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Church of England. Poo's of commen prayer.

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prayer. Paniter

LITURGICAL PSALTER

ARRANGED FOR USE IN THE

SERVICES OF THE CHURCH

BY WALTER HOWARD FRERE, C.R.
Bishop of Truro

A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. LTD.
LONDON: 28 Margaret Street, Oxford Circus, W.1
OXFORD: 9 High Street

MILWAUKEE, U.S.A.: The Morehouse Publishing Co.

Printed in Great Britain

First impression, 1925

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CHEN PS 1925

757627

INTRODUCTION

THE Psalter has been used in many ways in different forms of Christian worship. Indeed it has been the great quarry out of which the greater part of the early music of the Church has hewn its words. Sometimes psalms have been taken whole; sometimes parts of them only which have been found particularly appropriate. In the earliest uses we find both these methods employed: e.g. a psalm, or group of psalms, appropriated to the services of particular Hours, side by side with a part of a psalm sung between the lessons read in the Liturgy. From other occasions, such as a Vigil, when a prolonged effort of worship was to be made, the continuous singing of psalms probably took its origin. This plan was taken up by the hermits and monks, who found in the recitation of the Psalter by course an admirable devotional exercise and the result of this is seen in many forms of Breviary Offices, where provision is made, either by week, or fortnight, or month, for the recitation in course of the whole 150 psalms of the Psalter, except those already appropriated to special Hours-such as Lauds or Compline.

This continuous recitation was characteristic of monastic (or clerical) services it was suitable to experts in devotion rather than to the average In the people's services the method of selection prevailed over that of recitation-in-course.

man.

The great exception is the English Prayer Book and nowhere else in Christendom do ordinary lay-people attempt the task. It is, however, only few among ourselves that do so. Most of those who take part in our monthly course do so only on four days of the month. They share in that course only to the extent of accepting such a selection as the kalendar may bring to them. But many of them cling to the idea that they share in a course; and resent any idea of change. The scheme of revision, which forms part of the Alternative Prayer Book, would make it permissible, on Sundays at any rate, to give up the principle of recitation-in-course for that of selection. We may hope that in time this option may prevail. But if the selective plan is adopted, it should be followed frankly; and the best parts should be selected to the exclusion of the less suitable.

The Psalter is not uniformly suitable. Yet in the scheme propounded for Sundays according to the Revised Prayer Book there seems to survive

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a hankering after the discarded ideal, taking the shape of an attempt to work in most of the psalms into the table, more or less equally.

The present object is, however, not to criticize that table, but to put forward an example of a more whole-hearted adoption of the principle of selection. This LITURGICAL PSALTER is not the biblical Psalter, but a series of psalms taken from it for liturgical purposes. Psalms have been taken into it, or have not, so far as might be, on their merits, that is, their utility for the purpose of the Christian worship of ordinary congregations. A conservative line has been followed: only eleven psalms are not included (35, 49, 52, 58, 59, 64, 75, 76, 82, 83, 87), besides three (14, 70, 108) which are duplicates. But the psalms are not necessarily taken whole. Parts are omitted where it seemed desirable; or (more accurately speaking) in some cases only the part (or parts) of a psalm that seemed devotionally profitable have been included. This Liturgical Psalter is thus quite different from the bowdlerized Book of Psalms, which the Measure for Prayer-Book revision would provide, both in result and in method. The process that produces it is a positive and not a negative one.

The Editor is anxious not so much to commend his own selection, as to urge the principle of selection: and it is with this object that he ventures to put out a Liturgical Psalter.

§ 2

Having gone so far, he must go further. A selection of Hebrew psalms intended for public worship must take into account balance and rhythm, as well as the grouping of verses; questions of translation are sure to arise ; and even details of printing call for some attention. Such considerations did not enter in when the Prayer Book translation was made for Coverdale's Bible but they leap to the eyes now.

1. THE STRUCTURE OF HEBREW POETRY has created a corresponding type of chant, twofold in build. But in the Psalter a considerable amount of threefold parallelism is found, partly perhaps due to interpolation, but more largely due to a desire for some variety. The chant cannot follow the text in this respect without becoming over-elaborate. So there is a problem

constantly emerging, how to wed a twofold chant to threefold parallelism. There are cases where the excision of one of the members may be thought justifiable (1) or the cutting off of one to make an independent verse (2). But for the most part nothing can be done but the makeshift of setting two of the three lines to one half of the chant and one to the other half. Some of the changes here made in the position of the colon are due to this

difficulty (3), while others merely re-establish the normal parallelism of the Hebrew (4).

Apart from this, the English version provides a parallelism corresponding as far as possible with the Hebrew parallelism. But a translation cannot wholly secure the regular pulsing of the original, with its three, or four, or (more rarely) five pulses to a line. The more it can do so the better: but sometimes the English produces a set of pulses and a parallelism of its own, which is not that of the Hebrew, but is a very good substitute for it. A good example is given by the cases where two Hebrew parallel lines, with five pulses each, are represented by four English lines, each of the Hebrew lines making two English lines (5).

2. (i) ANGLICAN RHYTHM. A Liturgical Psalter of to-day must have in view the needs and limitations of the Anglican chant. This form has grown up out of the singing of our English Prayer Book Psalter. It has not the variety and flexibility of plainchant; and for that reason again its limitations must be specially kept in mind. Like the language out of which, or on to which, it has grown, it is prevailingly monosyllabic, and is constructed for cadences which end (oxytone) with a strong syllable. The Anglican chant can manage without much difficulty the (paroxytone) cadence, accented on the penultimate syllable, which is the prevailing rhythm in Latin and in all the more rhythmical languages: but it is in great difficulty with cadences where the last accent is on the third syllable from the end (proparoxytone); and still more so with the monstrous English words (as now pronounced) in which it is on the fourth from the end. A proparoxytone cadence is manageable if the word is light, e.g. vanity, enemy, and the like; but clumsy if it is heavy, e.g. in such cases as inheritance, reverence, righteousness, unless indeed these heavier words are given a much more deliberate and rhythmical expression than is now the custom. Any word like innocency, testimony, innumerable is a monstrosity in a cadence (6). But unfortunately such cases are common in the English Psalter. They are troublesome even earlier in the sentence (7). Only occasionally does it seem possible to mend matters, without making changes more drastic than would be tolerated.

(ii) Other accents than the last one in the cadence have also to be considered; for the Anglican chant is not very flexible. A choir that is skilful and sings daily can, no doubt, modify its rigidity; but an ordinary parochial choir, or a congregation, can hardly handle it freely. For them it has certain domineering accents alike in the first half and in the second. Consequently there are cases where a change is needed, if at all possible, for

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