questions are for
every Christian to consider, and for those undertaking the cure of souls
to make the subject of their faithful, laborious professional study. The
founding of professorships of social ethics in the theological
seminaries must lead to important and speedy results in the efficiency
of churches and pastors in dealing with this difficult class of
problems.[386:1] But whatever advances shall be made in the future, no
small part of the impulse toward them will be recognized as coming from,
or rather through, the inspiring and most Christian humanitarian
writings and the personal influence and example of Edward Everett Hale.

* * * * *

In one noble department of religious literature, the liturgical, the
record of the American church is meager. The reaction among the early
colonists and many of the later settlers against forms of worship
imposed by political authority was violent. Seeking for a logical basis,
it planted itself on the assumption that no form (unless an improvised
form) is permitted in public worship, except such as are sanctioned by
express word of Scripture. In their sturdy resolution to throw off and
break up the yoke, which neither they nor their fathers had been able to
bear, of ordinances and traditions complicated with not a little of
debilitating superstition, the extreme Puritans of England and Scotland
rejected the whole system of holy days in the Christian year, including
the authentic anniversaries of Passover and Pentecost, and discontinued
the use of religious ceremonies at marriages and funerals.[386:2] The
only liturgical compositions that have come down to us from the first
generations are the various attempts, in various degrees of harshness
and rudeness, at the versification of psalms and other Scriptures for
singing. The emancipation of the church from its bondage to an
artificial dogma came, as we have already seen, with the Great Awakening
and the introduction of Watts's "Psalms of David, Imitated in the
Language of the New Testament."[387:1] After the Revolution, at the
request of the General Association of Connecticut and the General
Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, Timothy Dwight completed the work
of Watts by versifying a few omitted psalms,[387:2] and added a brief
selection of hymns, chiefly in the grave and solemn Scriptural style of
Watts and Doddridge. Then followed, in successive tides, from England,
the copious hymnody of the