The sources from which this collection has been drawn are abundant and varied. The
psalmody and hymnology of the church furnish a vast preserve, the exploration of which
would be a large undertaking. It must be confessed that the pious people who had in their
hands some of the ancient hymn-books were justified in feeling that religion and poetry
were not closely related, for many of the hymns they were wont to sing were guiltless of
any poetic character. It was too often evident that the hymn-writer had been more intent
on giving metrical form to proper theological concepts than on giving utterance to his
own religious life. But the feeling has been growing that in hymns, at any rate, life is
more than dogma; and we have now some collections of hymns that come pretty near
being books of poetry. The improvement in this department of literature within the past
twenty-five years has been marked. There is still, indeed, in many hymnals, and
especially in hymnals for Sunday schools and social meetings, much doggerel; but large
recent contributions of hymns which are true poetry, many of the best of them from
American sources, have made it possible to furnish our congregations with admirable
manuals of praise.
The indebtedness of religion to poetry which is thus expressed in the hymnology of the
church is very large. Probably many of us are indebted for definite and permanent
religious conceptions and impressions quite as much to felicitous phrases of hymns as to
any words of sermon or catechism. Our most positive convictions of religious truth are
apt to come to us in some line or stanza that tells the whole story. The rhythm and the
rhyme have helped to fix it and hold it in the memory.
This is true not only of the hymns of the church but of many poems that are not suitable
for singing. English poetry is especially rich in meditative and devotional elements, and
of no period has this been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other side
of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and
Gilder on this side—these and many others—have made most precious additions to our
store of religious poetry. The century has been one of great perturbations in religious
thought; the advent of the evolutionary philosophy threatened all the theological
foundations, and there was need of a thorough revision of the dogmas which were based
on a mechanical theology, and of a reinterpretation of the life of the Spirit. In all this the
poets have given us the strongest help. The great poet cannot be oblivious of these
deepest themes. He need not be a dogmatician, indeed he cannot be, for his business is
insight, not ratiocination; but the problems which theology is trying to solve must always
be before his mind, and he must have something to say about them, if he hopes to
command the attention of thoughtful men. Yet while we need not depreciate the service
that has been rendered by preachers and professional theologians who have sought to put
the facts of the religious life into the forms of the new philosophy, we must own our
deeper obligation to the poets, by whose vision the spiritual realities have been most
clearly discerned.
It was Wordsworth, perhaps, who gave us the first great contribution to the new religious
thought by bringing home to us the fact that God is in his world; revealing himself now
as clearly as in any of the past ages. The truth of the Divine immanence, which is the