for the idea of the mother and her loving ministry. It is the same emotion, the same nervous key; there is the utmost harmony between them, and the substituted idea is given the full benefit of the original appeal. I once sang in an evangelistic service Bliss' "I Know Not What Awaits Me," prefacing it with the story of the composer's tragic death at Ashtabula, and emphasizing the uncertainty of life. This was, of course, a slightly veiled but none the less effective appeal to the fundamental feeling of the fear of death. As I sang I noticed manifestations of deep feeling on the face of a young man whose wife had been earnestly praying for him with apparently no result and who had just come home that day, crossing the high bridge over the Ohio at Bellaire on a train. After his conversion, which occurred before the service closed, he told me," As you sang I recalled my feelings as I crossed the bridge over the Ohio, and I thought, what if it had gone down with me as the Ashtabula bridge did with Bliss ?" The song simply transferred the sympathy I had roused in him for Bliss to himself. The fundamental personal and social feelings may thus be spiritualized in endlessly varied ways. This process is particularly effective in dealing with the unsaved, but is just as available in work among believers.

When once the fact is clearly recognized, that musical vibrations directly produce corresponding nervous vibrations and that they only induce vague contentless emotions in the mind, our thought is freed from a host of false and misleading ideas and we reach a firm basis for the application of music in church work. To confine it to purely physical and at best psychical limitations, may seem to degrade music, but such is not the case. The results of pleasure, of infinite expressiveness, of

transcendent beauty still remain. The physical and psychical are degraded and degrading only when we have made them so. They are the helpful handmaidens of the spirit, indispensable to our highest culture, happiness and character.

III

CHURCH MUSIC AN APPLIED ART

N pursuing our study of the character of church

I

music let me further remark that, while it is still

art, it is art with a purpose. That purpose is so lofty and so urgent that it becomes the controlling factor in the combination and dominates the whole form, character and content of the music used. The fixed principles and abstract rules of pure art are not abrogated, but are subordinated and obscured by the variable concrete elements the purpose introduces. This subordination prompts the leaders in every field of artistic effort,literature, music, sculpture, painting,-to resent the introduction of a moral or other purpose. That they should resent the commercial purpose is worthy of all approbation, as it is a lower motive than the artistic; but as moral and religious purposes have an even nobler motive than the artistic, the constant effort to eliminate them cannot be justified. It is a false pride that prevents art from being the humble handmaid of morals and religion.

If the religious purpose is the dominant element in church music, it follows that in its consideration there must not only be musical knowledge and skill and taste, but also a full comprehension and appreciation of the final end, as well as sympathy with it, and a clear insight into the artistic limitations thus introduced. The musical critic or the well-trained musician may deserve to have his opinions quoted as authoritative in the realm of pure

musical art and yet have no standing whatever as a critic or adviser in church music, if he has had no religious experience, or does not recognize the supremacy of the purpose over the art, or does not comprehend the adaptations and limitations imposed by the particular people to be helped or by the circumstances in which the work is to be done. This limitation is usually overlooked both by the musicians themselves and by the church workers they advise, although it is just as true in other lines of applied art. The historian or critic of artistic architecture may be a very poor architect or a misleading adviser in practical building. Ruskin's ideas on wallpaper or on chromo Christmas cards would probably have been anything but useful. Yes, I accept the parallel: church music in adapting itself to actual exigencies often must come down to the level of wall-paper and Christmas cards!

If the controlling factor in church music is edification and help, then the mental, moral and religious condition of those to be edified and helped becomes an essential element in its development and application. One of the most difficult phases of this adaptation is the realization that the work of the church includes "every creature," and that its music must reach and help not only the cultivated and artistic, but the rude and unlettered as well. This is all the more peremptory that the educated and refined classes have less need of emotional expression and have a wealth of other influences and resources that the masses lack. There is an unconscious selfishness in many cultivated people who demand that all music must meet the requirements of their own natures. As Dr. Curwen remarks in his "Studies in Worship Music," regarding the music of the Salvation Army, " How hard it

is for those whose natures have been refined by lifelong culture to enter into the feelings of an agricultural peasant or a cadger of one of our larger towns! Things which hinder our devotion may aid theirs; that which shocks us may attract them in the truest sense."

An English writer referring to this matter of adaptation puts the matter in a nutshell: "True science is elastic. It is half-science which is rigid and hidebound and unable to bend to circumstance. If we once have grip of the living principle, we can venture freely on its application to varying occasions!"

This explains why Sir George Macfarren, the distinguished English conductor and composer, broadened his views as he grew older. Early in his career he held the traditional view that only the ancient diatonic style of harmony should be used in church music. In confessing his error he said: "I reflected not that men in church were the same human beings as the same men at home or at market or on the wayside. I failed to consider that folks thought in the same language, felt from like impulses, acted from similar emotions whether they were in one place or another, whether they interchanged ideas with their fellows or addressed themselves to a higher Being. I overlooked the profound truth that to be sincere one must be natural: and that thus, whatever is assumed, if of form of speech or of melodious tones in which to declaim it, is unnatural-artificial, therefore, and consequently false!" Here is clearly expressed the reason for the adaptation of church music to the people it is intended to influence.

One of the difficulties with musical idealists is that they have no sense of the value of spontaneity and adaptation. Music is music to them whether dealing