-Longman's Magazine.

THE increasing use of a fuller ritual and higher art and finer music in our churches, and especially in our East-End churches, and not in the churches of the Roman Catholic and the Anglican clergy only, but even in the churches of the Scotch Presbyterians and of many of the English Dissenting sects, is one of the most striking features of an age which has a yearning for the deepest faith, and yet whose faith appears to be enveloped everywhere in an atmosphere of doubt. While our great cathedrals are struggling against the old narrow piety, for the right to use sculpture as freely as they have long used painting in the effort to bring home the meaning and reality of our Lord's life to those who throng them, and while the churches of some of our broadest Churchmen in the poorest districts of London are as elaborately adorned and as richly decorated with flowers as those which adopt the highest ritual,—there is springing up among men who look even more to the new science than to the new art for the religion of the future, a craving to interpret the modern tendencies of that science so as to reconcile it with Christianity, a craving that may very possibly succeed in reconciling men of science to Christian miracle, with out any of that fade rationalism which used to be invoked to explain away miracle into mere imagination. On all sides we see an increasing cagerness either to embody religion in symbolic forms, or so to interpret the processes and methods of Nature as to recognize the spiritual meaning and spiritual drift of much which used to appear to our ancestors as purely materialistic in its tendency. And even the very fanatics of the Church Association themselves, who are eager to banish the cross and the crucifix, and everything that has to them even a faint association with that terrible word "Idolatry," from our NEW SERIES.-VOL. L., No. 2.

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religious services, even they take the utmost delight, as the old Puritans took delight, in such symbolic romances as "The Pilgrim's Progress," which always seems to us the noble revenge taken by the starved imagination of naked Calvinism for the destitution to which the eyes and ears of the Puritans had been reduced, and the highest evidence that no religious feeling worthy of the name will consent to live without some imaginative expression for those urgent and infinitely varied spiritual yearnings for which there is no definite and rigidly accurate language. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a literature in which these yearnings are so frankly recognized as the Bible, where all the greater books are full of prophetic picture, symbol, and parable, from the psalm of Creation to the grand vision of the last of the Apostles in his banishment at Patmos. The only wonder is, that any religion which acknowledges its origin in the teaching of the Hebrews at all, should ever have sought to deprecate the use of those symbols which train the eye of man to recognize the evidence of things unseen. in a devout study of what is seen. At all events, in our own day no one can doubt that this love of symbol, and the eagernessfor its artistic use, are rapidly reviving, and that they are found especially useful in the churches of the poor.. Only last year, Mr. Chapman, the eloquent and eminent preacher who raised in the Anglican. communion for the Roman Catholic Father Damien so timely an aid in his noble enterprise of Christianizing the lepers of the Sandwich Islands, published a little book of sermonlets on the symbolic teaching of the decorations of his own church,— which is a church devoted to the poor of Camberwell, and which would not be half as well suited to the eloquent preacher's purpose had it not been enriched by the

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art as well as by the piety of one of its members. In "Sermons on Symbols," every one may see how eagerly the religious spirit of one of the most catholicminded, and at the same time least narrow, of our clergymen, avails itself of the aid of parable and symbol in pressing home, almost in the same fashion in which the Church of the Catacombs pressed home, the lessons of Christ.

To some extent, we believe this increasing love of symbol in religion to be due to the doubt which makes dogma difficult to the present generation, and which prefers, therefore, vague to explicit religious statements. In symbol there is no bond, and the mind which hesitates at every explicit declaration of creed can always take refuge in those hopeful signs and promises of more perfect beauty which Nature lavishes in such abundance among her richest gifts to men. It is true that she is equally lavish of symbols which are by no means so hopeful, symbols of evil and prophecies of pain and ruin; but even they admit of a use for the purposes of warning and reproach which does not commit him who uses them to any very oppressive creed. Unquestionably it is in part because picture, symbol, and parable, while they can be used to express some of the highest feelings and moral convictions, cannot be used to commit those who use them to any very rigid belief, that they are so popular in our own day. They embody the higher tendencies of religious feeling without embodying any very distinct intellectual conclusions.

