The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

CHAPTER V

[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.)

[2]Rev. Louis F. Benson, D.D., in The Hymnody of the Christian Church. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1927.) Used by permission.