It is often healthy to have one's assumptions challenged. I have been slow to feel the force of two contemporary responses to new hymns.
The first is the most radical. To quote one critic: 'The Lord may already have given to the church the major portion of hymns to be used to the end of the age.' Think for a moment, and you can hardly disagree - unless there are two more millennia before the Lord returns. We are unlikely to rival the wealth of our inheritance in less time than it took to accumulate.
But the well-known author of my quotation draws a tough conclusion: don't bother to try! Some of our 19th and 20th-century offerings lend weight to his argument; compared with Watts and Wesley, they sound trivial. But I cannot deduce that virtually nothing new is any good. This is the opposite of the grand illusion that everything has to be new.
