MR. STEAD'S TEST FOR HYMNS.

MR. STEAD has hardly discovered a true principle for the selection of the best hymns when he makes it his chief criterion that a hymn shall" have helped." If, indeed, he could prove that any hymn had not helped, it would be a very good negative criterion against selecting it, just as it would be a very good criterion against the selection of a life- buoy or life-belt that it had never after thousands of trials succeeded in saving the life of the man to whom it was thrown. But if any one were to treat the fact that a particular plank had actually saved the life of the man who

had got hold of it, as a proof that that special plank, or even any plank like it, must be of special value for the saving of life in deep water, be would certainly be accounted a very ill - advised counsellor by the Royal Humane Society, who would much prefer to judge of the advantages

of any such aid to men under risk of drowning not by the accident that it had saved a life, but by the

intrinsic qualities of the instrument itself,—its power of dis- placing a bulk of water very much heavier than itself, and the conveniences it might afford to the inexperienced and terrified person in need of it, for holding fast to it without too much muscular effort. Mr. Stead seems to us to go very far astray in choosing his own exceedingly accidental criterion for the selection. He pleads for it in this way :—

" The root idea of this Hymnal is to select the hymns, not by the fine or finicky 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 there 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."

Now just so a shipwrecked man who had clung to a bit of board from the wreck, and had managed by the help of it to reach the shore in safety, might say : =Here and thus did this plank help me, that is the best of all possible arguments for believing that it will prove helpful in similar circum-

stances to similar sufferers.' The plank may have had very little buoyancy of its own ; it may have had a good deal of iron in it ; it may have been more or less rotten ; and it may have taken a great deal of effort to hold fast to it ; but if, nevertheless, that plank proved itself the salvation of the poor wretch who lighted upon it, would it have thereby won its Tight to a place among the best appliances of the Humane Society for saving life at sea ? Surely to argue that it would, would be very bad reasoning. The fact that it had saved one life, or even two or three lives at various times, would only show that it was not wholly useless, that it was better than nothing. But it would not and could not show that it would be as good as a life-belt, to say nothing of a life-buoy, and yet that is what Mr. Stead's argument requires. He is making a selection of one hundred and fifty among many hundreds and even thousands of hymns, and the fact that one of them written in doggerel and bad grammar and adorned with "atrocious metaphors," had been of substantial use to two or three people, would weigh for very little unless there were good reason to suppose that none of the hundreds of hymns that have in them no "doggerel" metre, no 'bad grammar," no "atrocious metaphors," but are poems as well as prayers, have entirely failed in doing as much or more for those on whose hearts they have taken hold. What Mr. Stead seems to assume, which is in our opinion cer- tainly untrue, is that the spiritual effect produced by a very clumsy and limping hymn could not have been produced by any other clothed in more natural and beauti- ful speech. Our own belief, and we should have thought it would have been Mr. Stead's belief also, is that it is not so much the individuality of the hymn, but the divine spirit speaking through the hymn which produces the pro- found impression to which Mr. Stead's correspondents give so many striking testimonies. If one hymn had not been there to produce the effect they describe, some other would have produced that effect,—and an even greater effect if the spirit embodied in it had been equally sincere while the mode of

expression had been a great deal more closely fitted to the thought and feeling of the writer. Newton's hymn, "Begone, Unbelief," of which Mr. Stead speaks, and finds some others to speak, with ardent gratitude, is no doubt the product of a very sincere and earnest faith, but not of a more sincere and earnest faith than hundreds of others excluded from this selection, and yet embodied in far more fitting and impressive language, and therefore likely to impress scores of hearts for

every one which this limping hymn with its rather ostenta- tiously pietistic twang would touch. These are the verses which took such a hold of Mr. Stead himself :—

" His love in time past Forbids inn to think He'll leave ma at last In trouble to sink.

Each sweet Ebenezer I have in review Confirms his good pleasure To help me quite through."

Now, we venture to say that these verses would repel twice as many as they would touch, not because they were anything

but thoroughly sincere in the author, but because they are the stiff utterance of a man who could only use what we may

fairly call the stammering speech of a child eked out by a borrowed Scriptural word of no English origin which gives an air of Sunday-school ambitiousness to the childish performance. There are three really great hymn-writers in the English language,—Charles Wesley, James Montgomery, and William Cowper, from whose writings alone it would have been per- fectly easy to supply every one of Mr. Stead's hundred and fifty hymns without so much as giving a single hymn that had any artificial or ineffectual ring in it. Mr. Stead gives us eight of Charles Wesley's, not one of James Montgomery's, and five of Cowper's, and he omits such a hymn as Mont- gomery's "For ever with the Lord," containing two noble stanzas which, we venture to say, have penetrated scores of hearts through and through for every one which "Begone.

