More difficult to understand is the Puritan prohibition of all hymns except rhymed paraphrases of the psalms. Metrical versions were substituted for chanted prose versions for the reason, no doubt, that a congregation, as a rule, cannot sing in perfect unity of coöperation except in metre and in musical forms in which one note is set to one syllable. But why the psalms alone? Why suppress the free utterance of the believers in hymns of faith and hope? In the view of that day the psalms were directly inspired by the Holy Spirit and contemporary hymns could not be. We know that a characteristic of the Puritan mind was an intense, an impassioned reverence for the Holy Scripture, so that all other forms of human speech seemed trivial and unworthy in comparison. The fact that the psalms, as the product of the ante-Christian dispensation, could have no reference to the Christian scheme except by far-fetched interpretation as symbolic and prophetic, did not escape the Puritans, but they consoled themselves for the loss in the thought that the earliest churches, in which they found, or thought they found their ideal and standard, were confined to a poetic expression similar to their own. And how far did they feel this to be a loss? Was not the temper of the typical Puritan, after all, thoroughly impregnated with Hebraism? The real nature of the spiritual deprivation which this restriction involved is apparent enough now, for it barred out a gracious influence which might have corrected some grave faults in the Puritan character, faults from which their religious descendants to this day continue to suffer.
The rise of an English hymnody corresponding to that of Germany was, therefore, delayed for more than one hundred and fifty years. English religious song-books were exclusively psalm-books down to the eighteenth century. Poetic activity among the non-conformists consisted in translations of the psalms in metre, or rather versions of the existing translations in the English Bible, for these sectaries, as a rule, were not strong in Hebrew. The singular passion in that period for putting everything into rhyme and metre, which produced such grotesque results as turning an act of Parliament into couplets, and paraphrasing “Paradise Lost” in rhymed stanzas in order, as the writer said, “to make Mr. Milton plain,” gave aid and comfort to the peculiar Puritan views. The first complete metrical version of the psalms was the celebrated edition of Sternhold and Hopkins, the former a gentleman of the privy chamber to Edward VI., the latter a clergyman and schoolmaster in Suffolk. This version, published in 1562, was received with universal satisfaction and adopted into all the Puritan congregations, maintaining its credit for full two hundred and thirty years, until it came at last to be considered as almost equally inspired with the original Hebrew text. So far as poetic merit is concerned, the term is hardly applicable to the lucubrations of these honest and prosaic men. As Fuller said, “their piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon.” In fact the same comment would apply to all the subsequent versifiers of the psalms. It would seem that the very nature of such work precludes all real literary success. The sublime thought and irregular, vivid diction of the Hebrew poets do not permit themselves to be parcelled out in the cut and dried patterns of conventional metres. Once only does Sternhold rise into grandeur—in the two stanzas which James Russell Lowell so much admired: