[1]The condition of congregational singing at this time is reported by Rev. Thomas Walter as follows: “Our tunes are left to the mercy of every unskilful throat to chop and alter, to twist and change, according to their infinitely diverse and no less odd humors and fancies. I have myself paused twice in one note to take breath. No two men in the congregation quaver alike or together; it sounds in the ears of a good judge like five hundred tunes roared out at the same time with perpetual interferings with one another.”
[2]It is related of a New England minister, Rev. T. Bellamy, that after the choir had outdone all its past discord and blundering in rendering the Psalm, he announced another and admonished his choir, “You must try again, for it is impossible to preach after such singing.”
CHAPTER XIX
[1]Dr. S. Weir Mitchell.
[2]Dr. Louis F. Benson says of Charles Wesley’s “Jesus, lover of my soul”: “The suspicion remains that the secret of its appeal lies in a poetic beauty that the average man feels without analyzing it, and in a perfection of craftsmanship that makes him want to sing it simply because it awakens the spirit of song in him, rather than a mood of reflection.”
[3]The Wesleyan doctrine of the Second Work, or Holiness, now known as “The Victorious Life.”
[4]It will be a good introduction to this minute study to work out the Biblical authority for the dozen or more allusions.
[5]Hebrews 12:1.
[6]Fleming H. Revell Co. New York.
[7]A full discussion of hymn tunes will be found in Chapters X to XII of Music in Work and Worship or in Chapters V to X in Practical Church Music, of which books the present writer is the author. Both published by Fleming H. Revell Co. New York.