Unbelief," has reached. And he does this in order to include Newton's pattering little stanzas. He might almost as well have preferred the flint arrow-heads of the stone ages to the modern rifle for the effectiveness of their work. Here are the two stanzas of Montgomery's great hymn which are hardly rivalled in devotional poetry of this popular kind, except by

Charles Wesley :—

" Here in the body pent

Absent from !aim I roam,

Yet nightly pitch my moving tent A day's march nearer home.

Then when my latest breath Shall rend the veil in twain By death I shall ese.ipe from death And life eternal gain."

And many stanzas almost as fine as these are omitted to find room for such halting pieces as "Begone, Unbelief," and such vindictive ragings as those of the " Marseillaise " war-song, which has about as much business in Mr. Stead's collection as any other bit of rhetoric which leaves God wholly out of account and makes its appeal solely to the passions of men.

We do not in any way find fault with Mr. Stead for not judging his selection by what he calls the "line and finicky ear of the critic in the study," though Mr. Stead himself shows some deference to that "fine and finicky ear" when he can get a great poet like Goethe to endorse its judgment, —but what we do complain of is that while he excludes (perhaps rightly) all such exquisite devotional poetry as

George Herbert's or Henry Vaughan's, or to a very con- siderable extent even Keble's, on the ground, we suppose, that it is too subtle and refined to exert great influence in "the storm and stress of life," he uses as hymns such cold and deliberately rationalistic stuff as Pope's Universal Prayer to "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord," which has not the faintest spark of gracious inspiration about it, solely because it has that pseudo-Catholic ring, which a clever man who manages to make his intellect take the place of a missing heart,

sometimes produces by artificial means. We can well imagine that the "young Japanese" mistook the hymn for one of real breadth and comprehension, for they could not have caught its thoroughly frigid tone. But in reality it is as little Catholic in the true sense of the term as verse could be. There is a cold Catholicity which manages to freeze all real life out of religion, and then takes credit because it has deprived the fire which might have scathed us, of its biting force. Pope was nominally, no doubt, a Roman Catholic, but if he had a heart he never showed it in his verse at all, and his Universal Prayer was a mere moral vacuum which embraces everything that it has first reduced to nothingness. Mr. Stead's "Begone, Unbelief," lame and ricketty as it is, is far preferable to the worst poem Pope ever wrote. Pope could be keen and scathing, and he could also be very neat and pretty, but it was, we believe, simply out of his power to be devotional at all. Tried by Mr. Stead's test of helpfulness, we doubt this Universal Prayer ever having helped any one at all who could fully understand its almost Arctic frigidity. But Mr. Stead, while he attaches too much importance to genuine but raw emotion, also attaches too much importance to that which is almost at the opposite pole,—the shadow of a great name.

What seems to us to be of the essence of a really true hymn

is simplicity, intensity of feeling, and the evidence of a reverent and subdued heart. Mr. Stead finds the first two qualities in almost all those hymns which he has chosen for their intrinsic qualities, and not for the name of the authors, or of the patrons whose recommendations he has accepted,

but the latter quality is by no means universally present even in the great majority of his own choice. We will give, there- fore, one hymn which seems to us almost perfectly typical of the highest type. The late Dean Milman wrote many fine and popular hymns, which, like Bishop Heber's, had rather too pro- nounced a rhetorical air,—an air rather incongruous with the natural attitude of a subdued, submissive heart. But he wrote one absolutely perfect hymn, which, to our great sur- prise, we have not found either in "Hymns, Ancient and Modern," or in Mr. Stead's selection, though Dr. Martineau bas included it in his "Hymns for the Christian Church and Home." It is very short, very simple, fall of a generous intensity, and yet anything but rhetorical or passionate

"Lord, we sit and cry to Thee Like the blind beside the way ; Make our darkened souls to see The glory of Thy perfect day ; Lord, rebuke our sullen night And give Thyself unto our sight.

Lord, we do not ask to gaze On our dim and earthly sun, But tho light that still shall blaze When every star its course hath run; The glory of Thy blest abodo The uncreated light of God."

That is a hymn which would have fascinated, we think, even the simple souls that were not repelled by the rub-a-dub-dub of "Begone, Unbelief," and which is calculated to touch a greater number of hearts than any but the very best of Charles Wesley's wonderful hymns.