What is our being but a cry, A restless longing still, Which thou alone canst satisfy, Alone thy fullness fill?” A more important recent hymn writer is Rev. Louis F. Benson, D.D. (1855-1930), the editor of the current Presbyterian hymnals. This history of Christian hymnody cannot close more fittingly than to quote part of a stirring hymn by this greatest of American hymnologists: “Forward! singing ‘Glory To our Lord the King’; Forward! Trusting only In the name we sing. See the day is breaking And the road points far; March, with eyes uplifted To the Morning Star. Blessed is the Kingdom; Blessed be the King! Crowned is every duty His commandments bring. Now to serve like soldiers, Now to work like men; Oh, to love as God loves And to conquer then.” THE SINGING CHURCH PART III PRACTICAL HYMNOLOGY _Chapter XIX_ THE STUDY OF HYMNS I. IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY OF HYMNS It has been said that the two great books which every minister should study are the Bible and human nature. A third great book may be added, in which the foregoing two unite in a new combination—the Hymnbook. In that collection of hymns the truths of the Bible find their expression in a new form. They are no longer Oriental in spirit, based upon human experiences under different conditions and in a different intellectual atmosphere, but modern, and strong with a fresh vitality. They have passed through the crucible of intense personal feeling and experience, and have been recast in forms more comprehensible to a different race and to a different age. Next to his library of comment upon the Bible, and of exposition of its doctrines, should be that of the minister’s hymnological books giving the history, the illustrations, and the methods of making effective the hymns he uses in his congregation. II. PERSONAL ADVANTAGES OF SUCH STUDY OF HYMNS The first line of the study of hymns should be contributory to his own personal development. _Literary Pleasure._ A great delight awaits the minister of cultivated taste and sensibility, for there are not only ten really good hymns, as a famous literary doctor[1] once insisted, but hundreds of them, whose distinction and beauty of phraseology, whose fresh and orderly development of ideas, and whose elevation and glory of thought give unfailing literary pleasure. How can one read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Still, still with Thee,” that best of American morning hymns, without exquisite delight? “Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh, When the bird waketh, and the shadows flee: Fairer than morning, lovelier than daylight, Dawns the sweet consciousness, I am with Thee.”