PREFACE.

A THIRD of a century has elapsed since the publication of the "Hymns for the Christian Church and Home." If during that time nothing had occurred to affect the value of the volume except a gradual enrichment of our religious literature by new hymns, the publication of a supplement would have satisfied every need: but, in passing through a generation remarkable for rapid change, Christian piety itself, notwithstanding its essential permanence, has insensibly modified its complexion; and, in its truest moments, resorts to other centres of meditation, and speaks in other tones, than those which were natural to our fathers. Hence, in justice to the exigencies of a fresh time, it is not enough to add what is absent; it is requisite also to withdraw something that is present, in manuals of an earlier date; and, in attempting a complete re-cast of the materials at disposal for

the lyrical part of public worship, I hope to provide better for a real continuity of religious life, than by any less extensive change.

Two opposite tendencies have become more and more marked in the devotional literature of the last twenty or thirty years. On the one hand, the Anglican movement which commenced in the fourth decade of this century has nurtured a retrospective and historical piety, which opens its heart to the traditions of the past, reproduces forgotten treasures of poetry and prayer and devoted life, and clings for strength to the last link in the catena of saintly examples. The place of the "Christian Year" and the "Lyra Innocentium," side by side with the Bible in the boudoirs of innumerable English homes, renders it needless to say how the tender music from this source has reached the soul of our time and moved it to accordant response. With this influence, however, resting as it does on Catholic authority, is inextricably blended an ecclesiastical type of Christianity; not drawn from the interior of Christ's life, but made up chiefly from what others have thought and said about him, in looking back on the imperfect picture of his ministry. This secondary doctrine, of which he is not the source, but the object, was gradually assuming shape from the first pentecost to the end of the fourth century (the Council of Constantinople, A.D.

381); and though it is nothing but a crystallisation of human opinion respecting a recent divine epoch, it has passed into the theology of Christendom, and gives a special form and colour to all the lights of piety that are transmitted through it. The Christian mythology thus built up and consecrated may be seen most completely elaborated in the Roman or the Dominican Breviary; but the historical revival which commenced in Oxford forty years ago, and which has steeped the religious imagination of our time in mediæval tints, has imparted to the Anglican ritual and books of devotion a very similar character. They are pervaded by a startling dogmatic realism; spiritual symbols are turned into sacramental acts; apocalyptic imagery taken as literal fact; and in the calendar of the Church Year, the several acts in the drama of redemption are played out with a hard precision which reduces even the pathos and the mystery to rule. In the recent Anglican hymnals, exaggerated prominence is given to the objective and mythological elements which have found their way into the faith of Christendom: simple and natural piety finds there no shelter and no voice; when it would fly to the immediate communion with God, it is flung back on some superfluous mediation of intercession or of sacrament; when it would pour out the story of its own times and seasons, that bring

the sunshine or the frosts upon its inward life, it finds no more "Sacred Year" than the cycle of Church festivals which dramatise a mixed or legendary history, and of red-letter days that celebrate obscure or questionable saints. At long intervals, no doubt, the reader of these books may alight on some true gem, all the brighter for the dreary delay. But their general tendency is to guard the approaches to Christian devotion, against all who bring to them a thoughtful historical judgment, and an aversion to puerilities of taste.

Strong as the set of the current has become in this direction, it is only a certain class of religious minds that can be swept back by it into the region of fancy and fable. Others there are whose piety is undergoing just the opposite change; and, instead of re-assuming an ecclesiastical mythology, is disposed to loosen itself even from sacred history. And shall we dare to assert that this is not a new awakening, but only the old piety declining? The deeper the sense of spiritual realities, the more do we live in a present that is divine; and faith so far dispenses with the past as rather to invest it with sanctity than wait for its witness and consecration. The habitual walk with God," hour by hour, the leaning on him in weakness, the drawing from him of strength, the conscious passing of a warm light

or a chill shadow, according as he is remembered or forgotten, supersede by immediate experience the secondary attestations of divine things, and leave all scripture sacred simply by consent of sympathy and reverence. Such inward self-surrender is the true fulfilment of the Christian aim of life: it effects that harmonious union of the human spirit with the divine, which Christ lived to render possible; and to treat it as an apostasy, because it is so much at one with him as to be independent of what happened to him, and to let the doubtful be as it may, without losing heart of trust and love, is to stone the prophets, and crucify afresh the Saviours of human faith. If there be a spiritual devotion which more and more draws away from what tradition, apostolic or other, has questionably said about the first age, and, gathering itself into the centre, identifies its Christianity with the religion of Christ in its pure and personal essence, this simplification is as legitimate, and as much requires to be provided with adequate expression in worship, as the opposite tendency to luxuriant overgrowth of dogma and symbol. The difference between the present volume and its predecessor is due to the attempt to meet this change; the new hymns admitted belonging chiefly to the poetry of the inner life; while the old hymns excluded mainly deal with objective incidents either in