Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/357

Letter 30] little child many years ago. We were singing a hymn, and had come to the words:

"I suppose," said the child (who was young but somewhat old-fashioned in thought and expression), "that these words mean that you want to die, if they mean anything. But I don't want to die. So I don't think I ought to say them." In my own mind I sympathized very much with the objector; but I endeavoured to meet the objection. "Hymns," I said, "are written not for single persons but for congregations. In a whole churchful you will find all sorts of people of different ages and ways of thinking. Some are glad and strong, others sad and weak. Some rejoice in life and look forward eagerly to labour. These are mostly the young; but the older sort are sometimes tired of life and longing for rest. Now when we are singing a hymn we must all do our best, young and old, happy and sad, to enter into one another's feelings, and we must not expect that every word in every hymn will precisely represent our own particular feelings at the moment: the time will perhaps come when the words that now seem meaningless to us will exactly represent our deepest feelings, and we shall wonder how we could have ever failed to feel them; but for the present we must not be disposed always to be asking, 'Do I agree with this? Do I exactly feel that?' Of course if it occurs to you that these or those words are so opposite to what you think, that you would be telling a lie to God in uttering them, why then you must not utter them: but you ought not to suppose that in a church service God exacts from you a rigid account for every word of the congregational utterances in which you take part: if you can heartily