Yet the Gospel hymn has been treated as a convenient “punching bag” for the literary and musical idealist. One respects the antagonistic attitude of the high liturgist to whom the form is so significant, or of the literary or scholarly man whose susceptibilities are outraged by the acknowledged shortcomings and banalities of many of these popular religious lyrics. Nonetheless, one is astonished that persons of high intelligence, in their devotion to exclusively literary and musical standards, should be blind to the great spiritual value of the better specimens of this indiscriminately condemned class of hymns, and to the extraordinary effectiveness and the immense results in aggressive religious work which this people’s hymnody has demonstrated. This is really only the recrudescence of an ancient feud between the conception of the hymn as exclusively worshipful and belonging to the liturgical service, and as the free lyrical expression of the religious life of the people adapted to all phases of Christian life—individual, domestic, and social, as well as ecclesiastical. As the church life of the early Christians began to crystallize, the former improvisations were discouraged. In time, the service of song was taken from the laity in the interest of greater dignity and churchliness. The Arian controversy with its hymnic outburst freed the wings of popular religious song, only for them to be restrained again by the rigid formalism organized and enforced by Gregory the Great. The Waldenses, the Hussites, the Lollards, each group had its own popular hymnody. In the general breaking of bonds in the Reformation, the popular hymns of Huss and Luther and their associates, and the metrical psalms of Marot and Sternhold set to popular secular melodies, were the first manifestations of the new freedom. The same outcry was heard against the hymns of Watts, and a little later against those of the Wesleys, not only in Great Britain, but in New England as well. In the latter the outcry was heard against the “camp-meeting ditties” of the aggressive Methodists as they spread into the West. Even now, in Germany there is frequent protest against the use in church service of the simpler “folk” hymns, like “Harre des Herrn” (Wait on the Lord), “Ich will streben” (I will strive), and “Sei getreu bis in den Tod” (Be faithful unto death), because they are more recent in origin and have not the severe dignity of the older hymns and chorals. And so the feud between the devout formalism of the liturgical spirit and the free attitude of aggressive spirituality has gone on from century to century and from land to land, and will continue to do so “until He come.” _Lack of Discrimination._ There is an utter lack of discrimination shown in the opposition to Gospel hymns.