“O Lord, our God, arise, Scatter his enemies, And make them fall. Frustrate their knavish tricks, Confound their politics, On Him our hearts we fix; God save the King.” In Bishop Brooks’ original of “O little town of Bethlehem,” so widely known and used, the fourth stanza is omitted: “Where children, pure and happy, Pray to the Blessed Child; Where misery cries out to thee, Son of the Mother mild; Where charity stands watching, And faith holds wide the door, The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, And Christmas comes once more.” The reasons are not far to seek: the double rhyme in the third line is so forced as to be awkward; the first two lines refer to Jesus in the third person, but the next two in the second; more important still, the stanza does not make a sufficient addition to the value of the hymn to warrant the added length. The stanza, “Thy body slain, sweet Jesus, thine, And bathed in its own blood, While all exposed to wrath divine, The glorious suff’rer stood,” if retained, despite its medieval picture of our suffering Lord, would have added nothing to Watts’ noble hymn, “Alas! and did my Saviour bleed,” but rather would have hemmed the progress of its thought and feeling. Few of the lovers of Robinson’s classic hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,” would have enjoyed singing and visualizing the omitted fourth stanza, “O that day when freed from sinning, I shall see thy lovely face! _Richly clothed in blood-washed linen_, How I’ll sing thy sovereign grace!” A stanza was omitted from a hymn by Isaac Watts by Dr. Worcester, and he was compelled by public sentiment to replace it in his next collection. Who was right—Dr. Worcester, or Watts and the church public? “But while I bled and groaned and died, I ruined Satan’s Throne; High on my cross I hung and spy’d The monster tumbling down.” What a travesty in this stanza of Christ’s words, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven”! The omission of all the older hymns regarding “the state of the unpenitent dead” in our more recent hymnals is due to their usually rather lurid expressions, going beyond those of the Scriptures, to the reaction in the church at large against the rather mechanical and heartless emphasis of the painful doctrine—not only in hymns, but in sermons as well—and also to the realization that it is not a theme fitted for singing. What modern congregation could sing Watts’ stanza formulating the doctrine, “Up to the courts where angels dwell, It [the soul] mounts triumphant there; Or devils plunge it down to hell In infinite despair”? When we come to the hymns constructed by selecting stanzas from long poems—e.g., by John Keble or by John Greenleaf Whittier—we reach marvels of skill in selection and co-ordination that have greatly enriched English hymnody. _Reconstructing and Rewriting Faulty Hymns._