At the outset it has, of course, to be admitted that there are many cases in which a change from an author's original may not only be justifiable, but absolutely necessary in order to make sense. Thus, in "The radiant morn hath passed away", Mr. Godfrey Thring wrote originally, "Our life is but a fading dawn", which is nonsense, since a dawn does not fade, but passes into the blaze of noontide. Again, when Toplady in "Rock of Ages" wrote "When my eyestrings break in death", he was much better replaced by the line with which we are all familiar. Similarly, the change from "Hark! how all the welkin rings" to "Hark! the herald angels sing" was justified by the circumstance that "welkin" is an archaic word long since disused in common language. When Charles Wesley, in "Come, O Thou Traveller Unknown", writes, "To me, to all, Thy bowels move," the word "mercies" is excusably substituted for "bowels", since the old-time meaning of the latter term is now quite obsolete. The opening lines of Wesley's fine Ascension hymn used to read:

Hail the day that sees Him rise Ravished from our wistful eyes!

The reading now is: "Taken from our wishful eyes", which is as clearly an improvement as the substitution of "panting" for "gasping" in the fourth verse of the same hymn. In "Crown Him with many crowns", the original referred to the "rich wounds" of the Crucified Christ, but the adjective has long since been wisely removed. In another hymn, "View Him grovelling in the garden" has given place to "View Him stricken in the garden"; while Wesley's "So freely spilt for me" has become "So freely shed for me". The author of "O happy band of pilgrims" wrote, in the fifth verse, "What are they but vaunt couriers", and now we

sing, "What are they but the heralds," which is certainly better. Cowper, in his "Hark! my soul, it is the Lord," had the line "And when wounded, healed thy wound", an awkward tautology, which has been avoided by making the third word "bleeding". Sometimes a change may be necessary for metrical reasons. Thus, in Lyte's evening hymn, "Abide with me", the the last line of the fourth verse reads in the original: "Come, Friend of sinners, and thus abide with me", which gives a syllable too much, thus justifying the deletion of the "and". It is only by slight revisions such as this that it is possible to use at all Sir Thomas Brown's hymn "The night is come, like to the day" (an admirable rendering of which for use in worship has been made by George Macdonald), Jeremy Taylor's hymn on Christ's en try into Jerusalem, and one or two other lyrics that were not originally writen with a view to being sung.

These are mild cases of tinkering, to which no reasonable being would object; they are made on purely literary grounds, and do not affect the sense. When it comes to defacing a hymn in order to bring that hymn into harmony with a particular theological creed, it is an altogether different matter. The practice has naturally enough been defended. Thus, one says an editor must "see to it that the verses are in general agreement with the religious views of the congregations for whose use his hymnal is intended. Such considerations render alterations in the case of certain hymns, if they are to be included, imperatively necessary". Another says that "many hymns, without some alteration or omission, could not have been used in our Church of England service". A third declares that it is "impossible to adhere in every case to the form in which hymns first appeared, or even where altered by their authors to the text finally

adopted by them". It is obvious that, if we are to allow this principle-or want of principle-to rule, we must have as many different renderings of certain hymns as we have different churches and creeds.

And that is, practically, just what we do have. The writer once met with an extreme case in which an entire version of the metrical Psalms had been made solely to meet the views of those who opposed the use of musical instruments in public worship! Every reference to trumpets and shawms and harps and timbrels and what not, had been ruthlessly deleted until even the Psalmist himself would not have recognized the result. The alterations which have been made in this way are, indeed, almost incredible. Every theological fad that ever vexed the heart of man has been squeezed into some hymn or other, totally regardless of the religious views of the author, until the sense and living power of the original have all but entirely gone. Thus it was that a strongly Calvinistic Church, objecting to the universal salvation indicated in the lines

My broken body thus I give

For you, for all: take, eat and live,

made a version for itself, and asked its elect to sing, "Broken for you: take, eat and live". Even the "Church Hymnary" has a suspicion of something of the kind when it changes the line "Dying once He all doth save" in Wesley's "Christ the Lord is risen to-day", to "Once he died our souls to save". And just as a particular church may put its particular dogma into the mouth of a writer who has no sympathy with that dogma, so a particular belief to which a writer may have given expression in a hymn may be turned entirely round, or its expression altogether removed. There are several instances of this perversion in late

hymnals. Charlotte Elliott, for example, believed in the protection of guardian angels. Hence she consistently wrote:

Christian, seek not yet repose, Hear thy guardian angel say, etc.

This proved too much for the hymnal editor, and so he concocted the commonplace and utterly indefensible line, "Cast thy dreams of ease away," which a great many people sing with the innocent notion that it is the author's original. Father Faber believed and said (in "Hark! hark! my soul") that "All journeys end in welcome to the weary"; but very few editors allow him to express the belief, their version -or perversion-being "Faith's journeys end", etc. Faber, indeed, has been peculiarly unfortunate in the matter of his hymns. It may be perfectly true that there are in some of his finest productions "verses whose sentiment would exclude them from all Protestant worship". But then there is no need to take such hymns for Protestant worship. Faber never wrote his hymns for that purpose, and one has no more right to rob him of the expression of his own particular religious views than one has to recast the theology of "Paradise Lost".

