This is an entirely superficial criticism, though, in greater or less degree, it has been accepted in many modern hymn-books. It is unsound in principle, and contrary to the highest precedents, ancient and modern. It is the personal element that makes a hymn dear to the congregation of Christ’s flock. It is the fit expression of profound individual experience that gives a hymn its charm for the multitude, who can think poetry, but cannot write it. Perhaps no hymn of the last century has touched more hearts than Newman’s ‘Lead, kindly Light’; yet it was written as a personal prayer, giving expression to a special and temporary experience. Few hymns better illustrate the appropriateness to others of the experience of one. In his later years, Newman declined, almost querulously, to be ‘examined’ as to what he meant exactly by the closing lines of his famous hymn, written in a ‘transient’ state of mind, ‘when home-sick or sea-sick’; but to Mrs. Tait, who inscribed the lines And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since and lost awhile beneath the portrait of the children taken so suddenly from the desolated Deanery at Carlisle, no lapse of years could ever dull their meaning. The poet often speaks ‘not of himself,’ and his words may be truer as well as richer to the man who repeats than to the man who wrote them. A formal service, performed by professionals or by the technically ‘religious,’ may find suitable expression in general terms; but the Christian congregation Learns the use of _I_ and _me_. The grandest of all hymns, ancient and modern, throb with individual life, whether they soar to heaven on the wings of ecstasy, or bow to earth beneath an overwhelming sense of sinfulness. Bless the Lord, O my soul, And all that is within me bless His holy name. Have mercy upon me, O God ... Blot out my transgression. Create in me a clean heart, O God; And renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence, And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. O happy day that fixed my choice On Thee, my Saviour and my God! Abide with me! fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear, It is not night if Thou be near. Thou, O Christ, art all I want, More than all in Thee I find. Some of the most sublime passages in ancient chant and modern hymn are those in which the singer turns from the confession of a common sin or the expression of a common gratitude to claim a personal share in it. Even that greatest hymn of the Church’s public worship, the ‘Te Deum Laudamus,’ voices at last the cry of the individual believer— In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped; let me not be ashamed for ever. So Charles Wesley, celebrating the first anniversary of his conversion, sings—