Outside of the lamentable weakness of egocentric human nature it is difficult to discover why the part of the divine service devoted to sacred song should be so utterly subordinated to the other parts of the sacred program; but that it is true is so evident to any reasonable observer that it needs little or no proof. The janitor religiously postpones opening or shutting windows, or shaking down the furnace, during the prayer, or sermon even, until the hymn is being sung. Members of the congregation seize the opportunity to leave the room, or to consult with others about church affairs in all too audible voices. The hymn ought to be the consummate note of prayer and praise and devout meditation on sacred themes, the great co-operative climax in the worship of God. It is too often looked upon as a merely physical stimulus to liven up the tedious service.[9] This ought not so to be! For the primary object of assembling the saints is united worship—united praise. There can be no true public prayer without an element of worship; but it has a recognition of personal needs and even wants. This human factor makes it a composite of the human and the divine and lowers its dignity. In genuine praise there is a forgetfulness of the human element and a rising into the pure realm of the divine. In true praise the human soul is unconscious of self and utterly absorbed in God. Hence it is not too much to say that congregational song is the supreme element in all worship. _Chapter III_ THE LITERARY ASPECT OF HYMNS I. WHAT MAKES THE HYMN LITERATURE? _Its Character as a Transcript of Life._ In so far as a hymn is a transcript of a genuine conviction, intensified by emotion, or of a profound experience, it is literature. There have gone into it vision, feeling, imagination, sincerity, intimate experience—an appropriation of the influences life offers a soul that gazes upon it with wide-open eyes. It is not the measure or the rhyme that makes literature of a hymn. A bald formulation in metrical form of doctrines dissected by metaphysical processes may be called a hymn by courtesy, but it is not literature any more than would be a textbook on mathematics. But a hymn in which the hurried pulse and the throbbing heartbeat of deep human feeling can be felt is genuine literature, a revelation of human personality and of the collective life of which it is representative. It is the story of the experience of an exploring soul seeking knowledge of the deeper spiritual relations with God and his Kingdom.[1] _Its Wide Distribution._