[4]“In his volume, _The English Lyric_, Professor Felix E. Schelling virtually disposes of the hymn with the remark that ‘we may or may not “accept” certain hymns, but we do not have to read them.’ That is readily granted—unless, of course, one wishes to know them or to write just criticism about them.” _Ibid._
[5]“Frequently a hymn is a prayer; and it is a rule for the structure of prayers that they exclude all those recondite figures, dazzling comparisons, flashing metaphors, which, while grateful to certain minds of poetic excitability, are offensive to more sober and staid natures, and are not congenial with the lowly spirit of a suppliant at the throne of grace. A simile may be shining, but it may not be exactly chaste; and a hymn prefers pure beauty to bedizening ornament.” (Dr. Edwards A. Park, in _Hymns and Choirs_.)
[6]These numbers, of course, refer to the number of syllables in a line.
[1]The vagaries of credit for writing given hymns is illustrated in the appearance of the intensely Calvinistic Toplady’s name as the writer of Charles Wesley’s intensely Arminian “Blow ye the trumpet, blow.”
[2]Those who care to make a fuller study of the revision of hymns than the following discussion affords are referred to the full treatment of the subject, and to the abundant cases cited, by Professor Edwards A. Park, D.D., of Andover Theological Seminary, in _Hymns and Choirs_, issued in 1860 by Drs. Austin Phelps, Edwards A. Park, and Daniel L. Furber. The lapse of years has in no way diminished the value of this volume. It is unfortunately out of print and inaccessible to the average pastor, outside of public libraries.
[1]“But the emotional life, strongest, no doubt, in youth, remains a lifelong element of personality and especially of the religious personality. Feeling is not merely an integral part of religious experience, it is central, vital, its inmost core. William James speaks of it as the deeper source of religion, and says that ‘philosophical and theological formulas come below it in importance. It is the dynamic factor in the religious life. When it is absent, religion degenerates into mere formalism or barren intellectualism.’” (Gillman, in _The Evolution of the English Hymn_.)