PREFACE THIS Collection of Hymns is strictly supplemental. It assumes the use, in Public Worship, of those classic hymns which, because of their great excellence, are found in almost every Hymnal; and it merely furnishes, as additions to these, certain compositions, most of them of recent production, which for various reasons it may be desirable to include in worshipping use. This Supplement, therefore, has neither the completeness nor the proportions of an independent book of worshipsong. The remarkable development of Hymnology during the last few years-in the Romish and Anglican Churches especially, in which hitherto it has been neglected and disparaged-has pro.duced innumerable writers of hymns, of various degrees of excellence. It is in these churches chiefly, strange to say, that both the poetry and the music of our church-song are just now threatened with a corruption as meretricious as that which, in former times, was charged upon Puritans and Methodists. But just as the latter could also boast great singers like Dr. Watts and Charles Wesley, with whose hymns no book of church-song can now dispense; so modern Romanists and Anglicans |