Come hither, all ye weary souls.
We remember a venerable minister eighty-eight years of age, who filled a conspicuous place in the Church of his day; while he was dying his daughter said to him:
Jesus can make a dying bed
As soft as downy pillows are,
While on His breast I lean my head,
And breathe my life out sweetly there.
The old man listened as well as he could to the verse, then turned his head on the pillow, repeated the words “my head,” and so died. Perhaps some critic would remark that the versification is slightly inaccordant or defective, but its tenderness has propitiated many a dying pang.
Devotion is the eminent attribute of these hymns,—ardent, inflamed rapture of holiness. Well has it been said “to elevate to poetic altitudes;” every truth in Christian experience and revealed religion needs the strength and sweep of an aquiline pinion; and this is what Isaac Watts has done; he has taken almost every topic which exercises the understanding and the heart of the believer, and has not only given to it a devotional aspect, but has wedded it to immortal numbers; and whilst there is little to which he has not shown himself equal, there is nothing he has done for mere effect. Rapt, yet adoring, sometimes up among the thunder-clouds, yet most reverential in his highest range, the “good matter” is in a song, and the sweet singer is upborne as on the wings of eagles; but even from that triumphal car, and when nearest the home of the Seraphim, we are comforted to find descending lowly lamentations and confessions of sin—new music, no doubt, but the words with which we have been long familiar in the house of our pilgrimage.
Religion never was designed
To make our pleasures less.