Te Deum laudamus Author:Elizabeth Rundle Charles Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE ANONYMOUS GREEK HYMNS T may be well to dwell on the anonymous early hymns before we enter on the compositions of any known author ; beca... more »use where the author is not ascertained (and the date thus fixed), whilst the style is simple and primitive, the earliest manuscript discovered may be but.a copy of earlier writings, and a record of some far earlier unwritten song. For instance, the "Gloria in Excelsis," sometimes called a Morning Hymn or the " Hymnus Angelicus," preserved in our Communion Service, is possibly or probably more ancient than anything Clement of Alexandria, the earliest known hymn-writer, ever wrote. Its sublime, simplicity would lead one to conclude it must be so, were Christianity merely an historical religion. As it is, the question of comparative chronology seems of little importance. The original authentic documents of our faith are in our hands, and these we all acknowledge as our standard of doctrine ; and the Fountain of our life is equally near to every age. Whether, therefore, the greaterpurity of many of these anonymous hymns arises from their greater antiquity, or from a fresh approach to that ever-present Fountain in an age when many had recourse to polluted waters and broken cisterns, is a problem we may contentedly leave unsolved. In either case, they bear witness to a living communion of some human hearts with God, and are as such most precious, whether we regard them as carrying up the links of our faith to the first century, or as bringing down the faith and worship of the apostolic age to the fourth century. The first of these anonymous hymns which may be given here are those called in Daniel's " Thesaurus," Morning and Evening Hymn ; the Morning Hymn being the well-known " Glory to God in the highest." MORNING HYMN. ...« less