- First Presbyterian Church - https://fpcjackson.org -

Hymns of the Faith: From All That Dwell Below the Skies


Hymns of the Faith


“From All That
Dwell Below the Skies”

Psalm 117

A Presentation of
First Presbyterian Church

Jackson,
Mississippi

With

Dr. Ligon Duncan, Dr. Derek Thomas, and Dr. Bill
Wymond

Dr. Wymond: Good morning! This is “Hymns of the
Faith” brought to you by Jackson’s First Presbyterian Church. The minister of
the First Presbyterian Church is Dr. Ligon Duncan. Stay tuned for Hymns of the
Faith…..And now here with “Hymns of the Faith” is Dr. Duncan.

Dr. Duncan: Thank you, Bill Wymond. We are here
again for “Hymns of the Faith” as Bill, Derek and I take a look at some of the
best hymns handed down to us over the course of two millennia of Christian
history, and today we are coming to a Psalm. This is a Psalm paraphrase, the
text of which was composed by Isaac Watts, who was really one of the profound
influences on English hymnody down to this very day. He wrote hymns in a day
when most of the English churches were simply using Psalms, and he paraphrased a
lot of the Psalms, Christianizing them, and wrote a lot of famous hymn texts
that we use to this day. And we’re going to be looking at his paraphrase of
Psalm 117, From All That Dwell Below the Skies,
today.

Before we start out, Bill Wymond, why don’t you
share with us the tune of DUKE STREET, and
then, Derek, I’m going to ask you to tell us a little bit about Isaac Watts.

Dr. Wymond: [Plays hymn.]

Dr. Duncan: Now a lot of you will recognize that
tune as the tune to which you sing Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun.
It’s really a versatile tune that’s used for a lot of different songs in our
hymnal, and I want to get Bill to comment on that in just a few minutes. But,
Derek, tell us about this amazing person, Isaac Watts.

Dr. Thomas: Isaac Watts and John Newton are
probably two of the greatest English hymnologists…hymn writers. He was born in
1674, which is about the time when Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was
published. Born in Southampton, which is on the south coast of England (you
could sail from Southampton to France, for example), his father owned a boarding
house there, and suffered imprisonment for probably the same reasons as Bunyan
himself suffered imprisonment in the middle of the seventeenth century. He was
offered an education in Oxford or Cambridge to pursue ordination, but in order
to do that he would have to avow the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican
Church.

Dr. Duncan: Until 1832, you couldn’t go to Oxford
or Cambridge if you were not an Anglican — that is, a member of the Church of
England — and so this was a really big deal.

Dr. Thomas: And Isaac Watts to this day is the
hero figure… I don’t mean that in a bad way, but he is the hero figure of the
independence of folk like Congregationalists and to some extent Presbyterians,
but especially Congregationalists in England. And if you were to go today to an
independent church, an independent Reformed, Calvinistic church, for example,
then Isaac Watts is going to be the man they’re going to look to.

He became a tutor, as many of them did, for six
years to the family of Sir John Hartopp, and then in 1702 he became a minister,
a pastor, of a fairly distinguished independent congregation in Mark Lane in
London, which is in the east end of London. Then his health begins to
deteriorate, and he lives for the next 36 years presumably under the employment
of this family. But he basically composes hymns…and perhaps does some tutoring,
but he has an assistant in the church who seemingly more or less took over most
of the duties in the church.

And Isaac Watts wrote 600 hymns
that we know of. Some of the most famous ones — When I Survey the Wondrous
Cross
, of course…Join All the Glorious Names; Jesus Shall Reign Where’er
the Sun; Come, We That Love the Lord; Before Jehovah’s Awful Throne;
and
this one, which is a paraphrase of Psalm 117. We’ll talk about the whole
business of paraphrasing the Psalms and of Christianizing the Psalms, which is
what we associate with Isaac Watts especially

But he also paraphrased other
portions of Scripture. Now we don’t do that here (“here” meaning First
Presbyterian Church in Jackson), but in the Church of Scotland, for example, in
their Psalter, which would contain the 150 Psalms, some of them in two different
versions, there would also be a section of so-called “Paraphrases of Scripture”,
which I love. I miss singing those glorious paraphrases…paraphrases of
well-known passages of Scripture.

Dr. Duncan: One of the most famous is the Church
of Scotland Psalter’s paraphrase of Romans 8, The Savior Died and Rose Again,
Triumphant from the Grave
. And that’s just a tremendous paraphrase!

