This was a period of tribulation, calamity, and desperation, which, as Miss Winkworth remarks, “caused religious men to look away from this world” and led to a more subjective type of hymn, expressing personal feeling. In general, the literary value of the hymns of this period, in form and diction and imagination, exceeded that of those of the previous generation.
The spiritual deepening of this age of sorrow, the widening of the scope of the hymn by the inclusion of more subjective elements, and the literary advance in the structure and diction were preparing the way for the Golden Age of German hymnody which followed the conclusion of the great religious war. It extended from Paul Gerhardt (1604-1676) to Christian Fuerchtegott Gellert (1715-1769).
Gerhardt had spent his young manhood amid the desolation and difficulties of the Thirty Years’ War. He did not enter the ministry until he was nearly fifty years old, having written no hymns up to that time. A great preacher and a devoted pastor, he was a man of deep piety and of unflinching loyalty to the truth, as it was given to him to see it. As calamity followed calamity, under strict divine discipline in preparation for his great work in the writing of hymns, not only for the German church, but also for the whole Christian world, he united in himself the two tendencies, the one of viewing God and divine things in an objective way, characteristic of the early Lutheran hymns, and the other, the expression of the emotion produced by such contemplation in the heart of the Christian, characteristic of the subsequent period. He had the body of the older hymnody and the spirit of the new.
Moreover, Gerhardt was a poet. Indeed, his writings were extensive lyrics rather than hymns. Some of them have furnished several hymns. He was the Keble of German hymnody, and his influence upon subsequent hymn writing has been most helpful. There is a poetic fertility in the man lacking in his predecessors.
He wrote one hundred and twenty-three hymns, of which Dr. Philip Schaff declares that they “are among the noblest pearls in the treasury of sacred poetry.” They are of such uniform excellence that it is difficult to select those of outstanding merit. “Befiehl du deine Wege” (“Give to the winds thy fears”) was translated by John Wesley. “O Jesu Christ, mein schoenstes Licht” (“Jesus, thy boundless love to me”) is another most successful translation by the same hand. “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (“O sacred head, now wounded”) leans hard on “Salve, caput cruentatum,” but has a spirituality the older hymn does not so fully display. Thirty of his hymns are in general use in the German churches, and Germany recognizes him as her prince of hymnists, superior even to Luther.