ERIK ROUTLEY was the leading hymnologist of the 20th century, producing a stream of more than 40 books on the history, theology, and music of hymns and carols. He wrote more than 100 hymn tunes and more than 30 texts, edited and co-edited 15 hymnals, took a prominent part in the Dunblane consultations that kickstarted the “hymn explosion” of the 1960s, and edited the Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for 27 years.

As this rather breathless list of achievements suggests, Routley lived life to the full and was something of a workaholic. His relentless schedule of preaching, teaching, and lecturing almost certainly contributed to his untimely death at the age of 64 in 1982. While he spent his last seven years in the United States, first as Director of Chapel at Princeton Seminary, and then as Professor of Church Music at the Westminster Choir College near by, most of his life was devoted to Congregationalist ministry in the UK.

He served in churches in Wednesbury, Dartford, Edinburgh, and Newcastle, and spent 11 years at Mansfield College, Oxford, where he combined the positions of lecturer (later professor) in church history, librarian, director of music, and chaplain to Congregationalist students at the University of Oxford.

Nancy Graham, herself a hymnologist and church musician based in Alabama, makes good use of hitherto unpublished letters and reminiscences to tell the story of Routley’s packed life. Perhaps her most interesting revelation is just how much this dedicated Nonconformist owed to his High Anglican schooling at Fonthill Preparatory School, East Grinstead, and Lancing College.

He later wrote: “I consider it fortunate that my godly parents sent me off to two Anglican boarding schools where the emphasis wasn’t on rousing sermons but on liturgy and the kind of worship in which youngsters could really participate, and by the age of fourteen I had become an Anglican snob. I was enjoying the aesthetics of the church more than its dogma. The Anglicans were winning.”

Routley’s immersion in school-chapel worship meant that “by the age of eighteen, I knew, intimately, four hymn books and was fascinated by the differences between them.” Only one of these was a Nonconformist hymnal, the Congregationalist Worship Song, on which he had been brought up by his parents and at his home church in Brighton. The others were the 1889 and 1904 editions of Hymns Ancient and Modern and the 1906 English Hymnal.

Reading this biography, one wonders whether Routley was ever tempted to depart from his Congregationalist roots and espouse Anglicanism, and if so, why he did not take that route. He clearly found the 40-minute sermons that he sat through in his youth heavy going, and was puzzled by the “peculiar sounds” that the ministers made when they were praying in public: “they had one voice for talking to God and another for talking to me. I was thankful that I wasn’t God.”

Nancy Graham does not speculate on this subject (although she does put a photograph of Lancing College Chapel on the front cover of her book). Overall, while she covers the details of Routley’s life and work very thoroughly, there is a rather disappointing lack of analysis and reflection, which leaves us without a considered assessment of his character, achievements, and legacy. Maybe chronicling his non-stop activity did not leave any room for it.

The Revd Dr Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.

The Unfractured Faith of Erik Routley: From Brighton to Princeton
Nancy L. Graham
Lexington Books/Fortress Academic £77
(978-1-9787-1404-5)
Church Times Bookshop £69.30