But another reason why symbolic art is so popular as it is in our modern Churches, is that it is the form in which it is most easy to indicate a belief in that ultimate unity among all the forms of life, natural and supernatural, or, as some prefer to say, human and divine, which is supposed to be the special lesson of science for the present day; in other words, that it is by symbol that it is most easy to illustrate the evolution of good out of evil, and the evolution of higher out of lower forms of life, without committing one's self very deeply to any positive prepositions. The science of the day is not unwilling to recognize a certain spiritual optimism in Nature so long as the fundamental characteristic of Nature, its uniform method, is strictly ad

* Swan Sonnenschein and Co.

hered to; and hence proceeds what we may call the pantheistic element in the religion of science, the disposition to recognize a divine goal in the system of the world as we see it, on condition that we acknowledge no violent antagonism between good and evil, that, in Pope's words, all "partial evil" shall be recognized as "universal good." We ourselves do not believe that this tendency of modern science can be reconciled with Christ's teaching at all. In his teaching, evil and good are opposites, and not different shades of the same reality. But though we hold that this is so, and that no mere naturalisin can ever be transmuted into a Christian attitude of mind and heart, undoubtedly there is quite enough of true naturalism in Christ, quite enough of love for the gentle growth and unforced blossoming of Nature, to make the symbolism of Nature a most effective and pathetic medium in which to express a large number of the divine lessons which the Good Shepherd taught. Natural science, it is true, will never resolve the free will of man into a mere unfolding of Nature. It will always attempt this; it will always be pantheistic in its drift, because, deriving its methods from a region in which free will does not exist, and inevitable evolution is everything, it cannot explain that of which in this region there is not even a germ. But none the less, so long as there is a real transition from what is dead to what is living, from what is gross to what is glorious, from what is mean to what is beautiful, in Nature, so long there will be a region in which natural science and religion may move side by side, though a point will always be reached at last at which they tend sharply to diverge. And just at present, when the great task of the day seems to be to reconcile the doctrine of evolution with the revelation of God to man, and to discern the unity of Nature, so far as Nature is really one, the symbolic treatment of the religious life is the treatment of it which has most charms for the man of science, and which is most likely to reconcile him to at least a considerable element in the Christian faith. For example, in the little book of "Sermons on Symbols" of which we have spoken, Mr. Chapman says boldly that it is by our falls that we rise to higher levels than we ever knew, -a doctrine which is no doubt true of seeming falls, of

failures which were not really moral falls, because we were not really any worse after we fell than we were before we fell. But it is pure naturalism, pure repudiation of the fact of freedom and the reality of sin, if it be meant, as such a doctrine often is meant, though not by Mr. Chapman, to suggest that men are really the better for their sins, and that their sins are nothing but errors in disguise.

We believe, then, that though the increasing love of symbolism in religion is natural and healthy, yet that a great part of its immediate popularity is due to the

naturalistic tendency which yearns to find an absolute unity in Nature, human and divine, and to resolve all the transformations, moral and otherwise, through which the human mind passes, into mere growths evolved from the great source of life by the ordinary laws of the creative spirit. That is not Christianity, but a Pantheism at issue with Christianity. Still, there is enough in Christianity that is of a piece with Nature to make naturalism useful up to a certain point, though beyond that point it is misleading. - Spectator.

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In dealing with the two great forms of vocal utterance, it will be most convenient to take them in their historical, or at any rate their logical, order. Whatever native woodnotes wild" our hypothetical half-human ancestor may have warbled" by way of love-ditties before he taught himself to speak, there is no doubt that singing as an art is a later development than articulate speech, without which, indeed, song would be like a body without a soul. I will, therefore, treat of speech first; and it will clear the ground if I be gin with a definition. Physiologically, speech is the power of modifying vocal sound by breaking it up into distinct elements, and moulding it, if I may say so, into different forms. Speech, in this sense, is the universal faculty of which the various languages by means of which men hold converse with each other are the particular manifestations. Speech is the abstract genus, language the concrete species.

