IN the conversion of the world to a practical Christianity through the influence of Christian Science teaching, no small place is occupied by the hymnal used by Christian Scientists. In every Christian Science gathering throughout the world, on Sundays and on Wednesday evenings, selections from the hymnal are used to express the conviction of the newly awakened thought; to voice the gladness of those who are experienced in the healing work of Truth, the aspirations of those who are hungering and thirsting after righteousness: to whisper the prayer of those who stand upon the threshold of salvation and in trembling hope and awesome faith appeal to the God of Israel for a surcease of sorrow and pain and sickness and discouragement. It seems to be the office of a hymn to glide into consciousness on the tide of appropriate music, at a moment of spiritual receptiveness when its terse and simple statements of religious truth find a lodgment that is denied to prose presentations of the same import in greater detail of expression, and to recur to thought in moments when consciousness is striving against the errors to which humanity seems to be heir.
When the writer was quite young in Science, he heard the words of hymn 176 read in a Christian Science meeting, and participated in the singing, at a time when the declaration of the first two lines of the first verse came like balm to his spiritual sense; and as thought was awakened by the words which he sang with quivering lips and with a full heart, the cloud lifted and disappeared,—
I look to Thee in every need,
And never look in vain.
