210 LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE [^785 



" the low church " of a later and of ours — he yet wanted a body 

 of hymns introduced into our prayer book ; writing to Dr. White 

 that " the Methodists captivate many by their attention to church 

 music and by their hymns and doxologies," which, as he says, 

 " when rationally and devoutly introduced, are sublime parts of 

 public and private worship," and again writing. 



The Psalms of David, unless where tortured by versifiers, have but 

 few evangelical subjects. 



And writing again when Dr. White desired to leave the Litany 

 a part of the service separable from the order for daily morning 

 prayer : 



Let not our abridgments be too great. Without the Litany, Wednes- 

 day and Friday prayers would not draw many to church. 



And again as to certain prayers : 



The service would appear quite naked \\\'(\\o\\\. them.* 



A hymn, suggested by Dr. White, composed by Francis Hop- 

 kinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Smith 

 finds "too Jlai for the great occasion." 



We can readily conceive that the simplicity in the style of parts 

 of the English liturgy — its pure and little sonorous Saxon, and its 

 merely self-abasing terms with which its liturgy opens — did not 

 quite come up to the grandeur of thought, and the sonoritc of 

 utterance, and the impressiveness of spectacle, which the mind 

 and eye and ear of Dr. Smith affected and indeed required. 



To illustrate what I mean : 



The Church of England begins her service with sentences 

 purely penitential, and inviting to confession of sin, and the Ex- 

 hortation which adverts to these " sundry places " thus put before 

 the people in which the Scripture moveth them to confess their 

 manifold sins and wickedness and assures them of the forgiveness 

 of the same, if those sins and wickednesses are rightly confessed, 

 we shall, by God's infinite goodness and mercy, obtain. But 

 there was no asceticism nor any vast humility in Dr. Smith's com- 

 position ; while there was always an awful sense of God's presence 

 and greatness. To Dr. Smith, therefore, have been generally 



^Sce SMj>rtj, pp. 143, 147, 16S, iri. 



