Rev. John Mason Neale, D.D. (24 Jan 1818 – 6 Aug 1866)

On Wednesday, I gave a campus ministry talk on the influence of J.M. Neale, adapted from my recent research. Below is the handout I distributed to the students.

---

Born to Cornelius and Susanna Good Neale; named for Puritan cleric and hymn writer John Mason (1645–94). Cornelius was ordained a Church of England priest in 1822 and died in 1823. J.M. married Sarah Webster in 1842; three children: Agnes Neale, Vincent Neale, Mary Sackville (Neale) Lawson.

Cofounder of Cambridge Camden Society, later the Ecclesiological Society; from 1841-1866 co-editor (with Benjamin Webb) of its journal, The Ecclesiologist.

In 1846, he became warden of Sackville College, an almshouse in East Grinstead, but was inhibited by the local bishop from 1848-1860 for his “Puseyite” tendencies. In 1855, he founded the Society of St. Margaret, a women’s religious order that trained nuns to minister to the poor, which, after relocating to East Grinstead in 1856; his daughter Agnes was later its Mother Superior.

Died in 1866 at Sackville College, and buried 10 Aug 1866 in St. Swithun Churchyard, East Grinstead, West Sussex, England.

Hymns

A great and mighty wonder All glory, laud, and honor Alleluia, song of gladness, Art thou weary, art thou languid Brief life is here our portion Christ is made the sure foundation Christian! Dost Thou See Them Come, ye faithful, raise the strain Draw nigh and take the Body of the Lord Fierce was the wild billow For thee, O dear, dear country Good Christian men, rejoice Holy Father, thou hast taught me Jerusalem the golden, Jesus, name all names above Jesus, the very thought is sweet Lift up, lift up your voices now Now that the daylight fills the sky

O come, O come, Emmanuel O happy band of pilgrims O Lord of hosts, Whose glory fills O sons and daughters, let us sing O thou who by a star didst guide O Thou, Who through this holy week O what their joy and their glory must be O wondrous type! O vision fair Of the Father's love begotten Safe home, safe home in port That Easter day with joy was bright The day is past and over The day of Resurrection The day, O Lord, is spent The Royal Banners forward go The world is very evil To the name that brings salvation

References

• “J.M. Neale,” Hymnary.org, URL: https://hymnary.org/person/Neale_JM
• J.M. Neale, A Few Words to Church Builders (Cambridge: Cambridge Camden Society, 1841), URL: https://archive.org/details/fewwordstochurch00camb
• J.M. Neale and Benjamin Webb, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments (London: T.W. Greene, 1843), URL: https://archive.org/details/symbolismchurch00webbgoog
• Eleanor A. Towle, John Mason Neale, DD: A Memoir (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), URL: https://archive.org/details/johnmasonnealeme00towl
• James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: the Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1962).
• Barry A. Orford, “Music and Hymnody” in Stewart J. Brown, James Pereiro, and Peter Nockles, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 376-386.
• J. West, “Neale’s Hymnal Noted and its Impact on Twentieth-Century American Hymnody,” The Hymn, 69, 3 (Summer 2018): 14-24.
• J. West, “How Cambridge and John Mason Neale Continued the Oxford Movement,” Forward in Christ 11, 4 (October 2018): 18-20, URL: http://bit.ly/FIC-Neale-2018

New research on John Mason Neale

My first papers on church music were published last month, and one is now online. Both are on John Mason Neale, who — as I mentioned in January — is being honored in this the year of his bicentennial.

Neale’s Hymnal Noted

The main paper is about his most influential hymnal, Hymnal Noted, published with music editor Thomas Helmore. As the second paragraph summarizes:

In Hymnal Noted, Neale (1818-1866) and his colleagues compiled 210 hymns, with 105 unique texts translated from medieval Latin sources; many of these translations were later included in the major English hymnals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. AB this paper will show, the influence of Hymnal Noted also extended to the United States. Of the 105 texts, twenty-six were adopted by one or more of the twenty-four twentieth-century hymnals from the largest American Christian denominations, with hymns such as “All glory, laud and honor,” and “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”

The paper reviews the history of hymnody in the Church of England before the Oxford Movement, Neale’s career, his contribution to hymnody, and then specifically Hymnal Noted and its impact. It was published in The Hymn, the main US journal for scholarship on hymn music. I had presented the original version at the 2017 Society for Christian Scholarship in Music conference — my first appearance at any academic conference for religion, liturgy or music — and got great feedback, a sense of the norms of the field, and met some of today’s established and up-and-coming scholars.

