(Most likely CS material though there should be a factual answer)
You remember the scene . . . Tom and Huck and Joe had disappeared, off playing pirates on their island. The town thought they were dead. They snuck into the church while their own funeral was in progress, to the amazement of the townspeople
and…
The minister’s words makes it sound like they are talking about the traditional Doxology hymn, but it could be that they sang the Doxology and then sang this unknown “Old Hundred”
Actually, it’s called that because the English words originally set to the tune (in approximately 1551) were paraphrased from Psalm 100 by William Kethe in the 1500s. It’s the “Old” Hundredth because a New Version of the English Psalter was published in 1696, with Psalm 100 set to a different tune. Technically, it’s the music that’s referred to by “Old Hundred”. Any number of hymns have been set to this music through the years, most famously Bishop Thomas Ken’s “Arise My Soul and With The Sun”, of which the last verse is commonly sung by Protestant congregations as the Doxology,:
FWIW, it’s Hymn No. 95 in the standard Methodist Hymnal.
The Old Hundredth is almost without a doubt the best-known and most-frequently played piece of Protestant liturgical music in the English-speaking world; anyone who grew up attending a Protestant church, particularly Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, or similar denominations, would instantly recognize it. I’m Jewish now and it still provokes a visceral reaction in me.
Take a look at the 3rd line (tenor) in what athelas cited. It’s the same melody as the midi file, though the rhythm (which even today varies among denominations) is a bit different.
In the singing tradition Twain’s writing about, the tenor part carries the melody. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” was one of the verses of “Old Hundred,” but not necessarily the first.
We sang The Doxology (tune “Old Hundredth”) every Sunday when I was in the Christian & Missionary Alliance Church. We sing it rarely in my Assembly of God church.
Um… dare I ask what kind of visceral reaction? Does it evoke bad memories of the religion of your upbringing? Hope not - I’ve always liked it. We often sing it - in church (I’m Episcopalian), at big family meals, etc. We sang it at our wedding rehearsal dinner, come to think of it.
So the “praise God” is in there, but not much else. No heavenly host. No Father, Son and Holy Ghost. I’m no biblical scholar, but I am pretty sure the Trinity is a specifically Christian concept, so it wouldn’t be mentioned in the OT.
I don’t get what you posted in either of these, or the Catholic. Again, I don’t believe anything that mentions the Trinity can be attributed to the Old Testament.
No, it’s not negative at all. It’s just one of those things that I have such strong memories of, and it’s such a majestic bit of music, that it evokes a whole complex of memories, associations, and emotions; don’t really know how to describe it. I don’t have bad memories of my childhood religion – as late as my senior year of high school I actually considered becoming a Methodist minister. I grew away from Christtianity for a variety of reasons, and eventually found Judaism to be a much more in line with my personal beliefs, but it was never because of any negative experiences.
The words quoted by the preacher are, as mentioned earlier, the first of the final four lines of a seventeenth-century hymn by Bishop Thomas Ken. They have nothing to do with Psalm 100, except that they are frequently sung as the Doxology to the melody known as the Old Hundredth, which is called that because in the first Protestant English Psalter, it was used as the tune for a paraphrase of Psalm 100 by William Kethe.
In the current Episcopal Hymnal, it’s hymn 380. Hymns are referred to by number, not page number. In fact, the hymnal I’m looking at doesn’t have page numbers. The first verse goes like this:
The hymn is attributed to Isaac Watts who lived at the turn of the 17th century and is a paraphrase of Psalm 117. This one isn’t listed in the copyright notices at the back of the hymnal.
My church still does it most Sundays between the offertory anthem and the beginning of Communion while people’s offerings are being brought to the altar, and I usually sing the alto harmony line because I remember my father singing that bit of harmony.
Both the Doxology by Thomas Ken (“Praise God from whom all blessings flow”) and William Kethe’s rhymed version of Psalm 100 (“All people that on earth do dwell”) are sung to a tune by Louis Bourgeois known as “Old Hundred.” Since the funeral preacher lines out the beginning words of the Doxology, I think it’s pretty clear that Twain means the congregation shook the rafters with those words to the famous “Old Hundred” tune. Kethe and Ken lived in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively. Too bad they weren’t contemporaries; they could have teamed up as “Kith and Kin.”