stream through the darkness of the dark centuries, and they furnish the fresher beam of the new illumination, lighting the shrines and altars and chapels of modern times. What is a hymn? St. Augustine has, in a well-known passage, defined a hymn to have necessarily a threefold function. It must be praise; it must be praise to God; it must be praise in the form of song. These limitations, essential as they seem, would perhaps curtail many of our selections. We should then have to exclude much of that meditative devotion with which our best books abound; much also of that too painful and curious self-anatomy which many of our best hymn-writers permit their strains to exhibit. Yet we are very far from thinking that to be the test of sacred song which Augustine has supplied, and with which a very able writer in the “Quarterly Review,” in an article on hymnology, has quoted with approbation.[15] This test, applied to the great hymnals and hymnologists of the Church of the middle ages, would, we apprehend, be quite a failure. It is true that praise, and praise to God, and praise to God through Christ, in the form of song, should be the grand criterion for the structure of sacred verses for the use of congregations; but to what extent should these be mixed with the strains of simple devotion, the dwelling of the spirit upon the perfections of the Almighty; and with confession, the laying bare of the heart—its wants and its woes—in no morbid tone or strain, before the Divine and searching eye? Our impression surely is that hymns should represent all that the spirit desires to express in its moods of praise and prayer. By a more earnest appeal to the senses, the soul is opened; and it has been well said that so closely and mystically knit together are our higher and lower natures, that to neglect the one is to neglect the other. In prayer—the long, earnest, extemporaneous prayer—the spirit becomes abstracted, and, perhaps, even in the highest states, in the most subduing states of ecstacy, there are few of the congregation who rise as the preacher rises, or rest as he rests. The hymn, in its throbbings and tremulous and pendulous vibrations, breaks through the monotony and _ennui_ the body imposes on the soul, and, therefore, we are quite away from that increasing number in our more immediate midst who are indisposed to avail themselves of the bursts of sensuous song. We remember that it is not long since grave exception was taken by some among us to the singing— There is a land of pure delight,