Davidian
psalter were utterly banished from my ears, and from the ears of the
Church; and that way seems to me safer which I remember often to have
heard told of Athanasius, archbishop of Alexandria, that he would have
the lector of the psalm intone it with but a slight modulation of
voice, so as to be more like one reading than one singing. And yet,
when I remember my tears, which I shed at the hearing of the song of
Thy Church in the first days of my recovered faith, and that now I
still feel the same emotion, and am moved not by the singing but by
what is sung, when it is sung with a liquid voice and in the most
fitting "modulation," then (I say) I acknowledge again the great
utility of the institution.

'Thus I fluctuate between the peril of sensuous pleasure and the proof
of wholesomeness, and am more inclined (though I would not offer an
irrevocable judgement) to approve of the use of singing in the Church,
that, by the pleasure of the ear, weaker minds may rise to the emotion
of piety. Yet when it happens to me to be more moved by the music than
by the words that are sung I confess that I have sinned (poenaliter
peccare), and it is then that I would rather not hear the singer[5].'

What would St. Augustin have said could he have heard Mozart's Requiem,
or been present at some Roman Catholic cathedral where an
eighteenth-century mass was performed, a woman hired from the Opera-House
whooping the _Benedictus_ from the western gallery?

It is possible that such music would not have had any ethical
significance to him, bad or good. Augustin lived before what we reckon
the very beginnings of modern music, with nothing to entice and delight
his ears in the choir but the simplest ecclesiastical chant and hymn-tune
sung in unison. We are accustomed to an almost over-elaborated art,
which, having won powers of expression in all directions, has so
squandered them that they are of little value: and we may confidently say
that the emotional power of our church music is not so great as that
described by him 1,500 years ago. In fact if we feel at all out of
sympathy with Augustin's words, it is because he seems to over-estimate
the danger of the emotion[6].

There is something very strange and surprising in this state of things,
this contrast between the primitive Church with its few simple melodies
that ravished the educated hearer, and our own full-blown institution
with its hymn-book