It is usual to call the eighteenth century the golden age of hymn-writing; but I am not sure that this will be the final verdict. I confess that in many respects I find both the earlier and the later period more attractive. If we leave out of the account Wesley’s hymns, many of which owe their long use in the Methodist Churches to other than poetic considerations, the vast majority of the eighteenth-century hymns have disappeared from modern use. It is interesting to compare the hymn-books of 1750-1850 with those issued within the last twenty years. Rippon’s _Selection_, in its various editions; Collyer’s _Hymns_; Dobell’s _New Selection of Nearly Eight Hundred Evangelical Hymns_; Bickersteth’s _Christian Psalmody_; and Snepp’s _Songs of Grace and Glory_, compared with the most recent hymn-books, show not only what great additions have been made to the treasury of Christian song, but how many hymns once regarded as almost indispensable are now forgotten, and are never likely to be revived. The formal, didactic, preaching hymns, so popular a hundred years ago, have been steadily losing ground. They not only fail to touch the heart of present-day worshippers, they have no element of distinction, nothing that could or should give them a permanent place in the songs of the Church of Christ. Hymns of the period before Watts are much more common in twentieth-century hymn-books than in those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the hymns characteristic of the eighteenth century are rapidly disappearing. They were written to meet the needs of the Dissenting meeting-house and the Evangelical Revival. But among them are many which voice the experience, ‘not of an age, but of all time’; they speak the language of the soul that seeks and finds and follows the Saviour.