Among ourselves, the prejudices of our people, and the precision of the national mind, would under all circumstances hinder them from entering into an Office in a foreign tongue. We are not so constituted that we could content ourselves with the act of worship, and take it for granted that the unknown words meant something good with which we need not trouble ourselves. The inaction of mind and preponderance of imagination and feeling which this would imply, are foreign and not English characteristics. We have set far too much store by the share that the intellect can take in worship, but it is an equal mistake to make no arrangement for its exercise in a part of our duty towards God which is capable of drawing out its loftiest powers.

With some few favoured exceptions, we have to learn and to teach others, especially the uneducated, how to worship. Most, of course, is to be done with the children of our schools, in explaining to them the Catechism and Eucharistic Office, which last should be made a far more prominent part of their teaching than it has been hitherto. We need an easy book for them and for the poor, to teach them how to join in offering the Sacrifice, and how to adapt It to their own wants and needs. We have as yet no satisfactory book even for the educated, none, that is, which will bear to be used day after day.

Pictures also would be a great help to children and the unlearned, but a descent into the symbolic details of every part of the Mass would scarcely commend itself to the English poor. If the book confined itself to the presentation of the two main ideas in various forms, that our Lord Himself is there, and that this is the Offering of the Sacrifice made on Calvary, the few thoughts that they can put together would centre themselves round these, and if they could get no further, they would yet have a blessed feeling that they had met our Lord and spoken to Him, and that they had offered to God the Father something worthy even of His acceptance, an offering which could not fail to be recompensed by the Giver of all good. Few writers of books and sermons intended for the uneducated have the least idea how dense their minds are, and how incomprehensible to them are statements which the authors fancy so very clear. The very plainest deduction they require to have put into words for them, and their consciences are far from responding easily when sins that they commit daily are spoken of. Nothing can be too simple, and too great an amount of ignorance can scarcely be assumed in dealing with the uneducated

poor. It is not meant to imply that all the poor are uneducated. Many a begrimed workman is an educated man; badly educated, and taught to reason falsely, but still as much recognising an appeal to his intellect as a philosopher, though often more hopeless to argue with. But he, too, must start with the same primary idea that his duty to God requires from him worship, and that God has appointed the way in which He desires to be worshipped. He will probably worship more intelligently than the boor, but the faith and love which make worship acceptable can exist in minds perhaps incapable of one clear and definite idea on subjects of which the senses cannot take cognizance.

As soon as man believes in a God at all, the idea of worship seems to come to him in some form naturally. Few savage nations are without ideas of worship and sacrifice, however distorted and superstitious may be the rite, and however degraded the being they call a god. In many instances the failure of English missionaries has arisen from their endeavouring to destroy a false worship without substituting the true. They changed the act into an intellectual exercise, and required from the undeveloped understanding that it should address elaborate supplications to a Being Whom it could not see and might not picture. The instinctive adhesion to worship as an act forms an overpowering attraction to idolatry, and the new system is not sufficiently grasped by the intellect to call that faculty into exercise. Then we wonder at the failure of our missionaries, and redouble our vain attempts to reach the darkened mind. In England we have not, unfortunately, the negative unbelief of the savage, but that grosser and more obstinate unbelief which can only exist in a baptised and degenerated Christian. The heathen is often glad to hear that there is something better in store for him after death than the future his creed holds out to him, but the neglected Englishman has no time to give to such thoughts, and only wants something which will make his life more comfortable now. "God will not expect too much of a poor man." This is too often the beginning and end of his creed. It satisfies his dull conscience in life, and it sustains his last hours, when his mind, instead of brightening, is generally increasingly stupefied.

The usual way of dealing with such persons is to try and rouse in them a sense of sin and a need of repentance, and generally without success. A few gifted men, with great command over the emotions of others, can awake the slumbering perceptions, but the usual result is dogged indifference.

Might we not hope that the primary idea of an act of worship due from the creature to his Creator would be more easily instilled to begin with, involving as it does far less pain? Of course it would be a vital mistake to stop there, and a mistake which is too often made. This service being rendered, conformity to God's holy law is sometimes allowed to be regarded as a secondary and unnecessary branch of Christian. duty. Worship and crime do unfortunately co-exist in Catholic countries, but such a state of things indicates a defect in the teaching just as much as the complete absence of worship among ourselves. From the nature of the English character, and its down-right one-thing-or-the-other standard both in good and evil, we might hope to escape any great amount of inconsistency. We should have effected a great improvement in an ungodly man's life, if we brought him to make any sort of offering to God, and it would have a beneficial effect in drawing out the first beginnings of love. It is a deep knowledge of human nature that recommends us if we wish to become fond of a person, to do him a kindness, and it is a yet deeper truth that our love to God is more likely to grow from doing something for Him than from any amount of favours asked and granted. For at an early stage in the growth of spiritual life in the soul, there is a sense in which it is more blessed to give than to receive, if only we enter into the depth of the words, "All things come of Thee, and of Thine Own have we given Thee."