Dr. Thomas: And perhaps I’m Not Ashamed to Own
My Lord
, a paraphrase of…Romans 1? “I’m not ashamed of the gospel…” is that
what it is? I’m speaking off the top of my head now, but I’m pretty sure that’s
what it is. And what is sometimes criticized by a friend of ours [Dr. Duncan
laughs]
for some aspect of his understanding of the person of Christ, and
it’s a very abstruse sort of criticism that’s far too deep to go into in this
program, and I’m not sure about that criticism.

I’ve never seen that in any of his hymns, to be
honest. Now in addition to writing hymns, Watts wrote some hugely important
theological texts (and non-theological texts). He wrote a book on logic which
was used in Oxford — even though he never went to Oxford. It was used in Oxford
for about a hundred years, two or three generations of students at Oxford read
Isaac Watts’ Logic as part of undergraduate studies. Oh, for those days
again!

Dr. Duncan: Yes! Bill, this tune,
DUKE STREET, we sing it to lots of
different things. It’s in Long Meter. Tell us a little bit about it.

Dr. Wymond: The tune really is a simple tune, and I
think it’s one of my favorite tunes. It just works so well because it doesn’t
get in the way. It is a joyful tune. Usually we do it faster. We do it about… [plays].
So it just kind of gently glides up and down the scale and provides a good
vehicle for doing a text like this one — a joyful, exultant kind of text.

And as far as the origin of it is
concerned, we know that a man named John Hatton wrote this somewhere around the
end of the eighteenth century. John Hatton is one of those interesting fellows
who wrote one tune that is known, and they don’t find any other tunes from him —
or at least none that is used now.

He lived on Duke Street in a
small English village, and so the tune name is
DUKE STREET. And, just reminding all of us that these tunes that we use
actually have independent names themselves. This hymn is not From All
That Dwell Below the Skies.
This tune is
DUKE STREET.

We
were talking just recently about that phenomenon, that it has usually an
association with the place where the person is, or some biblical allusion, or
something like that for the tune name. But John Hatton, it is said, met his
Maker as a result of a stagecoach accident, and we’re thankful to him for giving
us this tune.

Dr. Duncan: Two things: one, doesn’t that remind
you that when you hear of someone like this…apparently their sole legacy to the
church is one tune…you don’t know whether… “Well, Lord, You may have me here to
do one thing! If that’s what You’ve got me for, that’s great!” It’s just a
reminder to all of us that you never know what the Lord has in store for you in
your life.

Dr. Thomas: I often think of that when I read
Haggai. The entire prophecy of Haggai takes place in four months. That’s all we
know about Haggai, four months of his life. And God raised him up for that.

Dr. Duncan: And the whole prophecy can be written
out in about two pages of Times New Roman 12-point type, front and back.

Dr. Wymond: So here’s John Hatton, who wrote this
one tune that has benefited the worldwide church, and he’s known in heaven now!

Dr. Duncan: We use it multiple times a year at
First Pres, because it’s serviceable. It works with a bunch of different texts
well.

Now, Bill, the second thing I was
going to say is, it’s Long Meter. Tell us what that means. We talked a little
about this a couple of weeks ago, but I thought that it would be helpful to
address the “L.M.” mark that ministers may be scratching their heads about at
the bottom right corner of their hymn text.

Dr. Wymond: Well, we have to have the hymns in
meter so that we can sing them to tune. They have to be predictable, regular
beats (or feet) to the poetry, and Long Meter means that we just have four lines
that have equal meter. All of the lines are eight beats, or eight feet:
“From-all-that-dwell-be-low-the-skies”…that should come out to eight. So it’s
8-8-8-8.

Dr. Duncan: And by the way, those “feet” that
Bill Wymond was referring to work out in syllables in the text, so
“From-all-that-dwell-be-low-the-skies” is broken out into the first line of that
Long Meter. And then, “Let-the-Cre-a-tor’s-praise-a-rise.”

So if you’re trying to figure it
out, you can count out the sung syllables of each of the lines in the verse, and
it will let you know. You can count that out and you can actually arrive at
whatever the meter is. And the Long Meter form has a specific number of feet, or
syllables, per sung line. I guess the most common are C.M. [Common Meter], and
then L.M., and then what would be after that? Would Short Meter be…?

Dr. Wymond: Short Meter is probably the least
common of the common! And it’s 6-6-8-6.

Dr. Thomas: In the days when we had one very
competent musician in the church in Ireland (and one, well, not so competent
musician) in the church, and I was the one who would choose the hymns, if I
chose one with a Long Meter I would always say, “Sing this to
DUKE STREET.” [All laugh]

Dr. Wymond: Well, there’s a very convenient index
in the back of hymnals, the Metrical Index, that shows you the meter of all
hymns. And you can just find a similar meter for a set of words to an unfamiliar
tune that you want to use, and then you can use the familiar tune to help people
to enjoy a new set of words.

