It is related to the church in the aid it affords to its collective life and to the reader or singer whose spirituality is to be inspired, developed, and expressed. It is the content expressing these several relations and purposes that separates the hymn from purely literary ideals and criticisms. I. ITS RELATION TO GOD _Thanksgiving._ The first impulse is a recognition of the blessings and privileges that God bestows upon his creatures in general and upon the writer and the singer in particular. There is consciousness of self in this expression of gratitude. The soul still has its feet upon the ground. There is nothing unworthy in this recognition of self as the recipient of God’s favor, for the soul honors God in its realization of its dependence on him and in its clear vision of the source of its blessedness. Indeed, God asks it as his due. _Prayer for Future Blessing._ The cynic who declares that gratitude is usually tinctured with the hope of favors to come may not properly represent the soul as it gives thanks to God, but there is a kinship between thanksgiving and prayer that makes it easy and logical to pass from the one to the other. The memory of benefits received inevitably suggests needs yet to be supplied. In its relation to God the hymn may well be a vehicle for the prayer that envisages the spiritual lack that God alone can supply, and vitalizes the recognition with a desirous urgency that must characterize true prayer. Here again we find not only divine authority, but encouragement and assurance. Whether the hymn is an individual or a collective prayer matters not. The individual need is also a need common to all petitioners, and the prayer by a congregation is still the individual prayer of its units, only intensified objectively toward God and subjectively toward the singers by its mass expression. This intensification is multiplied not arithmetically but geometrically. _Adoration._ The hymn of adoration lifts the soul into a higher plane, into a contemplation of the glory and majesty of the infinite perfections of its God in which self is forgotten and a consciousness of the infinitude of divine beauty, nobility, and spiritual elevation remains to thrill the soul. It rises on wings of selfless delight and rejoicing in God into a very ecstasy that only song can express. Whether the soul stands on some high peak of earth and surveys the billowing world that stretches far and wide with its beetling cliffs and rocky headlands, its forests and fields, its meadows and orchards, filled with the overwhelming mystery of life and force obeying implicitly the laws formulated only in inherent nature; or gazes into the great vault of the sky, with the silent majesty of circling stars and developing universes, it will find the anonymous hymn of more than a century ago voicing its deepest awe, its noblest joy: