.
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