The published paper benefitted greatly from the editorial process. In particular, I greatly appreciate the patience of interim editor Robin Knowles Wallace, an endowed chair at the Methodist seminary near Columbus.

How Cambridge and John Mason Neale Continued the Oxford Movement

Stained glass window in St Swithuns
Source: Forward in Christ, Oct. 2018

In writing the original paper, I felt that the Neale bicentennial should not go unremarked among American Anglo-Catholics; because of my involvement in the Forward in Faith church planting task force, I reached out to the Forward in Faith magazine, Forward in Christ. The editor, Fr. Michael Heidt, graciously agreed to run 1,650 words on Neale in the October issue.

While in my January blog post, I emphasized Neale’s hymns, I felt this audience would also be interested in Neale’s impact in other areas. One part was about how Neale and his Cambridge colleagues created the gothic revival in English church architecture — including in their showpiece Victorian Gothic church, All Saints’ Margaret Street, which I was fortunate to visit in June. The other was how Neale was among those who pushed the envelope of liturgical practice — sometimes at great risk to his career and livelihood – to reinstate medieval practices decried as “Romish” by many English Protestants. While incense and the chasuble remain controversial, it’s hard to remember that choir vestments, candles, and singing the communion service were also controversial 150 years ago.

The article appeared in the printed glossy magazine, and the full text is available for free on the Forward in Christ website. The website includes one of the pictures from the magazine: the stained glass window showing John Mason Neale and two others at St Swithuns, East Grinstead, where he was laid to rest on August 10, 1866. The other picture in the magazine is a recent interior picture of All Saints’ Margaret Street, which is available on their website.

References

• J. M. Neale and Thomas Helmore, Hymnal Noted: Parts I & II (London: Novello, 1851, 1856), available at https://books.google.com/books?id=2E3Dya5ON5oC
• J. West, “Neale’s Hymnal Noted and its Impact on Twentieth-Century American Hymnody,” The Hymn, 69, 3 (Summer 2018): 14-24.
• J. West, “How Cambridge and John Mason Neale Continued the Oxford Movement,” Forward in Christ 11, 4 (October 2018): 18-20, URL: http://bit.ly/FIC-Neale-2018

Thank you to everyone for their help and encouragement. I would be glad to email a scan of the printed copy of either article to anyone who’s interested — please contact me.

Singing to end all wars

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the War to End All Wars, what we now call World War I. With nearly 1 million dead from England and the rest of the United Kingdom, this date has been observed as Remembrance Day for the past century: the Church of England and other churches in the U.K. will be solemnly marking this occasion. Anyone who’s read biographies of Lewis, Tolkien and others of that generation know how much a mark the war made on the British people.

In the U.S., today is unlikely to be a big deal. The deaths were a factor of 10 smaller in absolute terms and 20x smaller in proportion of the overall population. The president (as any president would) is in Europe, not the U.S., to mark the occasion.

There isn’t really anything in the U.S. lectionary for Veteran’s (née Armistice) Day, and today’s readings don’t really lend themselves a sermon on the subject. However, I did find it was possible to gently remember the occasion through a choice of hymns.

The obvious hymn for the occasion is “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee”, which is missing from my favorite hymnal but #376 in Hymnal 1982 and #375 in Book of Common Praise 2017. This hymn was a pleasant surprise when, in our wanderings earlier this century to find a suitable Episcopal church, we found it was a quite popular recession hymn. I was struck how clever the adaptation was: the tune from the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th (“Ode to Joy”), with words that are roughly a paraphrase of Schiller’s 18th century text that was used in Beethoven’s German original.

