Somehow the luncheon conversation turned to hymns.  The diners were two cradle Catholics and two Protestant converts to Catholicism, and they agreed that what one of them called “The Yoo-hoo Song,” meaning “Eagle’s Wings,” didn’t quite get their blood stirring.  One of them, a former Presbyterian, remarked how odd it was that the 1955 Presbyterian hymnal he had used every week had a hymn by G. K. Chesterton, but while that hymn had featured in Presbyterian worship, he had never encountered it in Catholic liturgy.  The other three said almost at the same time that they never knew Chesterton had written hymns.

So, it might be time to reconsider Chesterton’s hymn, “O God of Earth and Altar.”  In addition to its inclusion in the old Presbyterian Hymnbook, it is in The English Hymnal, as well as in collections of Chesterton’s poetry, where it appears simply as “A Hymn.”  A piece of lyric verse in three stanzas, it dates to 1906 and can be sung to the tunes Llangloffan and King’s Lynn.

“O God of Earth and Altar,” it begins, “bow down and hear our cry/Our earthly rulers falter/Our people drift and die.”  What has caused this sorry state?  “The walls of gold entomb us/The words of scorn divide.”  Then comes a prayer:  “Take not thy thunder from us/But take away our pride.”

The prayer further implores the Lord:  “From all that terror teaches/From lies of tongue and pen/From all the easy speeches/That comfort cruel men/From sale and profanation/Of honour and the sword/From sleep and from damnation/Deliver us, good Lord!”

There follows an additional request:  “Tie in a living tether/The prince and priest and thrall/Bind all our lives together/Smite us and save us all/In ire and exultation/Aflame with faith, and free/Lift up a living nation/A single sword to Thee.”

These are stirring words, and the music makes them more so.  Chesterton’s hymn balances a sense of repentance with a desire to serve the Lord.  By calling on God to purify and perfect them, the congregation singing the hymn also invoke divine grace.  Human pride and idolatry keep us from being able to save ourselves.

When Chesterton composed that poem, he was an Anglican, and he was writing within a tradition of hymns that included such rousing lyrics as “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “The Son of God Goes Forth to War.”  The former is often mocked if not deplored; the latter seems all but forgotten.  When the Christian soldiers, “marching as to war,” follow the Cross, they also follow “Christ the royal Master” who “leads against the foe.”  The foe, of course, is Satan, luring us with sin.

While for some those words are as stirring as Chesterton’s, perhaps such sentiments are out of fashion today.  Imagery of war, even if referring to fighting against the Enemy, Satan, and the sins coming from our own fallen nature, might seem gauche.  At the same time, even mentioning that there just might be a satanic enemy of souls could mark one as embarrassingly uncouth.

In an essay called “The Tower,” collected in 1909 in Tremendous Trifles, Chesterton addressed that point of view.  “I remember a debate,” he wrote, “in which I had praised militant music in ritual, and some one asked me if I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band.”  Chesterton replied that he could “imagine it with the greatest ease,” because “Christ definitely approved a natural noisiness at a great moment.”

That great moment was when the disciples tried to get some rowdy children to be quiet and Jesus told the disciples, “If these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Lk 19:40).  From that statement Chesterton concluded that “With these words He called up all the wealth of artistic creation that has been founded on this creed.”

One example of that artistic element in Christianity, Chesterton argued here and also in Orthodoxy (1908), occurred in the unexpected phenomenon of Gothic architecture.  In the carved angels and saints, grotesques and gargoyles of that art form, the very stones do seem to be crying out and bearing witness to the glory of God.

After the First World War, Chesterton’s village of Beaconsfield proposed to set up a war memorial.  After much debate at a town meeting, the plan settled upon was for a cross in the town square, and things seemed to be in order until some residents realized that not only was the memorial to be a cross, it was to be a crucifix.  Chesterton defended the proposed crucifix for the crossroads around which the sleepy little community had developed.  “I do not want the crucifix to be a compromise,” he wrote in his autobiography, “or a concession to the weaker brethren. . . . I want it to be a blazon and a boast.”

Be that as it may, why should anyone want hymns that stir the blood?  Simply because the Christian faith is about human flesh and blood as well as about a divine spirit.  The music and poetry used during Mass must complement the message proclaimed in the Law and the Prophets, the Epistles and the Gospel.  Namely, the score of the hymns must underscore the prose of the Scriptures, so that the word coming from both sources becomes as challenging as the image of the crucifix, the challenge of doing penance and believing the good news.

At the end of Mass the priest or deacon tells all who are there assembled to go forth.  Although the world into which Christians are to take the Gospel, maybe even using words, might prefer being affirmed by sentimental songs, the hymns filling the hearts of even four middle-aged men at luncheon should be piercing swords of contradiction, rousing and fortifying them to go forth to spiritual warfare, against which, we have it on good authority, the gates of Hell shall not prevail.

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.