Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review; September 1902
IN quires and places where they sing, here followeth the anthem, ' points to a very large amount of deadness. According to our modern ideas of Church life, there would be not much appearance of it with out singing. The Wesleys would never have carried on their missions to the neglected heathen population in our midst if they had not had the help of their hymns. And, in our own day, Moody and Sankey's Hymns, with their telling tunes, became the mainspring of their missionary efforts. We are not now called upon to decide how far these exciting methods help 'to build up a sure foundation to last to eternity. For my own part, I regret to find the Wesleyans are substituting Moody and Sankey for the sound teaching to be found in Wesley's hymns. It is curious to read that the Wesleyan chaplain with the tr00ps in South Africa, though there were lots of New Testaments, was nearly brought to a stand-still from the want of Moody and Sankey's Hymns. There is no doubt that a great deal of the slip-slop doggerel that is carried off by a good tune in many of our modern missions, and the careless way in which hymns when wanted for special occasions are composed, have tended to tempt us to scout hymns altogether and to treat them as if they were of no possible good or power, and as if there was no possibility of finding true poetry and true inspiration and sound Gospel truths in any hymns The Psalms of David have been accepted into daily - almost hourly - use by the whole Church from the beginning, and although Tate and Brady, and even the Presbyterian Psalter in verse (generally limited to four verses at a time), have done their best to belittle hymnology, we cannot ignore the inspiring comfort under every need which the Psalter and the other special hymns in the Bible bring home to us. No one can deny the power of hymns or their poetry and inspiration who has read John Keble's Christian Year, or who has fully realised the extraordinary power which that publication had in advancing the great Oxford Movement and bringing life and power into a nearly moribund Church. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
