chancel at the end of a long church, are quite out of range, and their power of leading the singing is seriously affected. I would have them occupy such a place as they hold in most cathedrals, as nearly as possible in the middle of the people. I am aware that considerations of space will make difficulties here, and that the choir now occupies seats which might otherwise be empty; but all this might be overcome, and no efforts ought to be spared which might arouse life and vigour to worship, which is too often wanting in both. The average church-goer will not lift up his voice unless he is coaxed and encouraged by sounds on all sides of him.

THE CHAIRMAN.

I MAY say what happened once at Leeds with regard to voluntaries before the sermon. The voluntary was played by a well-known man, Sebastian Wesley, on the occasion of Dr. Hook preaching an inaugural sermon, and the music selected was from Handel's Samson-"What will the babbler say?"

The Rev. S. A. BARNETT, Vicar of St. Jude's, Whitechapel. (Read by Mr. W. A. BARNETT.)

"WE must have something light or comic." So say those who provide music for the people, and their words represent the world's opinion with regard to the popular taste. The uneducated, it is thought, must be unable to appreciate that which is refined, or to enjoy that which does not make them laugh. The opinion is not justified by facts. In East London, the city of common people, crowds have been found willing, on many a winter's night, to come and listen to part of an oratorio, or to selections of classical music.

The selections and oratorios have been given in churches or chapels by various choirs and choral societies; the concerts have been given in school-rooms, on Sunday evenings, by professionals of reputation. Over those who are generally so independent of restraint, who cough and move as they will, there has reigned a death-like stillness as they have listened to some fine solo of Handel. On faces which are seldom free of the marks of care, except in the excitement of drink, a calm has seemed to settle, and tears to flow, for no reason but because "It is so beautiful." Sometimes the music has appeared to break down barriers shutting out some poor fellow from a fairer past, or a better future than his present. The oppressive weight of daily care has seemed to lift, and other sights to be in his vision, as at last, covering his face, or sinking on his knees, he has made prayers which cannot be uttered. Sometimes it has seemed to seize one on business bent, to suddenly snatch him to another world, and not knowing what he feels, to make him say out, "It is good to be here."

To the concerts, hard-headed unimaginative men have crowded, described in a local paper as being "friends of Bradlaugh." They have

listened to, and apparently taken in, difficult movements of Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin. The loud applause which has followed some moments of strained rapt attention, has proclaimed the universal feeling, and shown that among the people of East London many may be found who care for high-class music. There is enough in these facts to make the world reconsider its opinion that the people can care only for what is light or laugh-compelling. stand the mysteries of music, or to be depths which respond to its call, and moment have a peculiar mission.

Minds not educated to underinterested in its creation, have music may thus at the present

"Man cannot live by bread alone" expresses a truth to which the religious and the secularist subscribe. The desire to be is stronger than the desire to have. There is in those men, whom the rich think to satisfy by increased wages and model lodgings, a greater need of being something they are not, than of having something they have not. The man who has won an honourable place, who by punctuality, honesty, and truthfulness has become the trusted servant of his employer, is often weary with the very monotony of his successful life. He has bread in abundance, but, unsatisfied, he dreams of himself filling quite another place in the world-as the leader doing much for others; as the patriot suffering for his class and country; or as the poet living in others' thoughts. There flits before him a vision of a fuller life, and the visions stir in him longings to share such life.

The woman who is the model wife and mother, whose days are filled with work, whose talk is of her children's wants, whose life seems so even and uneventful, so complete in very prosaicness-she, if she could speak out the thoughts which flit through her brain as she silently plies her needle, or goes about her household duties, would tell of strange longings, of passions, and aspirations which have no form in her mind. "There is no one," says Emerson, "to whom omens that would astonish have not predicted a future and uncovered a past.”

