Thou wilt own the minstrelsy
If it flows from childlike hearts.
Sincerity requires that the thoughts expressed should be real to the singer as well as to the poet. They may not be such as would have occurred to him, and the expression may be altogether beyond his powers of origination, but they must be such as he can think in his best moments or may be helped to enter into at the hour of prayer. Sincerity does not require that all our hymns should be on the lowest level common to a general congregation, but that the sentiment expressed, the emotion presupposed or to be excited, be suited to the heart of man in the presence of his Father in heaven. In the compilation of a hymn-book something must be left to the good sense and judgement of those who are to use it; and there is no part of public worship which calls for more serious and intelligent consideration than the selection of hymns suited to the occasion and to the congregation.
It is perhaps too much to say that sincerity also requires that the writer of a hymn should be not unworthy of a place in the Christian choir. Happily this question rarely arises. The author’s name is often an aid to devotion, and in most hymn-books there is hardly a name—except Dryden’s—that seems wholly unfitted to this sacred service.
2. Reverence.—‘God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few,’ restrained, seemly. The profoundest reverence, the lowliest adoration, shrinks from utterance when it hears and sees unspeakable things. This is sublimely taught in those great lines of Dante:
Here memory mocks the toil of genius. Christ
Beamed on that cross; and pattern fails me now.
But whoso takes his cross, and follows Christ,
Will pardon me for that I leave untold,
When in the fleckered dawning he shall spy