AN ESSAY. 7 contest that the song of the Lamb is also to be sung; and if the following words in this text are not to be esteemed the song of Moses, then neither are they to be esteemed the song of the Lamb; because there is not any express mention of the Lamb,. or his death, or resurrection, or redemption : nor is there any other song in scripture that bears that title ; and consequently it must signify a song composed to the praise. of God for our de- liverance by the Lamb, in imitation of the joy composed for deliverance by the hand of Moses : And thus at least we are to suit part of our psalmody to the gospel- state, as well as bor- row part from the Old Testament, which is the chief point I designed to prove. The next enquiry then proceeds thus : How must the psalms of David, and other songs borrowed from scripture, be trans- lated in order to be sung in christian worship ? Surely it will be granted, that to prepare them for psalmody under the gospel, requires another sort of management in the translation, than to prepare them merely for reading as the word of God in our language, and that upon these two accounts : First, If it he the duty of the churches to sing psalms, they must necessarily be turned into such a sort of verse and metre as will best fit them for the whole church to join in the worship : Now this will be very different from a translation of the original . language word for word ; for the lines must be confined to a cer- tain number of syllables, and the stanza or verse, to a certain number of lines, that so the tune being short the people may be acquainted with it, and be ready to sing without much difficulty; whereas if the words were merely translated out of the Hebrew as they are for reading, every psalm must be set through to music, and every syllable in it must have a particular musical note belonging to itself, as in anthems that are sung in cathe- drals: But this would be so exceeding difficult to practise, that it would utterly exclude the greatest part of every congregation from a capacity of obeying God's command to sing. Now in re- ducing a hebrew or a greek song to a form tolerably fit to be sung by an English congregation, here and there a word of the original must be omitted, now and then a word or two super- added, and frequently a sentence or an expression a little altered and changed into another that is something akin to it: And yet greater alterations must the psalm suffer, it we will have any thing to do with rhyme ; those that have laboured with utmost toil to keep very close to the hebrew, have found it impossible; and when they have attained it most, have made but very poor music for a christian church. For it will often happen, that one of the most affectionate, and most spiritual words in the prose, . will not submit to its due place in the metre, or does not end with a proper sound, and then it must be secluded, and another
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