The effort of the preacher to sensitize his mind and spirit, in order to appreciate what his hymnal offers, will give him more of the extraordinary winsomeness of his Master’s style. While not all hymns are distinctly literary in style and vocabulary, most of them have some poetical and imaginative qualities, and a great many of them have marked literary value. A careful canvass of these values will develop literary discrimination and taste. Hymns like Keble’s “Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear” and Heber’s “Brightest and best of the sons of the morning” must stimulate genuine literary appreciation. To segregate carefully in his mind the genuinely literary hymns—those that are full of imagination, symmetrical in structure, gracious in phraseology—will be a literary exercise of inestimable value. _Development of Emotional Nature._ But the finest literary discrimination and the highest literary delight cannot be secured without an emotional responsiveness that ministers do not always bring to their reading of hymns. But this emotion must not simply be poetic, it must be spiritual, based on an actualization of the profound spiritual truths expressed in the hymns. The most common fault among ministers is an aridity of mind, a dryness of feeling, a habit of abstract, academic thinking which have no response to the emotional values in the doctrines they preach. It is the secret of many an empty church, of many a barren pastorate. To some men who lack emotional and poetic insight, the hymnbook may appear dry and uninteresting. It certainly is unappealing to the unspiritual man, no matter how poetical he may be, and this will account for the occasional attack upon the hymns of the Christian Church as being without poetical power or merit. But the Christian minister, who deals with spiritual things, for whom the emotions of the human heart are a great opportunity, ought to find in the study of his hymnbook a great deepening of emotional intuition. Here he comes in touch with the saints of the Church who have risen to the greatest heights of spiritual insight, and who have sung because the feelings within them were so impelling that they could not do otherwise than sing. His own deficient emotion and his own dull insight into spiritual truth are here inspired and stimulated until he too stands upon the mountaintop. For his own spiritual edification, therefore, there is nothing, outside the Bible, so likely to be of spiritual help as the hymnbook. When he is discouraged, its hymns of inspiration and encouragement cannot but lift the cloud. When his heart is dull, and his vision of his Lord obscured, such hymns as “Jesus, I love Thy charming name,” by Philip Doddridge, “Jesus, these eyes have never seen That radiant form of Thine,” by our own Ray Palmer, or “Jesus, the very thought of Thee With sweetness fills my breast,”