THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 153
him the title The Doctor of Christian Art. He gave a great impetus to Greek hymnody, and besides his influence on their form and music, he gave their doctrinal character to the canons. This hymn is the first of eight odes in his Easter Canon, which is held to be the grandest piece in Greek sacred poetry. The brilliant phrases, culminating in acclamation, the freedom of the thoughts, the ringing, victorious joy, and the lofty presentation of the import of the Resurrection, compose a series of magnificent efforts of imaginative devotion. His hymns are grouped round the incarnation and life of Christ.
This is called The Golden Canon, or Queen of Canons. It proclaims the fact of the Resurrection, the New Passover, in which all are to rejoice.
The Greek hymn is sung every Easter Day in Athens and throughout the Greek Church amid scenes of triumph. Men clasp each other s hands and rejoice as though some great joy had suddenly come to them all.
St. Sabas, the founder of the famous monastery, died in 532, and forty monks still live in cells surrounding his grave. Dr. Hugh Macmillan says, Passing through the dreary, homeless waste of calcined limestone hills, which stretch between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, you come at last to the gate of the monastery, perched like an eagle s nest on the edge of the gorge of the Kedron. You look sheer down from the parapet that guards the open court of the convent, five hundred feet or more, to the bottom of the defile, where the Kedron in intermittent threads of silver languidly flows. The Rev. James King (Anglican Hymnology, 1885) speaks of the savage desolation amid which the convent has stood for fourteen centuries : Several times in the course of ages it has been plundered, and the inmates put to death by Persians, Moslems, and the Bedouin Arabs ; and, therefore, for the sake of safety, the monastery is surrounded by massive walls, and further guarded by two strong towers near the entrance, which tend to give the edifice the appearance of a fortress in a commanding position. On being admitted inside the gate we found chapels, chambers, and cells innumerable, for the most part cut out of the rock, perched one above the other, and con nected by rocky steps and intricate passages. The huge building seems as if it were clinging to the face of a steep precipice, so that it is difficult to distinguish man s masonry from the natural rock.
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