CHAPTER XXIII HOSMER, NORTH, VAN DYKE, BENSON, STRYKER, COPELAND FREDERICK LUCIAN HOSMER 1840 IT is only within the last few years that Dr. Hosmer's poems have to any extent found their way into our hymnals, and even yet their exceptional merits are not fully appreciated. More than a decade ago Dr. Julian, the eminent hymnologist, made the statement: "Amongst Unitarian hymn writers of the last twenty years Mr. Hosmer is the most powerful and original known to us;" and certainly no one has arisen in the meantime to endanger his supremacy. Dr. Hosmer was born at Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1840, and after receiving his education he entered the Unitarian ministry, serving as the pastor of several churches in the middle West. From his boyhood he had a strong poetical bent, but unlike so many others referred to in this Story, he wrote very few hymns before he was forty years of age. All the more interest therefore attaches to the little poem, "The Mystery of God," composed in 1876, one of the earliest from his pen, and one of the best: “O Thou, in all thy might so far, Beyond the range of sun and star, "What heart can comprehend thy name, "Yet though I know thee but in part, "O sweeter than aught else besides, That like a veil of shadow hides "And dearer than all things I know That makes the darkest way I go As a prayer of simple childlike faith, love for God, yearning to be near him, and yet reverently content to bide his time for fuller knowledge, without prying into forbidden mysteries, this hymn has a peculiar charm. A large number of Dr. Hosmer's compositions appeared in The Thought of God in Hymns and Poems, which he and his friend Mr. E. C. Gannett brought out in a first series in 1885, and in a second series in 1894. Quite a group of these hymns are now in general use. One in particular deserves to be still better known. It is entitled "My Dead," and it must have been written out of the author's own experience. It is full of tender comfort for the hour of bereavement: "I cannot think of them as dead "The Father's house is mansioned fair All souls are his, and here, or there, "And still their silent ministry Within my heart hath place, As when on earth they walked with me "Their lives are made forever mine; What they to me have been "Mine are they by an ownership Nor time nor death can free; FRANK MASON NORTH 1850 Rev. Frank Mason North, D.D., is emphatically a son of the city. He was born in New York in 1850, and was educated there till he went to Wesleyan University, from which he graduated in the Class of '72. Entering the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, he held several pastorates in the New York and the New York East Conferences, until, in 1892, he was made Corresponding Secretary of the New York City Church Extension and Missionary Society. He occupied this position with distinguished success for twenty years, and, as during most of the time he was Corresponding Secretary of the National City Evangelization Union, his activities were nation-wide. At the General Conference of 1912 he was elected a Corresponding Secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Board of Foreign Missions. From 1916 to 1920, the full term, he was President of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. In 1884 Dr. North wrote a very beautiful "Hymn of Trust," which has found its way into a number of books. It opens with the lines: "Jesus, the calm that fills my breast, |