In evangelistic meetings a few of the standards can express the high peaks of interest, but the Gospel songs lead up to those heights. The great revivals of the nineteenth and of the early decades of this century were distinctly characterized by the use of Gospel songs, many of them not even of the higher type.
Unfairness in Comparisons Made.
While the worst specimens of Gospel hymns have usually been selected as the basis of attack, the very best of the standard hymns have been held up as the criterion of value; the utter unfairness of such comparison is evident enough. Gospel hymns should be judged by their best specimens when compared with standard hymns.
The inequity of such a comparison is made more flagrant by the fact that these standard hymns, only hundreds in number, which are justly appreciated and lauded, are the survivors of multiplied tens of thousands that were written through the generations. Of the more than seven hundred written by Isaac Watts, twenty-three appear in the recent Presbyterian Hymnal. Of the nearly seven thousand hymns of Charles Wesley, the new Methodist Hymnal, naturally biased in judgment by tradition, uses only fifty-five, while the New Presbyterian Hymnal finds space for only eighteen. This tremendous mortality is not necessarily due to offensive weakness and faults, for hundreds served their day and generation most acceptably and well. In like manner the older Gospel hymns, which have had their day of usefulness are fading out of these collections, making way for new ones that express the feelings of the present generation more intimately. This is as it should be.
But when the detractor of current Gospel hymns finds some delectable bit of vulgarity or of literary clumsiness or of grammatical solecism, let him remember that Watts published lines like these:
“Tame heifers here their thirst allay
And for the stream wild asses bray.”
“I’ll purge my family around
And make the wicked flee”;
and that John Wesley allowed his brother to publish