there; but he could and did bewitch the clergy into making Lourdes a thing of ugliness. Their taste went wrong with everything they touched in Lourdes; and while Satan could not prevent the Blessed Virgin from working miracles, he could still bring it about that the faithful should be healed amid the most hideous architectural surroundings. Perhaps Huysmans would have credited the modern Catholic music unhesitatingly to the devil. But certainly Moody and Sankey were not clerics of Lourdes. Nor could the Presbyterians who first sang the rhymed version of the Twenty-Third Psalm to the air of "So bin ich vergessen, vergessen bin ich" be suspected of any part in the Devil's private feuds with the Virgin. Indeed, the particular Presbyterians whom I have heard sing it thus had not, I fancy, much more reverence for the one than for the other. I do not think that we can account for Gospel Hymns No. 5 by the Huysmans formula. Even the hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities, is, I believe, mere modern pandering to the uncultured majority: revivalism in essence, like Moody and Sankey and the Salvation Army and Billy Sunday. But at least the Catholics have this advantage: that though they too have indulged in operatic music and have even sunk to "Vierge, notre espérance," they still hear from their choirs the ancient music and the ancient words. You lose the sodalities and confraternities when you hear once more the familiar "Tantum Ergo" (I do not mean the florid one that they sing at St. Roch in Paris, and elsewhere); the new vulgarity is forgotten, as as many vulgarities have been touched and then forgotten by Rome, in her time. I used to think that the worst of our bad Protestant hymns was their ignoring of the human intelligence. Many giants great and tall, Stalking through the land, (My fortunate husband sang it in his youth.) But even that, while it could have a religious meaning, I should say, only for a sub-normal intelligence, is not a deliberate and explicit defiance of the intellect of man. Verbum caro, panem verum Tantum ergo sacramentum Novo cedat ritui: Præstet fides supplementum It took St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelicus, thus to state, in one supreme utterance, the whole case against the Higher Criticism. No, I do not think that the sense of a hymn counts so much. The medieval "Ave Maris Stella" has not much more to recommend it, philosophically speaking, than the hymn with the "Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late" refrain. A poem, even a religious poem, is good poetry or bad poetry, and that is all there is to it. "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" is a silly poem, and "The Son of God Goes Forth to War" is a rather fine poem; and Bishop Heber wrote both. But the permanent superiority of the latter is in the music to which it is set. One Presbyterian sect sings, I believe, nothing but the Psalms-rather unfortunately metricized, to be sure-and their church singing is the dreariest in the world. Yet the Psalms are rated high. "Onward, Christian Soldiers" gets its appeal from Sir Arthur Sullivan and not from the author. I do not believe that "Nearer, My God, to Thee" would have been the favorite hymn of the late President McKinley were it not for the slow, swinging tempo, which needs only a little quickening to be an excellent waltz, with all the emotional appeal of good waltz music. On the whole, Hymns Ancient and Modern are far better, from the point of view of poetry, than Gospel Hymns, No. 5-but they have not converted half so many people. The elect, the high-brows, may say what they like: if you are doing your evangelizing on the grand scale, the "sensual ear" must be pleased. I do not believe that the music I have referred to, of the "Tantum Ergo" or the "Parce, Domine," would ever convert the crowd in a tent or a tabernacle-even if D. L. Moody or Fanny Crosby wrote new words to it. But if you let a grammar-school pupil hack words out of the New Testament and set them to the tune of "Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground"-well, it would be strange if some one were not converted. You may be very sure that the Roman Catholic Church has not taken to vulgar and catchy hymns without a set purpose of winning souls. At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the light It was there by faith I received my sight, And now I am happy all the day. The last line might almost have been lifted bodily from one of Stephen Foster's negro melodies. It has the very lilt of My old Kentucky home far away. And it is only one of many in Gospel Hymns, No. 5. That is why my husband remembers them, in spite of himself. He may contemn them, but he cannot forgot. There is hardly one of them that would not consort happily with the right kind of brass band. They connote crowds and the "emotion of multitude." So, to me, does the "Parce, Domine" connote crowds-but crowds awe-struck, unweeping, and in no mood for stimulation by a cornet accompaniment. There is a cardinal difference. The success of almost any Gospel Hymn depends on an emotional appeal very like that of Kipling's banjo: And the tunes that mean so much to you aloneCommon tunes that make you choke and blow your nose, Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan— I can rip your very heartstrings out with those. Whatever Bach and Palestrina and Scarlatti and good Gregorian do to you-well, it is not that. Whereas almost any good Gospel Hymn gets you, if it gets you at all, in the banjo way. There is the revivalistic essence in all of them. And when the Catholics wish to be revivalistic, they imitate, rather badly, the Protestant "hymn-tune." Most of my friends are so truly high-brow that they cannot be "got" in the banjo way. They do not like cornet solos; and brass bands playing negro-melodies leave them dry-eyed. They honestly prefer the Kniesel Quartet or a Brahms symphony. Their arid and exquisite æstheticism rejects these low appeals. Did I not say that my husband loathes "Throw Out |