Catholic devotion, as the Church takes care to emphasize, should represent, not what we would wish to feel, but what we actually feel. There is no need for saying our hearts are on fire when really thy are not. This device exalts the emotions at the expense of reason. The whole tradition of Catholic devotion opposes the fabrication of an external devotion with poetic conceits and painfully drawn figures of speech which does not in the least represent our interior dispositions.
The hymn must express, not what makes its subject so sweet or beautiful alone, but what makes it so holy, magnificent, and lovable, so worth singing to and about. THE PEOPLES HYMNAL strives, therefore, to avoid every meretricious pretense of emotion, and replace this all-too-common hymnology with compilation of hymns meant to arouse a mature, honest, and integrally human response.
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