appealing, in agony kneeling,
I pray, I beseech Thee, O Lord, set me free!

One would, at first thought, judge this simple but eloquent cry worthy
of an appropriate tone-expression--to be sung by prison evangelists like
the Volunteers of America, to convicts in the jails and penitentiaries.
But its special errand and burden are voiced so literally that hardened
hearers would probably misapply it--however sincerely the petitioner
herself meant to invoke spiritual rather than temporal deliverance. The
hymn, if we may call it so, is _too_ literal. Possibly at some time or
other it may have been set to music but not for ordinary choir service.

SAMUEL RUTHERFORD.

The sands of time are sinking,

* * * * *

But, glory, glory dwelleth
In Immanuel's Land.

This hymn is biographical, but not autobiographical. Like the discourses
in Herodotus and Plutarch, it is the voice of the dead speaking through
the sympathetic genius of the living after long generations. The strong,
stern Calvinist of 1636 in Aberdeen was not a poet, but he bequeathed
his spirit and life to the verse of a poet of 1845 in Melrose. Anne Ross
Cousin read his two hundred and twenty letters written during a two
years' captivity for his fidelity to the purer faith, and studied his
whole history and experience till her soul took his soul's place and
felt what he felt. Her poem of nineteen stanzas (152 lines) is the voice
of Rutherford the Covenanter, with the prolixity of his manner and age
sweetened by his triumphant piety, and that is why it belongs with the
_Hymns of Great Witnesses_. The three or four stanzas still occasionally
printed and sung are only recalled to memory by the above three lines.

Samuel Rutherford was born in Nisbet Parish, Scotland, in 1600. His
settled ministry was at Anworth, in Galloway--1630-1651--with a break
between 1636 and 1638, when Charles I. angered by his anti-prelatical
writings, silenced and banished him. Shut up in Aberdeen, but allowed,
like Paul in Rome, to live "in his own hired house" and write letters,
he poured out his heart's love in Epistles to his Anworth flock and to
the Non-conformists of Scotland. When his countrymen rose against the
attempted imposition of a new holy Romish service-book on their
churches, he escaped to his people, and soon after appeared in Edinburgh
and signed the covenant with the assembled ministers. Thirteen years
later, after Cromwel