This the critical editor improves as follows:
“All hail, Eternal Child!
Sweet Babe of Bethlehem!
Hail God’s Eternal Son,
Sweet Babe of Bethlehem!”
The fine hymn “The Three Kings” is shortened by two verses—4 and 12. To be sure those two verses bear rather hardly on Protestants, but in that case, and in many others, why not leave the hymn out altogether? In the hymn immediately following it, “The Purification,” the last verse, which claims “all rightful worship” for the Mother of Christ, is thrown out—of course by Father Faber’s express desire. In “Lent,” on the very next page, verse 3, which celebrates “the feast of penance,” does not appear. Two pages on, in that most touching of plaints, “Jesus Crucified,” such verses as these are found unworthy a place:
“His mother cannot reach His face;
She stands in helplessness beside;
Her heart is martyred with her Son’s;