Dr. Duncan: Bill, there’s an interesting musical
part in the middle of this relatively simple tune that gets a little more
complex, and it’s where in the first stanza you sing “Let the Redeemer’s name be
sung.” It goes up, and it comes back down. What’s going on there in that tune
text?

Dr. Wymond: Well, I think it’s a musical flourish,
because you’ve had a lot of slow notes coming just before [plays], so
that line has been going, and then [plays] so when you come to the line
about the Redeemer’s name then it sort of takes off and has a flourish there.

Dr. Thomas: But the interval between the notes is
a small interval, so it’s not difficult to sing….going up four or five notes.

Dr. Wymond: Very predictable. You’re just going
right up the scale, one of the commonest progressions, so it’s easy for folks.

I must say something about Isaac
Watts, because he was sort of the bкte noire for some people who wanted
only to sing the pure Psalms, and he was seen as an interloper to some who were
thinking that he was trying to get people to sing hymns, who didn’t really want
to sing hymns. And so what made hymns ultimately acceptable in many churches
were these paraphrases of the Psalms and of the Scriptures. They first sang
Psalms, then they would sing the paraphrases, and they said, “Oh, well, why not
sing hymns?” In fact, some of the hymns we sing are really Psalm paraphrases and
we don’t even know it…like Joy to the World is from Isaac Watts, and I
think that’s Psalm 90. So we think of them as hymns, not Psalm paraphrases.

Dr. Duncan: And, you know, I have great regard
for our Psalm-singing friends, but I do think when you look at even the
paraphrases of the Psalms, in order to get the Psalms into workable metrical
paraphrases that will work with these kinds of meters that we’ve been talking
about, sometimes you have to be so inventive with your English versification
that you’re pretty close to a paraphrase already, and so people that get all
bent out of shape that you can only sing out of The Scottish Psalter of 1650,
and say that Isaac Watts is an interloper… I mean, I just want to say,
“Brothers, let’s lay this text side by side and see.”

For instance, let me show you
what he’s done with this. This is a Psalm paraphrase of Psalm 117. Here’s Psalm
117. It’s a very short Psalm, two verses:

“Praise the Lord, all nations!
Laud Him, all peoples!

For His lovingkindness is great
toward us,

And the truth of the Lord is
everlasting.

Praise the Lord!”

Now there’s the Psalm. Now here’s what Watts does with it:

“From all that dwell below the
skies

Let the Creator’s praise arise;”

Now he’s just said “Praise the Lord, all nations.” But he’s
just said it very elegantly and paraphrastically. And then,

“Let the Redeemer’s name be sung

Through every land, by every
tongue.” — [“Laud Him, all peoples.”]

Now he’s introduced the idea of
Redeemer there. Derek, we’ll come back to, because there’s his Christianizing of
the Psalm, although the God of the Old Testament was Redeemer as well. But this
is part of Watts’ Christianizing of the Psalm, and this was one of the
controversial things in Psalm-singing circles, to introduce the name of Christ,
or to mention the Redeemer specifically or the Messiah by name in the Psalms.

“In every land begin the song:

to every land the strains
belong.

In cheerful sound all voices
raise

And fill the world with joyful
praise.”

So he’s basically gone back again to “Praise the Lord, all
nations! Laud Him, all peoples!” and he’s said it in another way.

Then,

“Eternal are Your mercies, Lord;

Eternal truth attends Your word.

Your praise shall sound from
shore to shore

Till suns shall rise and set no
more.”

There he’s picked up again the content of the second verse
of that very short Psalm. So it is poetic, and it is elaborative, and it is a
paraphrase, but it’s actually pretty faithful to the content of the passage. So
that gives you a feel for a paraphrase as opposed to a metrical English
rendering. I wish I had one of the metrical versions of this Psalm in front of
me so that I could describe what it would have sounded like out of one of the
old Psalter hymnals, but perhaps sometime I can do that.

Let’s talk about the Christianizing of the
Psalms, though, that Watts does. What are the ways that Watts “Christianizes”
Psalms?

Dr. Thomas: I think it’s probably difficult for
most of our listeners who are not in the exclusive Psalm tradition to appreciate
just the extent to which this was a controversy.

Dr. Duncan: It split churches.

Dr. Thomas: Oh, yes! And I have to put all my
cards on the table now: my own son-in-law and daughter, of course, are exclusive
Psalm-singers–at least they belong to a church where there is exclusive
Psalm-singing…unaccompanied Psalm-singing. And if you’ve never experienced that,
it is quote phenomenal to hear a congregation sing unaccompanied Psalms. I’ve
heard it done badly, but I’ve heard it done extremely well. They will take your
breath away, especially when the congregation is musical and can sing all four
parts. That is….

