In spite of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns and a number of minor poets, and in spite of a wealth of charming folk songs, to prove that the spirit of song dwells in the Scottish breast, Scotland has made but a small contribution to English hymnody. The metrical psalm ruled the Scotch religious heart with a rod of iron. Only during the last generation has Scotia almost unwittingly made an important contribution. Horatius Bonar (1808-1889) was an industrious writer on many topics. He allowed no hymns to be sung in his church, but by a strange anomaly he issued three series of _Hymns of Faith and Hope_—in 1856, 1861, and 1866. While these hymns were being increasingly sung around the world, his church sang metrical psalms! More than one hundred of his hymns are in common use. Among them are the following: “I heard the voice of Jesus say,” “I lay my sins on Jesus,” “Go, labor on; spend and be spent,” “Beyond the smiling and the weeping,” “A few more years shall roll,” “I was a wand’ring sheep,” “When the weary, seeking rest.” Another Scotchman, George Matheson (1842-1906), the blind preacher, has written, among many others, a hymn whose beauty and mystical suggestiveness has rapidly given it wide usefulness: “O Love, that wilt not let me go.” Fortunate in having a very pleasing and effective tune, St. Margaret by Albert L. Peace, it promises to be a permanent fountain of blessing. _Chapter XVIII_ AMERICAN HYMNODY I. THE TRANSITION FROM PSALMODY TO HYMNODY The metrical versions used in New England were Ainsworth’s in Plymouth and vicinity under Pilgrim influence, and Sternhold and Hopkins’, where Puritan influence controlled. The New England ministers were scholarly and knew their Hebrew Bible. The Sternhold and Hopkins version was unsatisfactory, not so much for its literary deficiencies, but because it was not literal enough, did not reproduce the Hebrew minutely enough. This led, as we have seen in Chapter X, to the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, which was widely adopted, although Sternhold and Hopkins still had its partisans. These versions could not but find sharp critics among a more or less scholarly ministry and in time their absurdities weakened their hold upon the New England churches. The utter collapse of the congregational singing due to the lack of tunes in the psalm books, and the absence of competent precentors,[1] hastened the revolt among some of the Churches against the versions. Yet the tyranny of “use and wont” kept most of the churches in line, only a few of them adopting the later version of Tate and Brady.