Canon Overton's words concerning Dr. Neale are just and true, as follows: "One trait of his singularly lovable character must not pass unnoticed. His charity, both in the popular and in the truer Christian sense of the word, was unbounded; he was liberal and almost lavish with his money, and his liberality extended to men of all creeds and opinions. * * If, however, success in life depended upon worldly advantages, Dr. Neale's life would have to be pronounced a failure; for, as his old friend, Dr. Littledale, justly complains, he spent nearly half his life where he died, in the position of warden of an obscure almshouse on a salary of £27 a year.' But measured by a different standard, his short life assumes very different proportions. Not only did he win the love and gratitude of those with whom he was immediately connected, but he acquired a world-wide reputation as a writer, and he lived to see that Church revival, to promote which was the great object of his whole career, already advancing to the position which it now occupies in the land of his birth.' It is pleasant to read in Miss Towle's biography: "In politics Neale was naturally, we had almost said inevitably, a Liberal. He was a constant reader of newspapers, and, at the time of the war in America, absorbed in public affairs. He had an unbounded admiration for Abraham Lincoln, and felt his death to be a personal bereavement as well as a national calamity." That an Englishman of the favored class should have learned so quickly to bow before the immense and genuine majesty of our great Martyr President is greatly to his credit. It was soul meeting soul in noble communion. In reply to a special request for a characterization of Dr. Neale, the Rev. Frederic M. Bird has kindly written as follows: "The fact that he was poor, lonely, almost friendless (being a Cambridge, not an Oxford man), and the victim-partly from his own temperament and unworldly courage of scandal, persecution, and continuous neglect, excuses the suspicion that still hangs about his memory only from the viewpoint of the vulgar world, which distrusts and dislikes anything not on approved conventional lines. "As to certain disparagements: I fancy much of what little wine he could afford went to that poor and sick dissenting minister who, abandoned by his own people, was kept alive partly by this Romanizer's charity. And how many £5 notes had one to fling about and lose whose official income was less than thirty pounds, and who labored long at writing fiction to support his family! "His literary results, however unequal, were vast and memorable. He preferred to produce learned works like that on the Eastern Church, which won highest praise from the chief Russian authority, and devotional books, such as could bring in little money; but from his potboiling came such a wonderful series of tales from Church history in every age and land as nobody else has paralleled-I mean the numerous best, mostly short, reprinted in (I think) ten or twelve volumes. What hindered their currency was Protestant fears, for he swallowed the hugest miracles, and his martyrs were Roman Catholics, preferably Jesuits, and his persecutors Huguenots or Dutch Calvinists. All this amused me much when I read the tales some thirty years ago, and seemed a fair set-off to the Covenanting legends, etc., of my Sunday School days. "If he was a fighter it was only in bearing testimony; I never heard of his denouncing or attacking anybody. When that partisan bishop, after thirteen years, took off the inhibition. with a scant apology, intimating that he had mistaken the man, Neale dedicated the next edition of his Seatonian poems to him-not as tuft-hunting, but as carrying Christian forgiveness to the limit of the New Testament or Marcus Aurelius. This was the man's spirit. Read his 'Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.' You must have seen that the feeling in his best hymns is as deep and genuine as it ever is anywhere. The splendid 'Jerusalem the Golden' series came as hot from his heart and as straight from his experience as from the poor Cluniac monk. "The Congregationalist, Josiah Miller, writes truly of him when he says: 'His life was divided between excessive literary toil and exhausting labors of piety and benevolence.' What a tribute, and how few could deserve it! The words refer to Neale's outer life, but plainly imply the inner. It is heart answering heart—a good heart overleaping high hedges of doctrinal difference and thick walls of ecclesiastical severance at the appeal of a great man's great heart." To one other man only, EDWARD CASWALL, does our hymnal owe a really great debt for his most acceptable Latin translations. Suffice it to say concerning him that he was a Christian gentleman of many gifts and much culture, a graduate of Oxford, who was first a clergyman of the Church of England, and afterwards followed John Henry Newman into the Church of Rome. He was born July 15, 1814, and died at the Oratory, Edgbaston, January 2, 1878. He loved God and little children. His ministries of compassionate care were expended chiefly amongst the poor. The first lines of his translated hymns are as follows: 10 The sun is sinking fast. 41 Hark! a thrilling voice is sounding. 50 Come hither, ye faithful. 63 Earth has many a noble city. 98 Sing, my tongue, the Saviour's battle. 378 Come, Thou Holy Spirit, come. 653 My God, I love Thee: not because. There is also an original hymn of his composition, the first line of which is: 621 Days and moments quickly flying. In all there are sixty-one of our hymns which have come to us from the Greek and Latin, too many, of course, for annotation here. I make choice of seven to engage us with a passing word; and eight others, possibly the more important, for fuller consideration. The oldest Christian hymn known to us is to be found in the writings of CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, who was born about the year 170. He was a seeker for truth, first in schools of Greek philosophy, and afterwards in the school of Jesus Christ. He found his Divine Master, and yielded to Him the homage of his soul. Origen was one of his pupils, and Alexander, afterwards Bishop of Jerusalem. His theology was large and liberal. This is the first stanza of his hymn, in all of which we rejoice, translated for us by the Rev. Dr. HENRY M. Dexter, a New England Congregational minister. 446 Shepherd of tender youth, Another ancient hymn of sweetness and light is that evening hymn probably written by ST. ANATOLIUS, the first stanza of which is: 16 The day is past and over: All thanks, O Lord, to Thee! O Jesu, keep me in Thy sight, And save me through the coming night! Concerning this hymn Dr. Neale writes, "It is to the scattered hamlets of Chios and Mitylene what Bishop Ken's hymn is to the villages of our own land, and its melody is singularly plaintive and touching." One of our Lenten hymns, translated by Dr. Neale, is a hymn to rouse and stir. How its words ring out like some battle cry: |