Dr. Duncan: Well, the other thing about that is
that when you hear that, one of the nice things about it is you are hearing what
it would have sounded like for most Christians over 1850 years to have sung in
worship, because that’s how worship would have been done in most churches in the
world, up until about 1850. There would have been no musical accompaniment, and
the basic diet of the singing would have been Psalms.

Dr. Thomas: Except that in Calvin’s liturgy, for
example, they did sing other things other than Psalms.

Dr. Duncan: Right. But the basic diet was Psalms.

Dr. Thomas: Yes. But the argument is that one
should only sing what is demanded by God in Scripture to be sung, namely the
book of Psalms.

The problem with that, as I point
out to my exclusive Psalm-singing friends, is that you are then stuck in the Old
Testament.

Now we believe in the whole
Bible. We believe in the authority of all 66 books of the Bible, but we have to
in our worship reflect the transition from old covenant to new covenant.

In an exclusive Psalm-singing
church, you can preach about Jesus and you can talk about Jesus in your prayer,
and you can read about Him in the New Testament reading for that service, but
you can’t sing His name. Now, you can sing about Him, but you can’t say the name
Jesus when you’re singing–which seems to be to be extremely odd, to say
the least.

And what Watts is doing is
adopting a method of interpreting the Old Testament along the line of Luke 24,
when Jesus speaks to the two forlorn disciples, “…beginning in Moses and all the
prophets, He expounded to them the things concerning Himself.” So, finding Jesus
in the Old Testament…and I think Watts is just doing that with a clue in Psalm
117. There’s an important covenantal word there about the merciful kindness of
God which includes the idea of redemption. It includes the idea of the coming
Redeemer.

Dr. Duncan: Yes. You know, I’ve got a theory as
well, and we actually have it in the articles by the various hymnologists
commenting on Watts’ texts or paraphrases of the Psalms, that one of the reasons
that there was an impetus for Watts to do these paraphrases in the first place
is that, though there are many glorious metrical renditions of Psalms (you know
we still sing Psalm 100 in its original Old Scottish setting, because it’s
really well-conceived and well-executed; Psalm 23 has come down to us in many,
many good renderings), but some of the Psalm metrical versions are atrociously
contorted.

And Watts himself had a man
challenge him as a young minister, “Write something better than this doggerel
that we’re singing,” because out of the old Sternhold and Hopkins, and out of
some of the older metrical Psalm books, some of the metrical Psalms sounded kind
of like “Yoda does the Psalms”! You know, “Begun, the Clone War has!” — you
know, this sort of thing! You’re singing things backward like no one would ever
speak them.

Dr. Thomas: And the argument that you’ve already
mentioned, that the…is it the metrification…is that the verb? …is in itself then
a breaking of that principle, so that if you were to be true to that principle
you would have to sing it in the Hebrew, and even then with the problem of
Masoretic vowel pointing you’re still not sure if you’re singing it as they
would have sung it, say, in the temple. So…

Dr. Duncan: And Hebrew poetry works differently
than English poetry, so that the rhyming that we have is generally not present.
There’s alliteration in Hebrew poetry, and there is a rhythm and a meter to it,
but not in the way that it works in English. So you’re trying to match something
that’s…

Dr. Thomas: I’m on Isaac Watts’ page on this one
entirely, that I think we have not just the right but the duty to shine the
light of the New Testament into the Old, not just when we’re preaching it, but
when we sing it. And I am an inclusive Psalm-singer.

Dr. Duncan: Yes…by which you mean…

Dr. Thomas: That we should sing Psalms in worship.

Dr. Duncan: Bill? …You’re telling us that we need
to listen to this song now! [Laughs] Derek, very subtly he’s pointing to
the clock and saying, “Ligon, we need to listen to this song!” Okay, friends,
here it is: From All That Dwell Below the Skies.

“From all that dwell below the
skies

Let the Creator’s praise arise;

Let the Redeemer’s name be sung

Through every land, by every
tongue.

“In every land begin the song:

to every land the strains
belong.

In cheerful sound all voices
raise

And fill the world with joyful
praise.

“Eternal are Your mercies, Lord;

Eternal truth attends Your word.

Your praise shall sound from
shore to shore

Till suns shall rise and set no
more.”

Dr. Wymond: Victor Smith sang for us From All
That Dwell Below the Skies
. This has been “Hymns of the Faith” brought to
you by Jackson’s First Presbyterian Church.