The Happy man, and the true gentleman

This broadside, The Happy Man, as well as The Good Shepherd, An Invitation to Reformation, The Union, and The Exiles of Eden, include exhortations to forsake worldly vice for Christian blessings and some give conversion experiences as well. It is interesting that none of them bears an imprint. It is possible that they were ordered and purchased in bulk by itinerant missionaries.

A number of broadsides on the topic of The Happy Man were published from the 1770s well into the 1800s. The prose texts even appeared in newspapers, printed in the Castine (ME) Eagle on September 12, 1811, “to aid the cause of virtue and religion.” The two ring of the language of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress but have been attributed to Reverend Elias Smith, an early nineteenth-century revival preacher and hymnbook compiler.[1]

The hymn that follows the first section is a truncated version (beginning with verse 3) of Isaac Watts’s hymn for Sermon 31, “Am I a Soldier of the Cross” (Sermons, hymn 112). The pairing of the “Happy Man” text with Watts’s militaristic hymn is interesting, as there is no hint in the prose section that the unassuming “happy man” would ever fight.

The broadside version of the hymn text was revised to make it congregational. Using only Watts’s second and fourth verses, “I” and “my” became “we” and “our.” Jeremiah Ingalls set the entire Watts text to music for his Christian Harmony, adding a rousing “Glory, hallelujah” chorus. It is likely that his music was intended for this version of the hymn.

This second section of text, “The True Gentleman,” may also be modeled on Bunyan and has been quoted over the years with and without credit to him. The lyric beneath should not be confused with “Farewell, vain world, I must be gone,” which was circulating at the same time; a lyric on the same subject appeared much earlier in the sixth edition of Michael Wigglesworth’s “Farewell to the World” (74-76). The “farewell vain world” opening is often used for anticipation of death lyrics but on this broadside the poem appears to be more of a renouncement of worldly pleasures than of life itself.

This particular lyric is the first three verses of a new hymn, “Farewell to All but Christ,” published in Divine Hymns; or, Spiritual Songs in 1801. It was written to fit any ballad meter tune (8.6.8.6) (81-82). The words were published in six hymnals between 1801 and 1806 but were not associated with any particular tune. The hymn does not appear in Nicholas Temperley’s Hymn Tune Index.