Whatever of culture and refinement other forms of literature have brought has directly touched only a small minority, and but indirectly the great mass of civilized peoples; but the hymn has had a direct influence on the life and character of the mass of the people, and has appealed to their instincts and imaginations and shaped their ideals in the most immediate and striking way. Where one person has been refined and enriched in mind by the poetry of Milton, or Wordsworth, or Tennyson, a thousand have been comforted, inspired, and transformed by Sternhold and Hopkins, Watts, or Wesley. Archbishop Trench, the fault of whose hymns was chiefly that they were too few, was admonished by his friend, John Sterling, to give more attention to hymn-writing: “You would influence millions whom poetry in any other form would never reach.” II. OBJECTIONS TO RECOGNIZING ITS LITERARY CHARACTER _Due to Narrow Definition of Literature._ In spite of these facts that surely entitle the hymn to be considered literature in the most vital sense of the word, there are critics who look upon it with undisguised indifference, if not with scorn. Partly due to an utter lack of sympathy with the use of it, partly to an academic idea of what literature really is, emphasizing form and rhetorical interest, partly because its appeal is emotional and not mainly intellectual, these objectors are blind to the larger interests involved. If there is any truth in the insistence of some literary critics that there are few hymns that are good from a literary point of view, Montgomery’s statement may give a sufficient reason: “Our good poets have seldom been Christians and our good Christians have seldom been good poets.”[3] _Due to Failure to Realize Limitations of Hymns._ A better reason is that such critics have seldom realized the limitations the singing hymn presents to the poet. Milton was a great poet, but he could not condense his ideas sufficiently or give them the needed terse expression. He needed a large canvas, while the successful hymn-writer is confined to a miniature. Even Tennyson, who succeeded in small lyrics, wrote only one hymn and that ill-adapted to actual congregational use. Palgrave, in the preface to his _Treasury of Sacred Songs_, compares secular and sacred verse as follows: “Secular verse covers many provinces: manners, incident, love, landscape, the vast sphere of drama—in a word, all the many-colored romance of life. Sacred verse can hardly go beyond one province: to expect masterpieces in one field approximately numerous as those in the secular lyric is unreasonable. Even more unreasonable is it, when of this single province a district only is chosen for censure, and treated as the whole domain. Hymns, well-nigh limited to the functions of prayer and praise, are precisely that region in which a practical aim is naturally, almost inevitably, predominant!” _Some Critics and Their Criticism._