No man needs be afraid that to speak the truth concerning such will hasten the dominance of alien and oppressive powers; the truth is free, and to be just is to be strong.  Should the time come again when Liberty is in danger, those who have defended the truth even in her adversaries, if such there be, will be found the readiest to draw the sword for her, and, hating not, yet smite for the liberty to do even them justice.  To give the justice we claim for ourselves is, if there be a Christ, the law of Christ, to obey which is eternally better than truest theory.

I should like to give many of the hymns of Dr. Faber.  Some of them are grand, others very lovely, and some, of course, to my mind considerably repulsive.  He seems to me to go wrong nowhere in originating—­he produces nothing unworthy except when he reproduces what he never could have entertained but for the pressure of acknowledged authority.  Even such things, however, he has enclosed in pearls, as the oyster its incommoding sand-grains.

His hymn on The Greatness of God is profound; that on The Will of God is very wise; that to The God of my Childhood is full of quite womanly tenderness:  all are most simple in speech, reminding us in this respect of John Mason.  In him, no doubt, as in all of his class, we find traces of that sentimentalism in the use of epithets—­small words, as distinguished from homely, applied to great things—­of which I have spoken more than once; but criticism is not to be indulged in the reception of great gifts—­of such a gift as this, for instance:—­

  THE ETERNITY OF GOD.

        O Lord! my heart is sick,
      Sick of this everlasting change;
        And life runs tediously quick
      Through its unresting race and varied range: 
    Change finds no likeness to itself in Thee,
  And wakes no echo in Thy mute eternity.

        Dear Lord! my heart is sick
      Of this perpetual lapsing time,
        So slow in grief, in joy so quick,
      Yet ever casting shadows so sublime: 
    Time of all creatures is least like to Thee,
  And yet it is our share of Thine eternity.

        Oh change and time are storms
      For lives so thin and frail as ours;
        For change the work of grace deforms
      With love that soils, and help that overpowers;
    And time is strong, and, like some chafing sea,
  It seems to fret the shores of Thine eternity.

        Weak, weak, for ever weak! 
      We cannot hold what we possess;
        Youth cannot find, age will not seek,—­
      Oh weakness is the heart’s worst weariness: 
    But weakest hearts can lift their thoughts to Thee;
  It makes us strong to think of Thine eternity.

        Thou hadst no youth, great God! 
      An Unbeginning End Thou art;
        Thy glory in itself abode,
      And still abides in its own tranquil heart: 
    No age can heap its outward years on Thee: 
  Dear God!  Thou art Thyself Thine own eternity!