not indulge in continued self-analysis.

He is best

known by those lines, which have won many

hearts:

Come, ye sinners, poor and wretched,

Weak and wounded, sick and sore."

MISS HAVERGAL delights to express personal feelings and to describe spiritual states. The first personal pronoun is much on her lips. Moods and sentiments are plaintively pictured, and consequently there is a want of healthy vigour. A singer may start, as David often starts, with his own weaknesses and experiences, but he should quickly be absorbed in God, and in this contemplation of God the morbid self-analysis should be dropped.

6. SENSUOUS HYMNS.

Our praise is threatened with a deluge of amorous vapourings, sentimental effusions that verge on carnal passion and not on worship. To the emotional Mary, in the act of clasping the risen Christ, Jesus said, "Touch Me not." Many hymns, especially some from America, clasp Him with endearments, or gloat over His bodily wounds. "Touch Me not."

7. HYMNS OR SOLILOQUIES?

Some hymns included in recent collections are little more than devout meditations.

They are not praise, they are not prayer-unless by implication: they are pious reflections. They have

great excellences as religious poems, but they are not hymns.

Yet, in spite of this fact, they are found to be profitable for comfort and devotion.

ADELAIDE A. PROCTER has written several pieces that a devout mind loves to repeat; but scarcely one of them is a hymn proper; e.g.:

I do not ask that Thou wouldst take from me

Aught of its load."

A. L. WARING has written two pieces dear to our hearts, yet subject in some measure to the same criticism. Reflections occupy too much space. They

"My heart is resting, O my God."

Pieces that were written first as pure literature, and not as materials for worship, are naturally more likely to be mainly meditative. Those authors whose profession is literature do not generally follow the hymn model. And it is well that we should utilize in praise matter that is unconventional and free in its form. This more liberal treatment has admitted to the latest Hymnals such writers as Whittier, Bryant, Tennyson, O. W. Holmes, Longfellow, Jean Ingelow, and George Macdonald.

8. REJECTED HYMNS.

When we remember that Charles Wesley wrote six thousand hymns, that other authors composed hundreds, we see that the rejected must vastly outnumber the accepted. In the "struggle for existence," the fittest have no doubt survived. The elements that constitute unfitness are very varied.

Some are rejected because they indulge in fantastic metaphors, ingenious comparisons, quips and cranks of expression, or in minuteness of detail. Such abound specially in the Elizabethan era, which is unaccountably deficient in great hymn-writers.

One by GEORGE WITHER calls upon all to join in worship with heart, and voice, and instrument. The trumpet, the lute, and the viol are the chosen instruments. The choir is arranged thus: humanity to be choirmaster; birds to sing the warbling treble :

"Angels and supernal powers,

Be the noblest tenor yours.

From earth's vast and hollow womb

Music's deepest bass may come.

Seas and floods from shore to shore

Shall their counter-tenors roar."

The father of Nahum Tate, by name FAITHFUL TATE, might have figured as an approved hymnwriter to-day had he indulged less in overstrained and whimsical metaphors. The following belongs to the rejected, and no wonder !

"O Conscience! Conscience! when I look
Into thy register, thy book,

What corner of my heart, what nook,
Stands clear of sin ?

"And though my skin feels soft and sleek,
Scarce can I touch my chin, my cheek,
But I can feel Death's jawbone prick

Even through my skin."

JOHN BERRIDGE "took up the trade of hymnmaking because some jingling employment was required which might amuse and not fatigue him." He was remarkable for his humour and eccentricity, as also for his earnestness. As an example of his eccentric ways, he was buried by his own directions in that section of the churchyard where lay the suicides and the banned. His object was to remove the stigma, to consecrate the spot. His hymns are as eccentric as his ways.

"Jesus, Thou art the Rose

That blushest on the thorn;
Thy blood the semblance shows
When on Mount Calvary torn:
A rugged tree Thou hadst indeed,

But roses from a thorn proceed."

GEORGE HERBERT is almost as quaint and rich in "conceits" as Francis Quarles himself:

"The Sundays of man's life,

Threaded together in time's string,
Make bracelets to adorn the wife

Of the Eternal, glorious King."

I.

II.

EARLY CHRISTIAN HYMNS.

THE

HE primitive Christian congregations were secessions from the Jewish synagogues, and they carried the Hebrew praise with them into their services. The earliest attempts at Christian hymns were substantially compositions of the psalms of Miriam, Hannah, David. The "Magnificat" of Mary, the "Benedictus" of Zacharias, the "Nunc Dimittis" of Simeon, are all cast in the phraseology of the praise sung for long centuries previously in the Temple.

The "hymn" sung by Christ and the Twelve before leaving the Passover and first Lord's Supper to face Gethsemane's dread night was the Great Hallel (Psalms cxiii.-cxviii.)

The new faith soon demanded new expressions of its gladness. Yet for several generations the "hymns and spiritual songs" of the Christian Church rang with echoes of the sacred praise of the Temple.

The three most ancient hymns, sole remnants of the first two centuries, are the "TERSANCTUS

"Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts".