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Updated: June 13, 2025
When it was seasonable to sing praise to God, they were to do it with the spirit and the understanding also; 'not in the miserable, scandalous doggerel of Sternhold and Hopkins, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such as would sooner provoke a critic to turn Christian than a Christian to turn critic; they were to sing 'not lolling at their ease, or in the indecent posture of sitting, but all standing before God, praising Him lustily and with a good courage; there was to be 'no repetition of words, no dwelling on disjointed syllables. Wesley was much struck with the remarkable decorum with which public worship was conducted by the Scotch Episcopal Church, which has always been more inclined to High Church usages than her English sister.
They might as reasonably have called Tom Sternhold Virgil, and the resemblance would have held as well." In his Essay on Satire he says: "And yet we know that in Christian charity all offences are to be forgiven as we expect the like pardon for those we daily commit against Almighty God.
This second and enlarged edition was dedicated, in a four-page preface, to King Edward VI., and a pretty story is told of the young king's interest in the verses. The delicate and gentle boy of twelve heard Sternhold when "singing them to his organ" as Strype says, and wandered in to hear the music and listen to the words.
And the glamour of eternal, sweet-voiced youth hangs around the gentle Cicely, through the power of the inscription in the old psalm-book, "In youth I praise And walk thy ways," the romance of the time when Cicely, the Puritan commonwealth, the whole New World was young. Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms.
In the third Essay, on Parochial Psalmody, he gives the preference to Merrick's weak and affected version over the two other translations that are used in our churches. The late Bishop Horsley, in his Commentary on the Psalms, was, I believe, the first who was hardy enough to claim that palm for Sternhold, to which, with all its awkwardness, his rude vigour entitles him.
We should go on fighting with the rest of the world forever, if the ministers had not taken to fight among themselves." "As for Sternhold," said the earl, "'t is a vulgar dog, and voted for economical reform.
Other old critics thought that Sternhold, could he return to life, would hardly know his own verses. This is Sternhold's rendering of the Psalm in the edition of 1549: The heavens & the fyrmamente do wondersly declare The glory of God omnipotent his workes and what they are. Ech daye declareth by his course an other daye to come And By the night we know lykwise a nightly course to run.
The metrical translation of the Psalms known as Sternhold and Hopkins' Version was doubtless used in the public worship of God in many of the early New England settlements, especially those of the Connecticut River Valley, though the old register of the town of Ipswich is the only local record that gives positive proof of its use in the Puritan church.
"Not but there are who merit other palms Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with psalms. The boys and girls whom charity maintains Implore your help in these pathetic strains. How could devotion touch the country pews Unless the gods bestowed a proper muse."
There the boys of the free school also could be under the master's eye, and with instruments of music like those of King David, but now banished from even village churches, would accompany him in the doggerel strains of Sternhold and Hopkins, immortalised by Cowper.
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