Messages from the Lord are always true and seasonable, whether his words are those of rebuke or those of comfort. In each case too, the authority of the message is divine, and should not therefore be challenged. And the tenor of the messenger’s feelings must be according to the words which he speaks in the name of the Lord to his own generation, which was in a sadly degenerate condition. Its spiritual state, and the kind of message which the Lord gave him to deliver, caused his being distinguished as “the weeping prophet.” In times of backsliding, all who speak in the Lord’s name, and according to His mind, must be like him. The view which they have of the times they live in, and the kind of message which the Lord directs them to deliver combine to make them sad. The woeful condition of things around them casts its dark shadow on their face, and causes the gloomy and austere aspect for which they are condemned by those whom the Lord constrains them to rebuke.
First of all, then, on behalf of human hymns, it has been said, “We live now under a better and brighter dispensation than that of the Old Testament, therefore the inspired Psalms of David, and other Psalms in Holy Scripture, are insufficient.” But the question is not whether the dispensation under which we now live is better and brighter than that which preceded it, but whether, under this better and brighter dispensation, there is any security for better and brighter hymns than the Psalms of David, and whether there is a promise given to any man, or any body of men, of a richer unction of the Spirit—and not a richer unction only, but a specifically inspiring action of the Spirit, for the purpose of composing hymns for the public worship of God in the church than was given to him of whom it is written that, in his blessed swan song, he spoke as follows: “David, the son of Jesse said, and the man who was raised up on high, the anointed of the God of Jacob, and the sweet Psalmist of Israel, said, The Spirit of the LORD spake by me, and his word was in my tongue” (2 Sam. 23:1). Is there any modern hymnologist in circumstances to say that? Dr. Adam must tell us who he is, before his argument from the greater brightness of the New Testament dispensation is of any worth, otherwise it is an argument, not only on behalf of hymns, but against the Book of Psalms.
Very little thought is given these days to the question of the propriety of using instrumental music in public worship services. It is not questioned. The fact that instrumental accompaniment was more or less unknown in Presbyterian Church in Scotland up to the end of the 19th Century comes as a surprise to people, as does the knowledge that the great Baptist preacher of the Victorian era, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, never used instrumental accompaniment in the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London.
