head is hard, dry, innutritious, and ever leans to unbelief. The devotion that owns no source of life but the heart is indiscriminate, vapoury, passionate, and constantly inclines to superstition. The former is the blight of religion, the latter is its rankness. These deadly evils are, it is believed, avoided in the present Collection of "Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs." The belief is founded eventually on what with the writer is a fundamental principle, namely, that the being from whom God expects worship is man as God made him, and not man as maimed or marred by systems of speculation. Religion, as God-given, is meant for man, not for a part of man. It seems to follow that the principle which should preside in the formation of a "Hymn Book" is that which, taking for its framework human nature as it is, builds thereon and thereby a house of worship, exact and complete as is the soul of man itself. Such is the principle which has been followed in this volume. Man's intelligent nature, in all its chief qualities and movements, has been adopted as its mould. If the cast has been successfully taken, the book is a likeness of man, and as such a not unfit offering to his Maker.

It is not, however, man in the abstract, nor the man of the schools, still less any fashion of man produced or contemplated by paganism, that forms the type of this collection of devotional poetry, but man as pourtrayed in the Bible, and specially man as seen, addressed, and redeemed by the Saviour of the world. It is, therefore, man as imaged forth in the great ideal of our race,—the perfect man in Christ Jesus (Col. i. 26). He who declared "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John xiv. 6), offers himself as our archetype as well as our model and our Lord. That image of himself the disciple readily owns, that example he zealously emulates, that

authority he gladly venerates. There he finds at onco instruction and impulse,-both life for the substance, and light for the guidance of his inner self. Now Christ, as the word of God, is God's wisdom and love combined, The Christian man consequently is neither all reason nor all sentiment, but reason and sentiment united in due and harmonious proportions. The Christian man, moreover, gives an attentive ear to the teachings of Christ. But Christ has taught us not only to love God, but also who is the God whom we ought to love. That God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That God is the August Being whom he styled "My Father and your Father, my God and your God” (John xx. 17). Most clear as well as most emphatic are the instructions Jesus has given on this, which is the central point of his religion. Even the Hebrew idea of God did not fully correspond to his own idea. In his mind, actuated by the measureless spirit of God himself, the Jehovah of his forefathers expanded and softened into the tender and loving Universal Father. Accordingly he addressed the Samaritan Woman in these words: "Ye (Samaritans) worship what ye know not, we worship what we know; the hour cometh and now is when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for such are they whom the Father seeketh to worship him; God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" (John iv. 22). It is, then, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ that is the object of worship on the part of the Christian. It is He and no other being whatever. Here the Christian has neither option nor latitude. He that obeys not Christ here obeys him in nothing, for God is, as the centre of spiritual life, so its very essence. Every religion is what to it God is. The religion of Moses is one thing, the religion of Christ is another, precisely because

their underlying ideas of God are different. Thus the religion of Brahma is Brahma himself reduced to a finite scale, and the religion of Mohamed is Mohamed over again, as reproduced in the mind and the life of his followers. Accordingly Christ is the image of God, and the Christian worships the Father as he is reflected in the Son. The true object of Christian worship, then, is the perfection of all that is true, wise, good, loving, beautiful, and grand, because these attributes find in Christ a living centre, and an adequate expression. In consequence the worship that is acceptable to God must be such worship as was offered by Christ, and the worship which Christ offered was the very substance of his own perfect soul. Of such a soul truth is the marrow. Hence the stress which the Saviour lays on truth in his description of "the true worshippers." "The true worshippers" are defined by him to be those who worship his Father, and worship him not in form but in spirit. Spiritual worship addressed to the Father of Jesus is true worship, the true worship, the only true Christian worship. There is a worship which is not Christian; there is a worship which is not in the highest sense true;-such worship is not the Christian worship, for that consists of truth of thought and truth of sentiment, the thought taking its shape and colour from the thought and the practise of Christ, and so securing the proper object of worship; the sentiment springing from the heart of man, nurtured in the spirit of Jesus, enriched with the love of God, and directed by the Scriptures, makes the heart, the lip, and the life one, and educes thence an harmonious oblation to the one God. True Christian worship accordingly is the sincere worship of man's soul as illuminated, enriched, and directed by Christ. It follows that Christian worship is not that will-worship which men may form for or take to them

selves. It is nothing arbitrary; it is nothing variable; it is nothing uncertain. It is the worship which Christ paid; it is the worship which Christ commanded. It is no attitude of the soul, assumed either with or without a purpose; but the simple, spontaneous, and half unconscious utterance of the highest thoughts and deepest feelings of a soul inspired by the Son of God himself. As such it is the outcome of all that a Christian man has of what is good, pure, tender, noble, devout, and practical. Here is seen, too, the use, the duty, and the privilege of the practise of devotion. Devotion is the living communion of the soul with its God, and in consequence it is that exercise of the soul through which God stamps thereon his own image. What good so great, what delight so intense and pure, what dignity so elevated as for a mortal man to wear the image of God as perfected in Christ Jesus?

It is in the hope that something might yet be done for so grand, so enduring, so desirable a result, that the following poems have been compiled. May the blessing of God rest on the labour in rich abundance. The wish is supported by a hope which, springing from faith in Christ, gives an assurance that those who in worship approach nearest Christ, accomplish a work most acceptable to Christ. The proper end of all true devotion is the promotion of God's glory in true and holy living on the part of man. Devotion is the soul's nutriment. It is manna given from heaven. If so its forms, as well as its substance, ask serious attention and constant care. The most effectual form it can assume is that which unites every voice as well as every heart in sacred song. "A whole assembly" worshipping God with one heart and one voice is one of the most impressive and hallowing of sights. So desirable an end is greatly promoted by part-singing; in

which worshippers utter God's praise, in a seemly as well as effective manner, by producing in the union of their diverse tones of voice those harmonies which God loves, because they are what God himself has made due provision for in the qualities of the organs of speech, and the laws of musical sound. Instead of one man acting as a precentor, instead of a scientific or an unscientific choir, the entire congregation should take part in the worship of song, and with a view to this end classes should be formed in the Sunday school and in the Church, for instruction in singing, on such a scale as would in time make every worshipper a skilled vocalist,—at least so far as is required for the purposes of Christian psalmody. Coldness in worship would cease then to be a reproach; public worship would become more attractive as well as more beneficial; and the services of the pulpit would find a good soil for its good seed.

The desire to contribute something to the improvement of the services of public worship which has produced this Collection of "Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs," has also produced an auxiliary volume, namely, "The Christian Year: A Collection of Passages of Scripture, suitable for Chants, Anthems, &c., for Public Worship, arranged according to the Changes of the Seasons, and the Chief Festivals of the Church of Christ through the Course of the Year."

Lower Broughton, near Manchester,

December 1st, 1860.

JOHN R. BEARD.