A thankless task, it seems to us, is a series of editorials in the Sunday School Times on some of the phrases in Newman’s hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light.” We can not help believing that the spirit of a writer must enter into his production. When John Newman wrote the hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light,” he had come to that place in his own experience in which he could not depend upon his personal faith in God; he wanted some one to lead him. He did not find that in the English church, divided as it was into high and low and broad churchism; he could find it nowhere else but in Romanism, and he seemed to have joined the Roman Catholic Church in order to find some place where he could shelve personal responsibility and rest it all upon the body to which he belonged. We can not see how a Bible paper like the Sunday School Times could feel that it was a “kindly light” which was leading Newman from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism; from a personal trust and a personal Saviour to the trust in the church. It is to our own minds abhorrent to hear it sung by those whom God is leading. There are some choice phrases in it, and the tune to which it is set is to some very beautiful. We opine that the tune itself leads many astray who sing the tune without thinking of the words. The “kindly light” of Newman led him from darkness to greater darkness. It is one of the hymns which the Paulist Fathers and others use to convert Protestants to Roman Catholicism. We wish that there was a strong, vigorous faith in Protestantism which would refuse to sing such utterly unprotestant, unbiblical hymns.