Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Eccl. 12:7.

In traversing the long history of the human use of song in religious services, rites, and ceremonies, we have found that

1. The hymn has been recognized in every age, in every generation, by every race, whether savage or cultured, under every sky, as an expression of religious emotion, and as the generator of such emotion.

2. Religious emotions are of various types. It may be the earnestness of strong conviction; it may be the hot indignation against sin and evil, against neglect of the soul’s highest obligations. It may be the depressing sense of conscious unworthiness, rising into repentance for sin, into the tenderness of grateful recognition of the divine love and forgiving grace, expressed in tears, joy over the assurance of salvation expressed in beaming countenance or in ejaculations of delight, or even in shouts of victory. The human heart becomes an Æolian harp from which the winds of the Spirit of God evoke an infinitude of melodies, grave and solemn, tender and sweet, joyous and triumphant, or vigorous and inspiring,—a very symphonic orchestra.

3. As an expression of religious emotion the hymn has been effective in moving the human will, stubborn in its revolt against God, by intensifying the mental and spiritual power of religious ideas.

4. The religious idea is primary, of course, but its emotional response in the heart gives it vitality. It is the team of idea and its normal emotion that exerts the power of the hymn. An abstract idea, abstract because its emotional reflex has been abstracted, has no motive power.

5. In the effective use of the hymn the clear apprehension of its ideas must be enforced by the vital reproduction of the original emotion of its writer which urged its composure. A dry hymn written without vitalizing feeling has no power to inspire; it gives no sense of reality. Dry sermons, not pollinated by emotional vigor, can bear no fruit. The effectiveness of sermon or hymn will be determined by the intensity of the feeling behind it.

6. The emotional appeal must be genuine, both writer and singer must be sincere. Artificial emotion, the mere pretense of a feeling that does not exist, has no power. It is not merely unappealing, it is offensive.

7. But emotion necessarily implies an intelligence and a susceptibility to be moved—in other words, a personality. It also implies that one person’s feelings can call forth like emotions in other persons. The merely outward expression may even create a like emotion among others who do not fully apprehend the primary idea that set the original emotion to vibrating, creating a very contagion of feeling.

8. It follows that in actual aggressive work, largely depending on emotional transmission, the minister or the leader must supply the initiating impulse. If the minister has a dry mind—there are ministers who desiccate every topic they discuss—religious ideas suffer a blight of aridity, killing all sense of reality, this sense of reality being the sine qua non of all spiritual effectiveness. If he is fortunate in having a vivid imagination and a heart responsive to religious truth, he can multiply his mental gifts twentyfold by intensifying the truths he expresses.

9. Treated in this way, the hymn becomes the peer of the sermon in influencing power, and assures the minister eager for spiritual results a large harvest of souls, saved and spiritualized.