I am happy to say it does not fall within the scope of my present purpose to discuss the origin of language, a mysterious problem, on which the human brain has exercised itself so much and to so little purpose, that some years ago, I believe, the French Academy declined to receive any further communications on the subject. The origin of the voice is a different matter. The vocal function is primarily a means of expression. I see no reason

for disagreeing with Darwin, when he says that "the primeval use and means of development of the voice" was as an instrument of sexual attraction. The progenitors of man, both male and female, are supposed to have made every effort to charm each other by vocal melody, or what they considered to be such, and by constant practice with that object the vocal organs became developed. Darwin seems inclined to believe that, as women have sweeter voices than men, they were the first to acquire musical powers in order to attract the other sex, by which I suppose he means that the feminine voice owes its greater sweetness to more persevering culture for purposes of flirtation. I do not know whether the ladies of the present day will own this soft impeachment, or whether they will be flattered by the suggestion that their remote ancestresses lived in a perpetual Leap Year of courtship. Other emotions, however, besides the master passion of love had to be expressed ; joy, anger, fear, and pain had all to find utterance, and the nervous centres excited by these various stimuli threw the whole muscular system into violent contractions, which in the case of the muscles moving the chest and the vocal cords naturally produced sound—that is to say, voice. These movements, at first accidental and purposeless, in time became inseparably associated with the emotional state giving rise to them, so as to coincide

The mechanism of the voice is extremely simple in its general principles, though highly complex in its details. Fortunately a knowledge of the latter is not required for the comprehension of the main facts relative to the production of the voice, and I shall not further allude to them here. Vocal sound is produced solely in the larynx, an elementary fact which must be thoroughly grasped, as many absurd notions are current even among people who should know better, such as that the voice may be produced at the back of the nose, in the stomach, and elsewhere. The larynx is a musical instrument of very complex structure, partaking both of the reed and the string type, the former, how ever, distinctly predominating. It is essentially a small chamber with cartilagiuous walls, which is divided into an upper and a lower compartment by a sort of sliding floor, or double valve, formed by the two vocal cords. In breathing this valve opens, its two lateral halves gliding wide apart from each other, so as to allow a broad column of air to pass through; in speaking or singing, on the other hand, the valve is closed, but for a narrow rift along its middle. Through this small chink the air escaping from the lungs is forced out gradually in a thin stream, which is compressed, so to speak, between the edges of the cords, that form the opening technically called the "glottis, glottis," through which it passes. The arrange ment is typical of the economical workmanship of Nature. The widest possible entrance is prepared for the air which is taken into the lungs, as the freest ventilation of their whole mucous surface is necessary. When the air has been fully util ized for that purpose, it is, if need be, put to a new use on its way out for the production of voice, and in that case it is carefully husbanded and allowed to escape in severely regulated measure, every particle of it being made to render its exact

"Descent of Man, 2d ed., 1882, p. 87.

equivalent in force to work the vocal millwheel. When the air is driven from the lungs up the windpipe it strikes against the under surface of the floor or double valve formed by the vocal cords, which are firmly stretched to receive the shock, forces them apart to a greater or less extent, and, in rushing out between them, throws them into vibration. The vibration of the vocal cords makes the column of air itself vibrate, and the vibration is communicated to the air in the upper part of the throat, the nose, and mouth, from which finally it issues as sound. The vocal cords are the "reeds" of the vocal instrument, and as, owing to the extraordinary number and intricate arrangement of their muscular fibres, they can change their length and shape and thickness in an almost infinite variety of ways, they are equal in effect to many different reeds. If the vocal cords cannot move so as to bring their edges almost into contact, or if there is any substance between them which prevents them from coming together, the voice is destroyed; if there is anything (such as a growth) in or on one of them, its vibration is more or less checked, and hoarseness is the consequence. The primary sound generated in the larynx is modified by the shape, size, and density of the parts through which the vibrating column of air has to pass before it issues from the "barrier of the teeth." These "resonators" include the part of the larynx above the vocal cords, with the little sounding board, the epiglottis, covering it; the upper part of the throat or pharynx, the nasal passages with certain echoing caves in the bones of the skull which communicate therewith; and the mouth, with the soft palate and uvula, tongue, checks, teeth, and lips. It is to these resonators, as well as to the size and shape of the larynx itself-and those parts, like the features of the face, are never exactly similar in any two individuals-that the distinctive quality, or timbre, of the voice is due.

Timbre is the physiognomy of the voice by which the speaker can be recognized even when unseen. Just as the face may be lit up with joy, darkened with sorrow, or distorted with passion, so may the voice be altered by strong mental emotion. This is due to the influence of the mind on the nervous system, which controls every part of the body; if it be stimulated, in