6. _Fervour._—If there is no fire or glow in a hymn, it might as well be prose as poetry. Indeed, many hymns are so prosaic, so _wooden_, that it is difficult to see how they can ever Teach our faint desires to rise above the dullest levels of devotion. There should be in a hymn a restrained fervour, a reverent rapture of poetic inspiration free from all admixture of the sensuous and morbidly emotional. ‘Be not drunken with wine ... but be filled with the Spirit.’ Quench then the altar-fires of your old gods, Quench not the fire within.[29] Nay, rather, if we find no ‘minstrel rapture’ for the praise of the Most High, may we not ask with Charles Wesley— Why breaks not out the fire within, In flames of joy, and praise, and love? As might be expected, it is among the Anglican and the rationalistic communities that there is the greatest dread of the emotional in worship. Yet Dr. Martineau is the ablest apologist for fervour in religious poetry. The editor of a hymn-book will not think it necessary to graduate the fervour, the imaginativeness, the grandeur of the compositions admitted into his volume, by the cold, level, and prosaic condition of mind which may possibly prevail among some who use it. Thus, to damp the fire down to the temperature of the fuel, seems to offer but a small prospect of kindling anything. We must not thus forgo the glorious power which art exercises in worship. Its peculiar function in connexion with religion is to substitute for the poor and low thoughts of ordinary men, the solemn and vivid images of things invisible that have revealed themselves to loftier souls, and to present the objects of faith before the general mind in something of that aspect under which they rise up before the great artists of poetry and of sound. These gifted men are to lift us; we are not to depress them. In sacred music we acknowledge this principle at once; we confess that it is a noble thing, when we think of the origin of things, and call God the Creator, to have within us the mighty transitions of Haydn’s genius instead of our own puny dreams; to have the incidents of sacred story glow and live before us at the touch of a power like that of Handel or of Spohr; to find ourselves, at such bidding, with the ‘Shepherds abiding in the field,’ not far from the holy chant falling on the midnight air; or to hear in a voice, melting as Christ’s, ‘Come unto Me, ye weary’; or, as we pass from bereavement to bereavement of this world, to be haunted, as with a sudden peace, by the echo of that unearthly strain, ‘Blest are the departed.’ Not less elevating is the poetry than the melody of faith, when it is equally left alone with its first fresh power, and not reduced halfway to prose as a condition of its entrance into worship.[30]