The fit is that the melody is the EU national anthem, something hard to miss if you watch an EU gathering on TV. (Officially there are no words, but I recall seeing Europeans singing Beethoven’s words on TV). Of course, the EU is an institution created to prevent a repeat of World War II, but given that the 1918 Armistice did such a terrible job of preventing a repeat of World War I, in reality the Marshall Plan, Common Market and European Union were a do-over of what should have been done to provide peace 100 years ago.

Still, this was vaguely unsatisfying. Looking through the various topical indices, none of the first lines had an obvious fit to a more general desire for peace. But then a (sung) phrase kept rattling around in my brain: “Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.”

It turns out this is the end of verses 1-3 of the 19th century hymn, “God the Omnipotent! King, who ordainest.” The verses were fairly stable until the late 1970s, the first two in 1842 by Henry F. Chorley (a London music critic and opera librettist) and the last two in 1870 by Rev. John Ellerton, a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge and a contributor to Hymns Ancient & Modern.

The words I have sung from Hymnal 1940 (#523) since my childhood are:

God, the omnipotent! King who ordainest
Thunder thy clarion, the lightning thy sword;
Show forth thy pity on high where Thou reignest,
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.

God the all merciful! Earth hath forsaken
Thy ways all holy, and slighted Thy Word;
Bid not thy wrath in its terrors awaken;
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.

God the all righteous One! Man hath defied Thee;
Yet to eternity standeth thy Word,
Falsehood and wrong shall not tarry beside Thee;
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.

God the all provident! Earth by thy chastening,
Yet shall to freedom and truth be restored;
Through the thick darkness Thy kingdom is hast’ning;
Thou wilt give peace in thy time, O Lord.

The same words are in BCP2017 (#613). Despite the strong imagery, H82 (#569) only gently updates it, replacing “Man” with “Earth” in verse 3. In all cases, we are singing either to petition God for peace in our time, or to acknowledge our trust that he will do so at the time of his choosing.

What I remember most about the hymn, however, is the march that makes it both memorable in imminently singable. The real irony, however, is that the tune was the Tsar’s national anthem — at least until the Romanov family was executed by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. So singing the tune also marks a link to an earlier era of Europe that (for better or for worse) came to a violent end in 1917-1918.

Websites for Anglican hymnody

Oremus was an invaluable resource for comparing Anglican hymnals around the world, but last year they gave up because they were being hassled to death over supposed copyright concerns. (I have considerable knowledge of copyright and fair use, and they seemed to be very much on the side of being legal).

Over the last decade, Hymnary has gotten much much better, with good funding, a college and paid staff behind it. (It didn’t hurt that the federal government gave them a big grant to scan 2,000 hymnals from a college library.) It lists the hymn titles and tunes for all the American hymnals, as well as key Church of England hymnals of the past 150 years.

It has various layers of complexity: the searching by hymn, by hymnal, by tune and the ability to download CSV files of some of the data. I can't claim to be an expert on it yet, but would like to post a tutorial once I understand it better. However, I have consistently felt that (as in Oremus) when I pull up a hymn text, I have no assurance that the text I'm seeing matches the specific pew hymnal (in terms of verses and wording changes) in front of me.

During my field research for my next church music paper, I heard about some other resources that seem very useful.

The Episcopal Church’s Church Publishing Inc. has a website RiteSeries, which includes RiteBrain for liturgy and RiteSong for hymns.  In many ways, CPH is emulating what Concordia Publishing House (CPH.org) does for the larger (Missouri synod) Lutheran denomination. However, RiteSeries only includes the most recent full hymnal (Hymnal 1982) and its supplements (Wonder Love & Praise), as well as the 1979 prayer book (and supplements such as Lesser Feasts and Fasts), and omits mention of liturgies that have been officially deprecated for the past 35 years. This is unlike CPH, which emphasizes its 2006 worship book (hymnal+prayer book) but still sells its 1982 and 1941 books, and even offers some resources for the older books.

Still, in this era of putting all the music (or at least lyrics) in the service booklet, both Hymnal 1940 and Book of Common Praise 2017 need resources like this. Hymnary has page images for much of Hymnal 1940, so that's a start.

