It is no more true that all Gospel and Sunday-school hymns are crude, illiterate, and undignified than is the anti-foreign Chinese’s charge that all Americans are liars and thieves. Many of the Gospel hymns were written by devout, cultured people of high intelligence. Fanny Crosby has had wide recognition, and there have been many others of equal ability, but lacking her adventitious appeal for sympathy. There are many Gospel hymns which deserve the harshest denunciations that have been expressed. In a people’s hymnody that was inevitable; but there are others so fine that the line of essential values between the Gospel and the standard hymn is difficult to trace. Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings’ _Spiritual Songs_ was practically a people’s Gospel songbook, used for the same purposes and in the same relative spirit, and largely made up of new materials in text and music just like a modern Gospel songbook, being even issued in parts. Among its new hymns were Palmer’s “My faith looks up to Thee” and Smith’s “The morning light is breaking,” now recognized as leading standard hymns. The same is true of Gilmore’s “He leadeth me, O blessed thought!” and Kate Hankey’s “I love to tell the story” and Mrs. Hawks’ “I need Thee every hour.” Mrs. Gates’ “I will sing you a song of that beautiful land,” E. E. Hewitt’s “More about Jesus would I know,” Hopper’s “Jesus, Saviour, pilot me,” Stite’s “Simply trusting every day,” Walford’s “Sweet hour of prayer,” Hunter’s “In the Christian’s home in glory,” Bliss’ “Almost persuaded,” Spafford’s “It is well with my soul,” and Pres. Dr. J. E. Rankin’s “God be with you till we meet again” are none of them illiterate or undignified. Indeed, many of the writers of these despised hymns were college professors, clergymen of high standing, editors, women of education and culture and of profound spiritual life. Many Gospel song writers are far and away superior to the average of the hymnists of the eighteenth century—indeed, have written nothing so unpoetical and so distinctly offensive to good taste as some of the hymns published by Watts and Wesley, the hymnic giants of that age.