INTRODUCTION "Of making many books there is no end;" but of making useful books there is a decided limitation: and the gifted ones who can perform this feat are a select number. Dr. Robert Elmer Smith is one of these. His "Methodist Episcopalians" with its onehundred thousand circulation; his "Ladies' Aid Manual," the first in the field and absolutely adequate with a number of features that are distinct strokes of genius; these, followed by his "Woman's Foreign and Home Missionary Manual," show the work of a genius in massing practical suggestions and workable plans. His stately work, "Modern Messages from Great Hymns," places him easily in the master's roll in quite a different department, as a literary critic and expositor of devotional literature; and now comes his compilation of "Hymn Gems. Bishop Warren used to lecture to the delight of thousands on "The Intensities and Felicities of Biblical Expression." Dr. Smith has culled for years and placed under appropriate heads such choice poetical expressions from the wide range of Christian poetry and the hymns of the sanctuary. His book will enrich the mind of the student. It should be on the library table and on the desk of the study. It ought to be carried in the pocket and its treasures garnered while we wait at railway stations, ride on the cars, glide in automobiles, or are served in restaurants. We can snatch a minute a dozen times a day to get a gem; and what a mental enrichment and spiritual quickening our men, women, and children can have, if they deposit in the treasury of memory these precious gems. I am going to commit these lines to memory, or better, as our fathers expressed it, "learn them by heart. Who will join in this endeavor to "consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works;' not forsaking our own assembling together but speaking one to another "in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord.' Clarence True Wilson. |