Another office of the church hymn is to give a voice to those deep experiences in spiritual things that enrich the lives of the children of God. Many excellent Christians are dumb, unable to give expression to their genuine spiritual experiences. Others find their means of voicing what they feel totally inadequate. The hymns they sing and appropriate to themselves unstop their silent tongue. High tides of spiritual blessings, times of refreshing when Christ is near to the soul, hours of privilege when the whispering of the Holy Spirit is heard, victories over fierce or subtle temptation when God’s grace proves sufficient, moments of God’s overshadowing presence when the whole world is transfigured, and a thousand other marvelous experiences in the Christian life—all call for hymns to express them. They must be tender hymns, ecstatic hymns, triumphant hymns that will satisfy the craving of the soul to voice forth its deepest love, its spiritual ecstasies, its strange sense of overcoming power. The dumb soul, unable to speak of its explorations of divine grace, finds a voice in these hymns written by saints who had the divine gift of expressing like glimpses of the divine glory.[3] _Hymns Provide Help and Comfort in Dark Hours._ These hymns not only bring the joy of giving articulate expression to these mountain-top experiences, thus reviving them again and again, but they validate these experiences by showing that others have shared them and give them reality in the hours when faith fails and the temptation arises to consider them mere mirages and illusions. Others have been with us in Bunyan’s Beulah Land and verify our experiences of its delights. _Hymns Afford Clear Expressions of Christian Truth._ Another purpose in the use of hymns is to secure the clearest, most impressive, most appealing, most rememberable statement of the leading truths of the Christian faith that will fix them most ineradicably in the consciousness and the life of the individual and of the church. Such hymns must not be dry formulations of abstract doctrines, desiccated by logical discussions and metaphysical hair-splittings. Truth that is dry is no longer vital truth. Its vitamins of reality, of the deep feelings called forth by a sense of its actuality, of spiritual and poetic intuition, of self-propagating vitality, have been lost. Aridity of orthodoxy begets aridity of heterodoxy and is usually responsible for it. Didactic hymns that will serve the purposes of the Church must be living hymns, expressing truth transfigured by the feelings aroused by the contemplation of its glorious reality. “There is little heresy in hymns.” Heresies for the most part arise from arid mechanical reasonings; hymns flow from the intuitions of the heart.[4] This explains why some of our best hymns about Christ were written by Unitarians. _Hymns Give Opportunity for Active Participation by All._