men." For celebrating the praise of the Saviour, he seems to have been of like spirit and genius with Perronet. He was born in Buckingham, Eng., April 2, 1762; studied for the ministry and became a curate, successor of William Romaine. His spiritual maturity was early, and his habits of thought were formed amid associations such as the young Wesleys and Whitefield sought. Like them, even in his student days he proved his aspiration for purer religious life by an evangelical zeal that cost him the ridicule of many of his schoolfellows, but the meetings for conference and prayer which he organized among them were not unattended, and were lasting and salutary in their effect. Jesus was the theme of his life and song, and was his last word. He died in 1816.

Crown His head with endless blessing
Who in God the Father's name
With compassion never ceasing
Comes salvation to proclaim.

Hail, ye saints who know His favor,
Who within His gates are found,
Hail, ye saints, th' exalted Saviour,
Let His courts with praise resound.

THE TUNE.

"Haydn," bearing the name of its great composer, is in several important hymnals the chosen music for William Goode's devout words. Its strain and spirit are lofty and melodious and in entire accord with the pious poet's praise.

Joseph Haydn, son of a poor wheelwright, was born 1732, in Rohron, a village on the borders of Hungary and Austria. His precocity of musical talent was such that he began composing at the age of ten years. Prince Esterhazy discovered his genius when he was poor and friendless, and his fortune was made. While Music Master for the Prince's Private Chapel (twenty years) he wrote many of his beautiful symphonies which placed him among the foremost in that class of music. Invited to England, he received the Doctor's degree at Oxford, and composed his great oratorio of "The Creation," besides his "Twelve Grand Symphonies," and a long list of minor musical works secular and sacred. His invention was inexhaustible.

Haydn seems to have been a sincerely pious man. When writing his great oratorio of "The Creation" at sixty-seven years of age, "I knelt down every day,” he says, “and prayed God to strengthen me for my work." This daily spiritual preparation was similar to Handel's when he was creating his "Messiah." Change one word and it may be said of sacred music as truly as of astronomy, "The undevout composer is mad." Near Haydn's death, in Vienna, 1809, when he heard for the last time his magnificent chorus, "Let there be Light!" he exclaimed, "Not mine, not mine. It all came to me from above."

"NOW TO THE LORD A NOBLE SONG."

When Watts finished this hymn he had achieved a "noble song," whether he was conscious of it or not; and it deserves a foremost place, where it can help future worshippers in their praise as it has the past. It is not so common in the later hymnals, but it is imperishable, and still later collections will not forget it.

Now to the Lord a noble song,
Awake my soul, awake my tongue!
Hosanna to the Eternal Name,
And all His boundless love proclaim.

See where it shines in Jesus' face,
The brightest image of His grace!
God in the person of His Son

Has all His mightiest works outdone.

A rather finical question has occurred to some minds as to the theology of the word "works" in the last line, making the second person in the Godhead apparently a creature; and in a few hymnbooks the previous line has been made to read

God in the Gospel of His Son.

But the question is a rhetorical one, and the poet's free expression-here as in hundreds of other cases has never disturbed the general confidence in his orthodoxy.

Montgomery called Watts "the inventor of hymns in our language," and the credit stands practically undisputed, for Watts made a hymn style that no human master taught him, and his