ce and the austere role of
circumstance weighted with interest, and fused to an all-volatile
point sufficient to write to you concerning, and always entering,
freed from _schism_, the moot point, I beg leave to advance the
suggestion that (with correct apposition of sentiment, already said)
the moment has arrived for an improvement to be effected in the
Hymnal, in the public offices of St. Paul's Cathedral employed.

For the furtherance of this important item of diocesan and divine
service, "Hymns, Ancient and Modern," be it well known, has stood
the crucial test of a number of years; while its mechanical
characteristics have been demonstrated all the way along the metronome
number of decades it has served to mollify and assuage the griefs
and passions, and inspire the consciences of congregations using it
habitually as a _vade mecum_.

While believing in the sedate grandeur of its stereotyped orthodoxy,
I powerfully plead, and in a tone of restraint, this prerogative: that
the edition of hymns known as "The Hymnary," should upon examination
be found to contain more agreeable, versatile value and fecundity
of literary nutrition: honourably and scholastically capable of
out-classing the rival for whose displacement I plead; and competent
at once to put yet better light with wholesomer sustenance and rarer
spiritual food into the minds of its privileged students.

The ideas and principles conceived by the once editors and publishers
of the volume whose richly bestraught merits I champion, and whose
solemn rights I plead, (in the year 1871), was to place in society
at once, all electrified, au premier coup canonized (armed at
all points), a work which should at a moment be complete in law;
self-contained and academically referable to the stringent junctures
of an ecclesiastical, a national, and a polyphonetic tribunal: a
work which should loyally attract the acclaim of co-existing literary
hymnals, and ever would, it was reverently hoped--a sentiment which I,
for one, favourably concur in--remain, the key-symbol of the Reformed,
Anglican faith, with its near, true, and ever new ally--a note as
high, silvery and jurisprudential; purified domestic co-partnership!

To further substantiate and enhance my devoutly expressed remarks, I
confidently state that the compilation of "Hymns Ancient and Modern"
was not originally in fact the outcome of an individual movement, or
yet of a moment. At periods diverse, and at stages var