Hymns touch and influence the most intimate life of men, the moral and spiritual, and are always influential for good. They concentrate the comforting truths of the Gospel, make them rememberable; what is even more important, they add the emotional vitality to those truths that make them real and actual. To leave out the hymns from a single service might be an interesting experiment; but omit them permanently, as was the former custom among the Friends, and note how arid and flat the service becomes. To some, the hymnbook is simply the Bible in another form, bringing its doctrines, its ideals, its hopes, its promises, its comforts, and its spiritual inspirations in a more apprehensible form. Having passed through the crucible of the actual personal experience of the writers of the hymns, they are more concrete, more appealing, more actual. _The Value of Singing Hymns Too Often Overlooked._ Since the hymn has so high a spiritual value, it is all the more distressing that its possibilities of spiritual helpfulness are so generally overlooked and ignored by our ministers and their people. Even where it seems to be distinctly cultivated and emphasized, it is often the merely physiological effects that are sought. In other apparently earnest endeavors to develop its value, there is the aridity of merely artistic and literary emphasis, or the formal liturgical aspect that is stressed! There is an absence of clear comprehension of what the hymns are intended to accomplish, of their meaning, of the emotions they are supposed to express, and of the methods to be used to vitalize them and to make them effective. They are used mechanically, in deference to tradition and good ecclesiastical form. Most ministers select hymns to fit the themes of their discourses, fitness depending solely on logical relations. The spiritual life of the churches is not only the poorer and the shallower because of this loss of the quickening influence of the hymn, but this mechanical attitude is carried over to the other exercises of the divine service. The preacher who sings mechanically will pray mechanically, preach mechanically. _The Need of Emphasis on Efficient Use of Hymns._