Excerpt from Latin Hymns: Edited With Introduction and Notes

The language, it is true, of Christian prose and verse is not that of the Augustan age of Roman literature. It could not be. The thoughts and feelings of the Confessions of St. Augustine, or of the Dies - [me and the Landa Sion, could no more be expressed in the language of Cicero or in the diction and meters of Horace than the ocean can be confined within the banks of the Tiber. The Latin of the classic writers possesses a certain fulness and majesty and decorum, a stately self-control that is admirable in its way, but it lacks something which paganism could not give: it lacks flexibility and the power to adapt itself to the infinite reaches of Christian thought and to the profoundly spiritual emotions of the re generated human heart. This is the reason why, with all its perfection of form, classical Latin is comparatively formal and cold, without the softening and deepening influence that comes from the intimate communion of the soul with God and heavenly things. Cicero, indeed, in the finest passages of the Somninin Scipionis and the De Senectnte reaches out after this higher spiritual quality of style; Virgil has more of it than any other Latin writer; but it was reserved for St. Jerome and St. Augustine and other great Christian writers to make the ancient tongue vibrate on the ear with a new rhythm and cadence, - a rhythm, sweet and strange and as far-reaching as the new-born sense of the boundless power and love of God. This is the Latin of the liturgy and of the great medieval writers. It is Latin, not in its last stage of decay, as Macaulay would have it, but the ancient language transformed and spiritualized, representing the dawning of a fresh order of expereinces, the regenerate type of humanity. In the happy phrase of Mr. David Lewis, it is 'baptized' Latin.

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