4. The religious idea is primary, of course, but its emotional response in the heart gives it vitality. It is the team of idea and its normal emotion that exerts the power of the hymn. An abstract idea, abstract because its emotional reflex has been abstracted, has no motive power.
5. In the effective use of the hymn the clear apprehension of its ideas must be enforced by the vital reproduction of the original emotion of its writer which urged its composure. A dry hymn written without vitalizing feeling has no power to inspire; it gives no sense of reality. Dry sermons, not pollinated by emotional vigor, can bear no fruit. The effectiveness of sermon or hymn will be determined by the intensity of the feeling behind it.
6. The emotional appeal must be genuine, both writer and singer must be sincere. Artificial emotion, the mere pretense of a feeling that does not exist, has no power. It is not merely unappealing, it is offensive.
7. But emotion necessarily implies an intelligence and a susceptibility to be moved—in other words, a personality. It also implies that one person’s feelings can call forth like emotions in other persons. The merely outward expression may even create a like emotion among others who do not fully apprehend the primary idea that set the original emotion to vibrating, creating a very contagion of feeling.
8. It follows that in actual aggressive work, largely depending on emotional transmission, the minister or the leader must supply the initiating impulse. If the minister has a dry mind—there are ministers who desiccate every topic they discuss—religious ideas suffer a blight of aridity, killing all sense of reality, this sense of reality being the sine qua non of all spiritual effectiveness. If he is fortunate in having a vivid imagination and a heart responsive to religious truth, he can multiply his mental gifts twentyfold by intensifying the truths he expresses.
9. Treated in this way, the hymn becomes the peer of the sermon in influencing power, and assures the minister eager for spiritual results a large harvest of souls, saved and spiritualized.
REFERENCES AND NOTES
INTRODUCTION
[1]Genesis 4:21, 23.
[2]Genesis 31:27.