From the highway that leads to hell, From paths of darkness and despair, Lord, we are come with Thee to dwell, Glad to enjoy Thy presence here. It cost Him death to save our lives, To buy our souls it cost His own, And all the unknown joys He gives, Were bought with agonies unknown.[101] The ‘sacramentarian’ element is naturally absent from Watts’s twenty-five hymns ‘prepared for the holy ordinance of the Lord’s Supper,’ which are, with a few exceptions, much less solemn and impressive than those of Wesley. Two have, however, a permanent place among our Communion hymns. The seventh of the series, ‘Crucifixion to the World by the Cross of Christ’— When I survey the wondrous Cross is so great a hymn, and consecrated by so many hallowed associations, that comment is superfluous and criticism impertinent. The third, ‘The New Testament in the Blood of Christ, or The New Covenant Sealed,’ is absent from the chief hymnals to-day with the exception of the Methodist, to which it was added in 1830. It begins— ‘The promise of my Father’s love Shall stand for ever good,’ He said; and gave His soul to death, And sealed the grace with blood. Watts wrote no great festival hymns to be compared with ‘Hark! how all the welkin rings,’ or ‘Hail the day that sees Him rise.’ His best work is found in his hymns and spiritual songs, some of which are among the most spiritual and most scriptural ever written. The tone of triumph is comparatively rare, though now and again, as in ‘Join all the glorious names,’ he rises as high as ever Charles Wesley rose in his hymns for ‘Believers rejoicing.’ Such are, ‘My God, the spring of all my joys’; ‘Come, we that love the Lord’; ‘Jesus shall reign where’er the sun’; ‘Come, let us join our cheerful songs.’ To Dr. Watts, with his delicate health and protracted sicknesses, songs in a minor key were peculiarly suitable, and some of his most precious hymns are those which speak of the life to come. He seldom writes of death as Wesley does, and such a line as Ah, lovely appearance of death would have been impossible to him; but no Christian poet has touched the sorrows of our hearts more tenderly or comforted the bereaved more wisely than he has done in such a hymn as Give me the wings of faith to rise; while There is a land of pure delight has voiced the thoughts of myriads of anxious souls, to whom only ‘a prospect of heaven’ could make ‘death easy.’ Watts seldom, if ever, showed the ecstasy of Charles Wesley. He never sang The promised land, from Pisgah’s top, I now exult to see; but he knew that Could we but climb where Moses stood, And view the landscape o’er, Not Jordan’s stream nor death’s cold flood Should fright us from the shore. There are few more tender lines than the verse in his hymn for ‘The Death and Burial of a Saint’—