It is in the spiritual world that they who cannot live on bread alone must find their food. This spiritual world has been, and is the domain of religion. That which science has not known, and can never know; that which material things have not satisfied and can never satisfy, the longing of man to be something higher and nobler, it has been the glory of religion to develop, as it reveals through Jesus Christ the God who is higher than the best. The spiritual world in which our aspirations move is the domain of religion, and forms of worship are the means by which we are brought into this world. Religion thus sustains and guides our aspirations, and forms of worship unite the spiritual world of aspirations with the material world of the senses. A true form of worship would do away with the pernicious opposition between what is religious and what is material. There would be no despisers of forms, rituals and expressions, if they lifted men into a spiritual world, where Christ is, and where they would be at one with God, who is perfect. The sense of something better than their best has been to men the spring of noblest effort and highest hope, and it is because the present words and forms of worship give so little help to unite them with the best, that many of those born to aspire and live, not on bread alone, speak slightingly of religion, and profess they find no need of prayers nor of church-going.

The present forms (be they words or rituals) do not express present thoughts, they do not therefore unite the material and the spiritual, and they do not carry daily hopes and longings into the spiritual world. For want of words or expressions, man's aspirations lose their sustenance and guide. Man is dumb, and is in the world without religion. In other times the words of the Prayer Book, and the phrases now labelled "theological," did speak out, or, at any rate, did give some form to men's vague, indistinct longing to be something else and something more. The picture of God, drawn in familiar language, gave a distinct object to their longing, as they desired to be like Him and to enjoy Him for ever. In these days historical criticism and scientific discoveries have made the old expressions inadequate to state man's longing, or to picture God's character. The words of prayers, be they the written prayers of the English Church, or be they that re-arrangement of old expression called "extempore prayer," do not always fit in with the longings of those to whom, in these later days, sacrifice has taken other forms, and life other possibilities. The descriptions of God, involving so much that is only marvellous, often jar against minds which have had hints of the grandeur of law, and which have been awed, not by miracles, but by holiness. Petitions for the joys of heaven fall short of their wants who have learnt that what they are is of more consequence than what they have, and the anthropomorphic descriptions of God tend to make Him seem less than many men who are not jealous, nor angry, nor revengeful.

Words fail to carry modern thought or wants. There still lives in man that which gropes after God, that which reaches to the spiritual world of righteousness and love, where Jesus Christ is at God's right hand, but it can find no form to be the means of bringing it to the spiritual world. Men cannot express their highest. They are dumb creatures. Dumbness involves a loss which it is hard to exaggerate, and constitutes an unfailing claim for pity. He who cannot express his highest is dumb, and to-day a book might be written on the sorrows of man as a dumb animal. It is no accident that the dumb were held to be possessed by devils, and often now it seems to me that it is because they cannot express their thoughts of themselves or of God that so many live base and unworthy lives. Thought-hope and love-has outstripped words. Men cannot say what they think, nor put into words what they know. They are ignorant of what they have been unable to express, ignorant of themselves and of God. They are without the form which would lift them into the domain of religion, and their aspirations are without guidance. Because they are dumb they are not only sad and suffering, they are mean and selfish. There is need, then, for some power to open their lips to enable them to say what they are and what they want; there is need of a form of worship to unite the spiritual and material worlds.

Music seems to have some natural fitness for this purpose :

1. In the first place, the great musical compositions are the results of inspirations. The master, raised by his genius above the level of common humanity to think fully what others think only in part, and to see face to face what others see only darkly, puts into music the thoughts which no words can utter, and the description which no tongue can tell. What he himself would be, his hopes, his fears,

his aspirations; what he himself sees of that Holiest and Fairest which has haunted his life, this he tells by his art. Like the prophets he has had his vision, and his music proclaims what he himself desires to be, and expresses the emotions of his higher nature. Others, lesser men, find in his music the echo of their own wants. Great men are little men writ large; the best is what the worst may be, the greatest master is a man akin to the lowest man, and the voice in which he tells his hopes thus finds its response in human nature. That music which unfolds passions and aspirations which have never been realised by the ordinary man speak no strange language, for it will make him recognise his true self and his true object. In the music which is the expression of the wants of a great man, all who are men find an expression for wants and visions for which no words are adequate. Music may be what prayer now so often fails to be, a means of linking men with the source of the highest thoughts, and of enabling them to enjoy God.