ART. II.-CHURCH MUSIC.

[COMMUNICATED.]

Is

CHURCH Music is the true handmaid of Ritual; for not only does it submit to its order, and yield to its will, but it reflect perceptibly its dignity, or it may be its carelessness and slovenliness. Does Ritual put on her robes of beauty, and adorn herself with every grace to welcome the coming of her Lord ? Music is conspicuous in her train, moving with stateliest measure, and chanting with grandeur her ancient strains. Ritual sensuous, and tricked out merely to catch the idle fancy of men? Music at once imitates her mistress, and warbles love-tunes, or flaunts meretricious hymns. If Ritual is slovenly, a careless jade, indifferent whether her Master be present or not, then music is seen to content herself with a few uncomely shreds of Tate and Brady as a covering for her naked poverty. But Church Music has also a direct relation to Church Doctrine; for where there is found to be a disbelief in the Presence of Christ in His Sacraments, or a decay in reverence for God's House, there the character of the music is proportionately deteriorated; so that a history of the decline of Church Music since the Reformation may easily be read as a history of the decline of Catholic belief within the Church.

At the beginning of the Reformation, the instinct (for such it may be called) of Catholic doctrine clung to the musicians of the "new-religion," and, therefore, their compositions are chaste, pure, and glorious, though, like the Prayer-Book from which they drew their new inspiration, wanting in the fervour and unction of ancient days; but the art soon began to feel the effect of Protestant inundation,-lower and lower it sinks as the tide of inevitable Calvinism rises, till at last Bathos is reached, and Cathedral choirs went into ecstacies over Cecil's "I will arise;" or the inspiring composition of R. Smith, "How Beautiful upon the Mountains."

"Services" had descended from the sublimity of Tallis's Te Deum to the profundity of Jackson's. Hymn Tunes, once upon a time grand and ennobling, could reach no lower depth of degradation than Devizes and New Cambridge, which were the compositions most in vogue forty years ago. There was, indeed, an upward movement at the end of the seventeenth century, and a bright gleam of hope illumined the Church when Blow, Purcell, Aldrich, and Croft, lived and wrote; but

the superiority of their writings in true Church tone, was no doubt due, in the case of Purcell, to the chastening fire of a long persecution; in that of the others, to the high doctrine of the age of the non-jurors, and the indirect influence of James II. in a Catholic direction. In those days, when young men, they received the vivid and ineffaceable impressions which youth alone can receive, and a true direction was given to their musical talent; but the rising to the surface, the little gasping for breath is soon over, for the faith of the Church of William of Orange is not sufficient to keep them up, and Weldon leads the downward course, followed by Greene, Kent, Clarke, Whitfeld, and others. Good enough musicians (two at least,) but with scarce a spark of Catholic spirit or grave devotion in their hearts.

This is the point that so strikingly exemplifies our remark that ecclesiastical music depends for its perfection on the appreciation of Church doctrine. The revival of music as a science had no effect upon Church music: it made, indeed, musicians write better compositions; but these it could not of itself make one whit more Catholic in tone. Kent could go on writing his interminable effusions, and facetiously clung to the old word "verse" anthem as a happy definition of their character; but neither name nor secular talent could make the reality. The stupendous genius of Handel did indeed break through all trammels, and soar to the very Heavens; but his ignorance of Catholic truth is still perceptible in his writings, or rather he wrote nothing where it might be displayed for oratorios his greatest achievements were never intended to be more than religious operas,-as such they were composed, and as such they will remain. In their proper place they have the grandest effect, but, except in the case of one or two pieces, and these chiefly choral, the introduction of oratorio music into Churches not only does the music injustice, from the poverty of the orchestra, but causes the impression that the piece sung is intended solely to display the quality of the boy's voice, or the perfection of the choir. Against the encouragement of which impressions in the House of God, we cannot too stoutly dub ourselves "Protestant."

The revival of sound Church Music must undoubtedly be ascribed to the late revival of Church principles. When Oxford dealt the death-blow to Protestantism, Cambridge dug the grave of secular ecclesiastical music; and to the Church of the present day is left the task of filling in the earth, and removing from sight every relic of the departed.

The Camden Society's works, The Parish Choir and the