needs be afraid that to speak the truth concerning such will hasten the
dominance of alien and oppressive powers; the truth is free, and to be
just is to be strong. Should the time come again when Liberty is in
danger, those who have defended the truth even in her adversaries, if
such there be, will be found the readiest to draw the sword for her, and,
hating not, yet smite for the liberty to do even them justice. To give
the justice we claim for ourselves is, if there be a Christ, the law of
Christ, to obey which is eternally better than truest theory.

I should like to give many of the hymns of Dr. Faber. Some of them are
grand, others very lovely, and some, of course, to my mind considerably
repulsive. He seems to me to go wrong nowhere in originating--he produces
nothing unworthy except when he reproduces what he never could have
entertained but for the pressure of acknowledged authority. Even such
things, however, he has enclosed in pearls, as the oyster its incommoding
sand-grains.

His hymn on _The Greatness of God_ is profound; that on _The Will of God_
is very wise; that to _The God of my Childhood_ is full of quite womanly
tenderness: all are most simple in speech, reminding us in this respect
of John Mason. In him, no doubt, as in all of his class, we find traces
of that sentimentalism in the use of epithets--small words, as
distinguished from homely, applied to great things--of which I have
spoken more than once; but criticism is not to be indulged in the
reception of great gifts--of such a gift as this, for instance:--

THE ETERNITY OF GOD.

O Lord! my heart is sick,
Sick of this everlasting change;
And life runs tediously quick
Through its unresting race and varied range:
Change finds no likeness to itself in Thee,
And wakes no echo in Thy mute eternity.

Dear Lord! my heart is sick
Of this perpetual lapsing time,
So slow in grief, in joy so quick,
Yet ever casting shadows so sublime:
Time of all creatures is least like to Thee,
And yet it is our share of Thine eternity.

Oh change and time are storms
For lives so thin and frail as ours;
For change the work of grace deforms
With love that soils, and help that overpowers;
And time is strong, and, like some chafing sea,
It seems to fret the shores of Thine eternity.

Weak, weak, for ever weak!
We cannot hold what we possess;