After more time than we ever anticipated, we have put our little songbook into a more polished form. In the Introduction Remonres has already thanked some of those who had a part, and I would like to thank especially Lyn and Remonres: the two I've dealt with directly. They (all) had the software and the skill and it is they who put forth the effort to make this much more presentable and more usable than our first version which—to my mind, at least—was more of an attempt at collection rather than presentation.

This project was not my idea so I shouldn't get much credit at all. But that's not to say I have any reservations about it; I think this is wonderful and will commend itself to anyone in the modern church who has any hope of repairing generation's worth of liturgical vanity and vandalism.

I have said this before so I won't belabor it again, but now that we have worn ourselves out on so many religious enthusiasms only to find ourselves weak and unwell, and now that we have made the faith as unattractive as it seems humanly possible to make it, I think it is time to abandon the eccentricities and renew our inner life with what is real.

Russell Kirk guessed that it would take three generations for a fresh idea to work its way from articulation to acceptance to implementation. I'm not prepared to argue with him, and while I agree with Eliot that it takes thousands of years to produce a culture, I am prepared to hope that three generations raised on liturgy such as this may produce the men and women we need to make worship possible again.

To your good health.

 http://remonstrans.net/media/Hymn_Compilation_v2a.pdf