Finally, my research interview yesterday with a long time choir member in Houston — who grew up with the 1928 prayer book and 1940 hymnal and never left — she pointed out SmallChurchMusic.com. It has MP3 files for Hymnal 1940, Hymnal 1982 and The English Hymnal. It also lists the 2006 LCMS hymnal and the 1990 Presbyterian hymnal, and several Methodist hymnals. For each tune, there are multiple MP3 files that list how many verses and what keys they are in. It also provides its own PDF of a score, its own standard lyrics (not specific to a hymnal), and links to pages on TheCyberHymnal and Hymnary for the hymn.

Like so many out there, I appreciate the work these individuals (or not-for-profits) are doing to make these resources available for those of us who still value hymns and hymn-singing in America.

Fr. Robert Taft (1932-2018) on the liturgy

Fr. Robert Francis Taft, S.J., died Friday in Weston, Mass., where he had retired in 2011 after 46 years at the Oriental Institute of Rome. Born in Rhode Island, he was best known as a Roman Catholic scholar of Eastern liturgies and was in fact a priest in Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, an Eastern Rite church in communion with Rome. The Pray Tell blog posted an obituary by John F. Baldovin, S.J., a friend and colleague who stayed in touch with Fr Taft after his retirement.

Fr. Taft was a highly knowledgeable, influential and opinionated contributor to the postwar ecumenical movement that called itself “Liturgical Reform”. While for the Roman church this specifically meant bringing the liturgy into the vernacular, the broader movement sought to bring new evidence, insights and opinions to change the liturgy in the direction the reformers believed best. Over the past 70 year, this movement that impacted almost the entire swath of liturgical Western Christianity.

I knew of Taft’s work from his definitive 1986 book The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, which is on the future reading list of my ecumenical liturgy reading group. As a student of liturgy — rather than a scholar making original contributions — today I can only scratch the surface of assessing his contribution.

(For those that wonder why I spend so much time on liturgy in a music blog, please bear with me).

Pray Tell also posted the 1985 speech Fr. Taft gave upon receiving an award for his liturgical studies. From this 8,800 word speech, I will (cherry) pick some on how this priest and scholar found that a proper liturgy is important for congregational worship:

…what the Vatican II reforms initiated was a return of the liturgy to the people. … But the only way it can remain popular is if we leave it alone. … What ordinary people in ordinary parishes need is familiarity, sameness, the stability of a ritual tradition that can be achieved only be repetition, and that will not tolerate change every time the pastor reads a new article. The only way people are going to perceive liturgy as their own, and therefore participate in it, is when they know what is going to happen next.
…
So let me enunciate a liturgical principle: ritual – or call it order of worship, if you belong to a tradition that dislikes the word ritual – a certain stability in the déroulement of worship, far from precluding spontaneity and congregational participation, is its condition sine qua non, as is indeed true of any social event. Italian crowds spontaneously shout “brava” to divas at the opera – but not in the middle of an aria – because the conventions of civility dictate that there is a time and place for everything.
…
Like medieval cathedrals, liturgies were created not as monuments to human creativity, but as acts of worship. The object of worship is not self-expression, not even self-fulfillment, but God. “he must increase, I must decrease,” John the Baptist said of Jesus (Jn 3:30) and that is an excellent principle for liturgical ministers. Anyway, experience shows that most spontaneity is spontaneous only the first time around. Thereafter it always sounds the same. Furthermore, most people are not especially creative in any other aspect of the existence, and there is no reason to think that they will be when it comes to liturgy. They can, however, be drawn to participate in a common heritage far nobler and richer than the creation of anyone of us individually. What we need is not further to reinvent the wheel, not to reshape our liturgy every time we read a new article, but just to take what we have and use it very well.
…
In other words, liturgy is a common tradition, and ideal of prayer to which I must rise, and not some private game that I am free to reduce to the level of my own banality. And when the rite has something I do not understand, especially if it is something that Christians in almost every tradition, East and West, have been doing for about a millennium, then perhaps my initial instinct should be to suspect some deficiency in my own understanding, before immediately proceeding to excise whatever it is that has had the affrontery to escape the limits of my intelligence.

Requiescat in pace.