10]. And though such extreme
disasters may be exceptional outbursts, yet they are always but just
beneath the surface, and are the inevitable outcome of the use of
unworthy means. The cause of such a choice of means must be either an
artistic incapacity to distinguish, or a want of faith in the power of
religious emotion when unaided by profane adjuncts. What would St.
Augustin have ruled here, or thought of the confusion of ideas, which,
being satisfied with any expression, mistakes one emotion for another?

The practical question now arises. We know the need; how is it to be
supplied? We require music which will reach the emotions of uneducated
people, and in which they will delight to join, and in which it shall be
easy to join: and it must be dignified and not secular. If we condemn and
reject the music which the professional church-musicians have supplied
with some popular success to meet the need, what is there to take its
place? Of what music is our hymn-book to be constructed, which shall be
at once dignified, sacred, and popular?

The answer is very simple: it is this, _Dignified Melody_. Good melody is
never out of fashion; and as it is by all confession the seal of high
musical genius, so it is that form of music which is universally
intelligible and in the best sense popular; and we have a rich legacy of
it. What we want is that our hymn-books should contain a collection of
the best ecclesiastical and sacred hymn-melodies, and _nothing but
these_, instead of having but a modicum of these, for the most part
mauled and illset, among a crowd of contributions of an altogether
inferior kind; the whole collection being often such that if an
ill-natured critic were to assert that the compilers had degraded and
limited the old music in order to set off their own, it would be
difficult to meet him with a logical refutation.

The shortest and most practical way of treating this subject will be to
give some account of the sources from which the music of such a hymn-book
as I propose would be drawn. I will take these in their chronological
order. First in order of time are the Plain-song melodies.

I have already stated the ordinary objection to these tunes, that they
are stiff and out of date. Now it may be likely enough that they will
never be so universally popular in our country as the fine melodies
invented on the modern harmonic system, yet the idea that they are not
popular in character, and that modern people