In this light they are more difficult than Prayers. Beggars can express their wants to a prince; they cannot converse like his courtiers. Much the same remark may be made about the Songs or Canticles of the Church, which are also inspired, and are a kind of Psalms written for particular occasions, chiefly occasions of thanksgiving. Such are the two Songs of Moses, the Song of Hannah, those in Isaiah, the Song of Hezekiah, of Habakkuk, of the Three Children, of Zacharias, of the Blessed Virgin, and of Simeon, most of which are in the Breviary, and the last four are retained in our own Reformed Prayer Book. Yet though Hymns, as being of a measured length, and restrained metrically, are so far safer to attempt than Psalms or Songs, they have their own peculiar difficulties. They are direct addresses to Almighty God, which ever must be most difficult to the serious mind, whatever be the difficulty of other devotions. This, in the instance of Prayers, has led to the use of Sentences, such as occur in our own Services; which, besides the advantage of extreme brevity, for the most part admit of being taken from Scripture. It has led also to the repetition of the Lord's Prayer, and of the _Kyrie Eleison_; and, again, to the use of Collects, which lessen the difficulty of addressing God by subjecting it to fixed rules. Hence our best Family Prayers are what may be called a succession of Sentences strung together, the simple and concise expression of our humiliation, fear, hope, and desire, for ourselves and others. Long Public Prayers, to make a general assertion which of course admits of exceptions, are arrogant and irreverent; hence the Pharisees made them. Hence, too, the unchastised effusions which abound in the present day among those who have left the Church or lost her spirit. The great Eucharistic Prayer is nearly the only long prayer in the Catholic Church; and there is every reason to suppose that in its substance it proceeds from inspired authorities. In our own Service it has been separated by our Reformers into three distinct portions. Hymns, however, being of the nature of praises, cannot be altogether brought down to that grave and severe character which, as being direct addresses to God, they seem to require; and this is their peculiar difficulty. To praise God specially for Redemption, to contemplate the mysteries of the Divine Nature, to enlarge upon the details of the Economy of Grace and yet not to offend, to invoke with awe, to express affection with a pure heart, to be subdued and sober while we rejoice, and to make professions without display, and all this not under the veil of figurative language, as in the Psalms, but plainly, and (as it were) abruptly, surely requires to have had one's lips touched with a "coal from the Altar," to have caught from heaven that "new song" "which no man could learn, but the hundred and forty and four thousand which were redeemed from the earth"--the virgin followers of the Lamb.