The inequity of such a comparison is made more flagrant by the fact that these standard hymns, only hundreds in number, which are justly appreciated and lauded, are the survivors of multiplied tens of thousands that were written through the generations. Of the more than seven hundred written by Isaac Watts, twenty-three appear in the recent _Presbyterian Hymnal_. Of the nearly seven thousand hymns of Charles Wesley, the new _Methodist Hymnal_, naturally biased in judgment by tradition, uses only fifty-five, while the _New Presbyterian Hymnal_ finds space for only eighteen. This tremendous mortality is not necessarily due to offensive weakness and faults, for hundreds served their day and generation most acceptably and well. In like manner the older Gospel hymns, which have had their day of usefulness are fading out of these collections, making way for new ones that express the feelings of the present generation more intimately. This is as it should be. But when the detractor of current Gospel hymns finds some delectable bit of vulgarity or of literary clumsiness or of grammatical solecism, let him remember that Watts published lines like these: “Tame heifers here their thirst allay And for the stream wild asses bray.” “I’ll purge my family around And make the wicked flee”; and that John Wesley allowed his brother to publish “Idle men and boys are found Standing on the devil’s ground; He will give them work to do, He will pay their wages too.” Remember also that William Cowper, the poet acclaimed by literary critics as the father of a new movement in poetical writing, issued such a stanza as this: “Not such as hypocrites suppose Who with a graceless heart Taste not of Thee, but drink a dose Prepared by Satan’s art.” If the great poets and hymn writers of that age wrote such lines, what must have been the character of the verses of the obscure scribblers and poetasters of their day! Not only do the best of the standard hymns alone survive, but those survivors have been rewritten and amended by a half-century of editors and hymn revisers, their revisions being re-revised by succeeding critics, as we have seen in a previous chapter. Every line and phrase has been submitted again and again to the microscope of the literary critic, until we have a body of hymns established in every detail by the consensus of the best literary minds of the last century. This is no derogation of our accepted hymns, but a great advantage to them; but it must not be overlooked in making a fair comparison. _Criteria for Evaluation._ Much of the criticism of the Gospel hymn is due to excessive emphasis on the literary and poetical aspects of the verses to which objection is made. But we have already insisted on the fact that these are not the final criteria of the value of hymns, although they are important factors not to be overlooked.