Commentary, Notes, and Introductions to the 1858 Sabbath Hymn Book: The Musicalized Theology of Popular Belief Just Before the Civil War

"The 1858 Sabbath Hymn Book" stands as an important and significant historical product of nineteenth-century American hymnody, as well as a by-product of nineteenth-century American Protestant culture, that, outside of the boundaries marked off by a small number of specialists in the field, lies practically forgotten. '...[the "Sabbath Hymn Book"] demonstrates the existence of the tensions within American congregational song, a competition, of sorts, between the influences of the 'classical' hymnodists from outside the United States - the likes of Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, Charles Wesley, Reginald Heber, James Montgomery, John Keble, et al - and the attempts by native American hymnodists to anchor their congregational hymnody to the theological needs and liturgical interests of American worshipers.' The importance of "The Sabbath Hymn Book" derives not only from indications of its relatively immediate popularity within the pews of mid-nineteenth-century Protestant congregations, but because of the high degree of its overall literary quality. Insofar as concern the current students of hymnody, the actual texts within this volume permit, and indeed facilitate, the observation of the practices of hymnal editors of nineteenth-century America - their methods of selection and revision, their priorities for placement and arrangement, their preferences and prejudices. However, from a century-and-a-half abyss of historical oblivion, it calls out for an airing - for a place upon library shelves, for a new opportunity to be read, to be studied, to be analyzed, to be discussed. Consider this sesquicentennial edition, then, a scholarly commentary - a scholarly tribute, perhaps - upon an effort of superior hymnodic scholarship.