2. In the second place, it may be said that the best existing expression of that which has been found to be good has been by parables, words, i.e., which are not limited to time or place, but are of universal application. A parable does not die with the age in which it is spoken, it lives on, giving to every age a different conception of that which the eye cannot see nor the tongue utter, but leaving with each age the sense of having learnt at the same source. In some degree all art is thus a parable. Titian's Assumption helped the medieval saints to worship the Virgin Mother, and helps us now to realise the true glory of womanhood. Music, though, even better than poetry and painting, fulfils this condition. It reveals that which the artist has seen, and reveals it with no distracting circumstance of subject, necessary to a picture or to a poem. They who listen to a great musical composition are not drawn aside to think of some historical or romantic incident; they are free to think of that of which such incidents are but the clothes. They may have different conceptions, the cultured and the uncultured may see from a different point of view the vision which inspired the master, but they will have the sense that the music which serves all alike brings them to the same source. Music is the parable for this century. Creeds have ceased to express that which men in their inmost hearts most reverence, and are now symbols of division rather than of unity. Music is a parable, and like all parables is unmeaning, foolish, and sensuous to those who will not think, to those who having eyes see not, and seek not the revelation of God through modern life. It condemns the fools who will not understand, to greater folly, but tells the thoughtful, the student and the earnest seeker, in sounds that will not change, of that which is worthy of worship; and tells to each true hearer just in so far as by nature and circumstance he is able to understand it, while it gives to all that feeling of common life and that assurance of sympathy which has in old times been the strength of the Church. By music men may be taught to find the God who is not far from any one of us, and be brought within reach of the support which comes from the sympathy of their fellow creatures.

3. Lastly, it may be urged there is still one other requisite in a perfect form of religious expression. It must have association with the past. The emotions which such expressions are to cover are rooted in old

memories, and the inner life is never brand new. A brand new form of worship, therefore, would utterly fail to express wants which if born in the present are born of parents who lived in the past. Music fulfils the necessary condition. Music which expresses the yearnings of the men of to-day, expressed also the yearnings of the men of old days. They who feel music telling their unuttered wants and unsyllabled praises may recognise in its sound the echoes of the songs which broke from the lips of Miriam and David, of Ambrose and Gregory, and of the simple peasants, as 100 years ago they were stirred to life on the moors of Cornwall and Wales.

This association of music with religious life gives it an immense power. When the congregation is gathered together, and the sounds rise which are full of that which is, and perhaps always will be, "ineffable," there floats in also memories of other sounds-poor and uncouth-in which simpler ages have expressed their wants and hopes. The atmosphere becomes, as it were, religious, and all feel that music is not only beautiful, but the means of bringing them near to the God of all the world, who is, who was, and who ever shall be.

Music may thus give expression to the inner life, to the aspirations which reach out to that which is not bread; and it is for the want of such expression that work is often mean and worship meaningless.

Music cannot indeed take the place of defining words, nor of intellectual propositions; and left to rule alone its influence might be only sensuous. There is, however, little danger of the lonely rule of music for the children of this age. They who are vigorous in the search of truth, and fearless in its application, they who are rational and scientific, are under an influence which saves them from the dominance of the vague emotion of feelings or of sense. The true children of the age seek and work, they doubt and analyse, and they without fear may let the longings which science and discovery have loosened find expression in music, and themselves wait in patience for the day on which they shall say, "This is what I hope," "This is what I believe." It is a mistake to put thoughts into words which are too small for them, and it is a mistake to give up thinking. Music divorced from scientific thought will not satisfy the soul. Music united with the teaching which is the world's latest news of God may rouse the buried life, and once more give men rest in God through Jesus Christ.

The Rev. C. H. HYLTON STEWART, M.A., Precentor of Chester.

I THINK it a wise move on the part of the committee of management that they have allotted to music such a high place on the list of subjects for discussion at this Congress; for surely all will acknowledge that as music has been one of the most important factors in the great Church revival, so now she is one of the most powerful engines in the hands of the clergy, not only for attracting large crowds to their churches, but for conveying Divine truths into the souls of men. Some there are who will disagree with me here, no doubt. I will not waste time by proving the fact, I will content myself with saying that the "evidence is too strong