or congregational singing will seem justifiable.

All these last-named emotions,--which I have taken from congregational
hymn-books,--and I suppose there may be more of them,--call for delicacy
of treatment. A Lamentation, for instance, which might seem at first
sight as if it would gain force by volume, will, if it is realistic or
clumsy, become unmanly, almost so as to be ridiculous, and certainly
depressing to the spirit rather than purifying. In fact while many of the
subjects require beautiful expression, they are also more properly used
when offered as inspiring ideals; and to assume them to be of common
attainment or experience is to degrade them from their supreme sanctity.
But in thus ruling them unfit for general singing one must distinguish
large miscellaneous congregations from small united bodies, in which a
more intimate emotion may be natural: and as there is no exact line of
distinction here, so there is no objection to the occasional and partial
intrusion of some of these more intimate subjects into congregational
hymns.

To this first question then, as to what emotions are fit to be expressed
by congregational music, the answer appears to be that the more general
the singing, the more general and simple should be the emotion and that
the universally fitting themes are those of simple praise, prayer, or
faith: and we might inquire whether one fault of our modern hymn-books
may not be their attempt to supply congregational music to unfitting
themes.

To the next question, _Whose emotion_ is this congregational music to
excite or heighten? the answer is plain: It is the average man, or one
rather below the average, the uneducated, as St. Augustin says the
weaker, mind and that in England is, at least artistically, a narrow mind
and a vulgar being. And it may of course be alleged that the music in our
hymn-books which is intolerable to the more sensitive minds was not put
there for them, but would justify itself in its supposed fitness for the
lower classes. 'What use,' the pastor would say to one who, on the ground
of tradition advocated the employment of the old plain-song and the
Ambrosian melodies, 'What use to seek to attract such people as those in
my cure with the ancient outlandish and stiff melodies that pleased folk
a thousand years ago, and which I cannot pretend to like myself?' Or if
his friend is a modern musician, who is urging him to have nothing in his
church but what would satisfy the h