Franklin Square Song Collection - online songbook

200 favorite songs and Hymns for Schools, Homes Lyrics & Sheet Music

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	114	FRANKLIN-SQUARE	song collection:
	Since the Church has been divided into many branches, each has had its sweet singers, whose music has gladdened all the rest. It was Toplady, a severe Calvinist, who gave us " Rock of Ages." Men differ about the atonement; they almost call each other heretics and outcasts in their difference about it; but, when that hymn is sung, every heart rests upon the one Redeerrier. It was Charles Wesley, an Arminian, who sang "Jesus, Lover of my Soul." Side by side are Watts and Wesley, Church of England and Dis-		senter. F. W. Faber, a devout Catholic, wrote that hymn which breathes the highest spirit of Christian submission, " I worship Thee, sweet Will of God." Madame Guion, an unquestioning Catholic, wrote "O Lord, how full of sweet content!" Francis Xavier, one of the founders of the Jesuit order, wrote " Thou, O my Jesus! Thou didst me upon the Cross embrace." While the Church of England was con­vulsed by the greatest struggle it has known within this century, Keble, closely attached to one of the
	HARK! THE HERALD ANGELS SING.			Mendelssohn.
	contending parties, wrote the Evening Hymn which the whole Church delights to sing. A Unitarian, Sarah F. Adams, gave us " Nearer, my God, to Thee." The controversies over the orthodoxy of that hymn are as dry and cold and dead as the stones Jacob took for his pillow; and, meanwhile, souls mount up by it toward heaven as did the angels on the ladder Jacob saw as he journeyed to Padan-aram. We walk here, as it were, in the crypts of life: at times, from the great cathedral above us, we can hear		the organ and the chanting choir; we can see the light stream through the open door, when some friend goes out before us; and shall we fear to mount the narrow staircase of the grave that leads us out of this uncertain twilight into eternal light?—Longfellow. Whenever I think of God, I can only conceive of him as a Being infinitely great and infinitely good. This last quality of the divine nature inspires me with such confidence and with such joy that I could have written even a Miserere in tempo allegro.—Haydn-