Page 3 - Mirror to the soul

PREFACE
Psalms gave the Christian community its first hymns. Indeed, the Hebrew name for our Book of Psalms means ‘Songs of Praise’.
Because psalms speak not only of God as active in history, and of his universal majestic creative power, but as a God known in personal encounter, and open to every cry of the human heart, the book has been, for more than a thousand years, what Calvin described as a ‘glass’ or mirror:
“... for not an affection will a man find in himself, an image of which is not reflected in this glass. Nay, all the griefs, sorrows, fears, misgivings, hopes, cares, anxieties, in short, all the troublesome emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated, the Holy Spirit has here pictured to the life.”
Even in many Anglican churches today, the chanting of psalms is becoming a lost art. Metrical psalms are not, except in the rarest cases, actual translations of the original, but to congregations used to hymn singing they can offer something of the riches that singing (or saying) of the psalms provide.
As with those metrical psalms in regular use (The King of love my shepherd is; Through all the changing scenes of life; O God, our help in ages past to name a few examples) the hymns in this collection claim no more than to be ‘based on’ the psalm in question; and of course, as with the examples above, they can be sung in their own right as hymns, regardless of their origin.
A glance at themes represented (following the first line, on the Contents page) will show the kind of variety that will often fit easily into a pattern of worship; or be of help in private devotion.
Timothy Dudley-Smith November 2013 Ford, Salisbury