"Still waters run deep." We must not expect all who are helped by hymns to publish their special preferences and experiences, and among our own fellow-countymen especially, every man's heart is his castle. Yet there are yearnings shared by all. To express and interpret these yearnings, to deepen and guide them, is the work of the hymn-writer.

The object of this collection, of course, is to ascertain what writers have succeeded best. It is a very difficult task, even when the compiler is assisted by correspondence from the uttermost ends of the earth.

Still, the task, though arduous, has been pleasant. Who can estimate the incalculable force for goodness and kindness and honest living that these hymns represent! Each of them is as seed-corn bearing harvests by which the nations live. That is true of all hymns, for in them dwells the real catholicity of the Christian Church. Well said Henry Ward Beecher: —

There is almost no heresy in the hymn-book. In hymns and psalms we have a universal ritual. It is the theology of the heart that unites men. Our very childhood is embalmed in sacred tunes and hymns. Our early lives and the lives of our parents hang in the atmosphere of sacred song. The art of singing together is one that is forever winding invisible threads about persons.

In hymns, as in iron-clads and many other inventions, France has led the way. Clement Marot was the first to popularise the Psalms as the Song Book of the people. His version became the book of song in the castle as well as in the cottage, for recreation, and for at work; the lady at the hall, the weaver at the loom, the peasant at the plough, the first lesson taught to children, the last words whispered to or uttered by the dying man." I was reminded of the astonishing effect produced by the French innovation by the influence which the Salvation Army songs often exercise on a population which hears them for the first time. was a sight to see and not to forget, a string of cabmen at a north-country station sitting on a fence, sing

It

ing the hymns of the Salvation Army in the intervals between the trains.

The same thing was observed in Germany and in Scotland. Luther's doctrine would have fallen comparatively flat had not his psalms and hymns given wings to his teaching. They were carried all over the country by wandering students and pedlers, and became so popular that they even found their way into the Roman Catholic Church, so that a Romanist declared: "The whole people is singing itself into the Lutheran doctrine."

And no wonder; for Luther was one of the first to mark the great truth that the tune is more important than the words. With him the tune was first, the words second. Luther fashioned the words to the tune. "The rhythm of the song was always in his ear as he worked on it; he carefully fitted the syllables to the notes. In certain places it is seen that he did violence to the language to fit it to the exigencies of the music." But the German reformer had a good notion of what a tune should be. He said:

The words of hymns should have a swing and a good strong metre, so that the congregation might catch up the tune to join in with it. Let us bid good-bye to the music of Gregory, and take the common songs of our own people, as they sing them at harvests, at village festivals, at weddings, and at funerals, for use in our churches. Man can as well praise God in one tune as the other, and it is a pity that such pretty songs as these should be kept any longer from the service of their Maker.

Mr. Reginald Brett went too far when he declared that the music and congregational singing were the causes of emotion, and not the words of any hymn; but there is no doubt that Mr. Balfour was right when he said: -

One of the great merits of hymns lies in the associations which attach to them, from which it follows that they cannot really be considered apart from the tunes to which they are habitually set. In my opinion, the editor of a hymn-book who

deliberately divorces old words from their accustomed setting is an iconoclast of the worst order.

I hope that in affixing as far as possible the old familiar tunes to this collection, I may escape the major excommunication.

It is a fashion in some quarters to sneer at the poetical value of hymns. A glance, however, through the pages of this collection, will suffice to show that, while some hymns may fall far below the standard of first-class poetry, many, not the majority, will fairly rank with the best verse that our race has produced. Modern hymnologists are no longer of the opinion of the worthy men who compiled a hymn-book for one of the straiter sects of orthodox dissenters, in which it is gravely set forth that "poetry itself is objectionable as bearing the spirit and imagination of man." On this I am glad to have Mrs. Meynell's mature and dispassionate judgment against the disparaging observations of Mr. William Morris and Mr. Coventry Patmore. Mrs. Meynell

says:

Hymns have, and doubtless always will have, a power over men's minds; and I don't wonder at it, for I think - against the usual literary opinion that many popular hymns are very beautiful, and that their authors made literature without know. ing it. Personally I have none of those early associations with hymns. I never heard any in my childhood. Consequently, I think I have been touched by the real beauty of hymns, and not by the mere accident of association.

There only remains one word to say as to the extremely broad view which I have taken of my duties as an editor. Never before in any popular hymnal have hymns to the Virgin jostled the Confession of the Jewish faith, revolutionary songs elbowed the ancient anthems of the Church, while psalms and hymns and spiritual songs of all countries and of all creeds and of none stand side by side on an equal footing, each exhibiting as its sole credential that it has helped the human heart to love, to dare, and to aspire, and

strengthened man to bear his part worthily in the warfare of life. It is well when we introduce the million to the study of comparative religion that the Religions should be on their best behaviour. All religions show their best manners in sacred song. But until this little book chanced to fall into the hands of its readers, how many of them were utterly oblivious of the treasures of beauty, of wisdom, and of love that were to be found outside the cover of the hymn-book of their own church? Here at least Roman, Greek, Lutheran, Calvinist, Methodist, Unitarian, and Jew are recognisable only by the common accents of a common faith in the One Father in Whose family all we are brethren.

THE

PREFACE.

HE songs of the English-speaking people are for the most part hymns. For the immense majority of our people to-day the only minstrelsy is that of the hymn-book. And this is as true of our race beyond the sea as it is of our race at home.

Of the making of collections of hymns there is no end. But so far as I have been able to discover, no collection of hymns has ever been made based upon the principle of including in it only those hymns which have been most helpful to the men and women who have most influenced their fellow-men. Yet surely those hymns which have most helped the greatest and best of our race are those which bear, as it were, the hall-mark of Heaven.

The root idea of this Hymnal is to select the hymns, not by the fine or finical ear of the critic in the study, or even by the exalted judgment of the recluse in the cloister, but by the recorded experience of mankind. Here and thus did this hymn help me that is the best of all possible arguments in favour of believing that it will prove helpful under similar circumstances to similar characters. The hymn may be doggerel poetry, it may contain heretical theology, its grammar may be faulty and its metaphors atrocious, but if that hymn proved itself a staff and a stay to some heroic soul in the darkest hours of his life's pilgrimage, then that hymn has won its right to a place among the sacred songs through which God has spoken to the soul of man.

Who is there among the men and women of this generation who has not, at some time or other, experienced the strange and subtle influence of sacred song? Hymns have rung in the ears of some of us while still