Perhaps, however, it will be better to illustrate our case by showing how one or two of the very greatest hymns have been dealt with as a whole by the cutting and carving editors. Let us look first at Newman's "Lead, kindly Light", that beautiful hymn which, as Lord Rosebery put it in a recent address, "expresses in most glorious language the highest of all aspirations”. One would have thought that here, at least, was a lyric which not even the editorial mangler would dare to meddle with. Unfortunately, there is no limit to the audacity of the hymn cobbler. As a rule, he is too much of a

coward to touch the work of living writers; but he knew that the author of "Lead, kindly Light," was practically dead to the world from the time that he entered the Roman communion, and so he hacked and defaced his magnificent hymn without compunction or fear of consequences. Dr. Horatius Bonar, himself a hymn-writer, was one of the first to lay hands on it. In 1845, he adopted the unwarrantable alteration: "Lead, Saviour, lead amid th' encircling gloom," and changed "the garish day" into "the glare of day", in both of which variations he has been followed by later editors. In one hymnal the beautiful line in the third verse: "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent" gives place to the prosaic paraphrase: "O'er dale and hill, through stream and torrent"; while in some half-dozen collections the simple and surely unobjectionable phrase, "One step enough for me", is transformed into the sibilant, "One step's enough for me". In an American hymnal of 1860 we have "Send, Lord, Thy light amid th' encircling gloom", and, among other distortions, this per version of the third verse:

Meantime, along the narrow, rugged path

Thyself hast trod,

Lead, Saviour, lead me home in childlike faith,

Home to my God,

To rest forever after earthly strife
In the calm light of everlasting life.

This, it is almost superfluous to remark, is excused by the author on theological grounds. The verse, we read, "was added by the editor from a sense of need, and from a deep conviction that the heart of the belated pilgrin can only find rest in the Light of Light". So much might surely have been taken for granted; and, in any case, the added stanza is entirely redundant, if for no other reason than that it is not Newman's. That the Cardinal himself condemned it, hardly needs to be said.

We have seen how Wesley censured the alterations of his hymns. One of his best-known lyrics, "Jesu, Lover of my soul," has suffered as much from the editorial cobbler as any hymn that ever was written. The opening stanza has about twenty different readings! An early objection was, of course, taken to the term "Lover" as applied to the Saviour: it was thought not to be solemn and dignified enough; and so attempts were made to increase the reverence of the opening line by the sacrifice of some of its pathos, and a good deal of its poetry. Thus, we have such readings as, "Jesu, Refuge of my soul", "Jesus, Saviour of my soul", "Father, Refuge of my soul", and so on. Then followed a difficulty about the lines

While the nearer waters roll, While the tempest still is high.

These have led to all kinds of alterations-"While the billows near me roll", "While the raging billows roll", "While the threat'ning waters roll", "While the ocean round us rolls" (ne

cessitating, of course, further changes), "While the gathering waters roll," and other impertinences literally too numerous to mention. Nor could the simple words "Let me to Thy bosom fly" be left alone. One wanted to have the reading: "To Thy sheltering arms we fly"; another suggested: "We to Thee for safety fly"; a third ventured on: "To Thy mercy we would fly". In 1863 Dr. Kennedy made the verse run in this way:

Jesus, refuge of my soul,

To Thy sheltering arms we fly; While the raging billows roll,

While the tempest's roar is high.

It is not surprising to learn, on the authority of the editor of the "Dictionary of Hymnology", that in the whole range of hymnody there is no stanza or portion of a stanza which has undergone so many alterations. As an editorial curiosity these four lines of Wesley's are, in fact, in their transformations unique.

Another hymn which has suffered greatly at the hands of the tinker is Milman's beautiful litany: "When our heads are bowed with woe". Dr. Martineau made a perfect travesty of it in his "Hymns of Praise and Prayer”, garbled every stanza, and added a closing verse which, as one critic has justly remarked, is no alteration in the ordinary sense, but a gratuitous and unwarranted substitution, in which the meaning of the original totally disappears. Bishop Bickersteth also left it bruised and mangled when he printed it in his "Hymnal Companion”. The construction of the hymn is such that the second stanza of each pair of two is an answering counterpart of the stanza preceding it; but without regard to this important circumstance the Bishop removed the stanza beginning "When the solemn death-bell tolls", and left its companion verse "a broken fragment responsive to nothing". Be

sides that, a concluding verse was tacked on to the hymn by some unknown hand, whose weak imitation only reveals more fully the beauty of Milman's original.

But there is more to be said about the tinkering to which this hymn has been subjected. The expression "Son of Mary" in the refrain line has been a stumbling block from the first, and all sorts of attempts have been made to get rid of it. We have had "Son of David", "Man of Sorrows", "Loving Saviour", and one knows not what all; anything, indeed, but that which Milman wrote. The keynote of the hymn is quite evidently the Divine humanity of Christ; but the silly Protestant prejudice against the name of the Virgin being mentioned has most effectively removed this grand central idea. Some years ago the question of altering the line was being tediously debated by the committee charged by the Church of Scotland Assembly with the preparation of an official collection for that church. Several of the members contended that to leave the expression "Son of Mary" would tend to Mariolatry. This was more than even the gentle Dr. Robertson of Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh, could stand. Rising, with flushed face, he cried excitedly, "That phrase can only lead to Mariolatry when our congregations consist of born idiots." So it is. And yet here we have the "Church Hymnary", with the old reading, "Man of Sorrows"-a concession, as we have been told, to the Irish Presbyterians. Milman sacrificed to the Irish Presbyterians because the Irish Presbyterians "find themselves in the midst of prevailing Romanism, with all its errors"! One may ask whether it is an error to bring out the humanity of Christ in a hymn meant for public worship. That the Saviour was the Son of God might, perhaps, be questioned, but surely not that He was the Son of Mary. This