7. But emotion necessarily implies an intelligence and a susceptibility to be moved—in other words, a personality. It also implies that one person’s feelings can call forth like emotions in other persons. The merely outward expression may even create a like emotion among others who do not fully apprehend the primary idea that set the original emotion to vibrating, creating a very contagion of feeling. 8. It follows that in actual aggressive work, largely depending on emotional transmission, the minister or the leader must supply the initiating impulse. If the minister has a dry mind—there are ministers who desiccate every topic they discuss—religious ideas suffer a blight of aridity, killing all sense of reality, this sense of reality being the _sine qua non_ of all spiritual effectiveness. If he is fortunate in having a vivid imagination and a heart responsive to religious truth, he can multiply his mental gifts twentyfold by intensifying the truths he expresses. 9. Treated in this way, the hymn becomes the peer of the sermon in influencing power, and assures the minister eager for spiritual results a large harvest of souls, saved and spiritualized. REFERENCES AND NOTES INTRODUCTION [1]Genesis 4:21, 23. [2]Genesis 31:27. [3]Exodus 15:1-21. [4]Numbers 21:16, 17. [5]Psalm 90. [6]Joshua 6:16. [7]Judges 5:1-31. [8]I Samuel 2:1-16. [9]I Samuel 10:5. [10]I Chronicles 9:22; 11:4, 11:5. [11]Mark 14:26. [12]Acts 16:25. [13]Colossians 3:16. [14]James 5:13. [15]Revelation 5:9; 7:9-12; 11:15-18; 14:2,3; 15:3,4; 19:1-7. CHAPTER I [1]Dr. Phelps goes on to say, “Yet the greatest of these, that grace which above all else vitalizes a true hymn, is that which makes it true—its fidelity to the realities of religious experience.” [2]“A hymn must have a beginning, middle, and end. There should be a manifest graduation in the thoughts, and their mutual dependence should be so perceptible that they could not be transposed without injuring the unity of the piece; every line carrying forward the connection, and every verse adding a well-proportioned limb to a symmetrical body. The reader should know when the strain is complete, and be satisfied, as at the close of an air in music.” (James Montgomery.) [3]Dr. Parks, back in 1857, remarks: “That is not always the best church song which sparkles most with rhetorical gems. There are spangled hymns which will never excite devotional feeling.” [4]Sung at President McKinley’s funeral. [5]Greece never had a sacred book, she never had any symbols, any sacerdotal caste organized for the preservation of dogmas. Her poets and her artists were her true theologians. (Renan, in _Studies in Religious History_.)