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As regards artistic and liturgic music Hooker’s argument is so clear, persuasive, and complete that all later contestants upon the ritualistic side have derived their weapons, more or less consciously, from his armory. After an eloquent eulogy of the power of music over the heart, Hooker passes on to prove the antiquity of antiphonal chanting by means of citations from the early Christian fathers, and then proceeds: “But whosoever were the author, whatsoever the time, whencesoever the example of beginning this custom in the Church of Christ; sith we are wont to suspect things only before trial, and afterward either to approve them as good, or if we find them evil, accordingly to judge of them; their counsel must needs seem very unseasonable, who advise men now to suspect that wherewith the world hath had by their own account twelve hundred years’ acquaintance and upwards, enough to take away suspicion and jealousy. Men know by this time, if ever they will know, whether it be good or evil which hath been so long retained.” The argument of Cartwright, that all the people have the right to praise God in the singing of psalms, Hooker does not find a sufficient reason for the abolition of the choir; he denies the assertion that the people cannot understand what is being sung, after the antiphonal manner, and then concludes: “Shall this enforce us to banish a thing which all Christian churches in the world have received; a thing, which so many ages have held; a thing which always heretofore the best men and wisest governors of God’s people did think they could never commend enough; a thing which filleth the mind with comfort and heavenly delight, stirreth up flagrant desires and affections correspondent unto that which the words [369] contain, allayeth all kind of base and earthly cogitations, banisheth and driveth away those evil secret suggestions which our invisible enemy is always apt to minister, watereth the heart to the end it may fructify, maketh the virtuous in trouble full of magnanimity and courage, serveth as a most approved remedy against all doleful and heavy accidents which befall men in this present life; to conclude, so fitly accordeth with the apostle’s own exhortation, ‘Speak to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, making melody, and singing to the Lord in your hearts,’ that surely there is more cause to fear lest the want thereof be a maim, than the use a blemish to the service of God.”[80]
The just arguments and fervent appeals of Hooker produced no effect upon the fanatical opponents of the established Church. Under the exasperating conditions which produced the Great Rebellion and the substitution of the Commonwealth for the monarchy, the hatred against everything identified with ecclesiastical and political oppression became tenfold confirmed; and upon the triumph of the most extreme democratic and non-conformist faction, as represented by the army of Cromwell and the “Rump” Parliament, nothing stood in the way of carrying the iconoclastic purpose into effect. In 1644 the House of Lords, under the pressure of the already triumphant opposition, passed an ordinance that the Prayer Book should no longer be used in any place of public worship. In lieu of the liturgy a new form of worship was decreed, in which the congregational singing of metrical psalms was all the [370] music allowed. “It is the duty of Christians,” so the new rule declares, “to praise God publicly by singing of psalms, together in the congregation and also privately in the family. In singing of psalms the voice is to be tunably and gravely ordered; but the chief care is to sing with understanding and with grace in the heart, making melody unto the Lord. That the whole congregation may join herein, every one that can read is to have a psalm-book, and all others not disabled by age or otherwise are to be exhorted to learn to read. But for the present, where many in the congregation cannot read, it is convenient that the minister, or some fit person appointed by him and the other ruling officers, do read the psalm line by line before the singing thereof.”[81]
The rules framed by the commission left the matter of instrumental music untouched. Perhaps it was considered a work of supererogation to proscribe it, for if there was anything which the Puritan conscience supremely abhorred it was an organ. Sir Edward Deering, in his bill for the abolition of episcopacy, expressed the opinion of the zealots of his party in the assertion that “one groan in the Spirit is worth the diapason of all the church music in the world.”
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As far back as 1586 a pamphlet which had a wide circulation prays that “all cathedral churches may be put down, where the service of God is grievously abused by piping with organs, singing, ringing, and trowling of psalms from one side of the choir to the other, with the squeaking of chanting choristers, disguised in white surplices; some in corner caps and silly copes, imitating the fashion and manner of Antichrist the Pope, that man of sin and child of perdition, with his other rabble of miscreants and shavelings.”
Such diatribes as this were no mere idle vaporing. As soon as the Puritan army felt its victory secure, these threats were carried out with a ruthless violence which reminds one of the havoc of the image breakers of Antwerp in 1566, who, with striking coincidence of temper, preluded their ravages by the singing of psalms. All reverence for sacred association, all respect for works of skill and beauty, were lost in the indiscriminate rage of bigotry. The ancient sanctuaries were invaded by a vulgar horde, the stained glass windows were broken, ornaments torn down, sepulchral monuments defaced, libraries were ransacked for ancient service-books which, when found, were mutilated or burned, organs were demolished and their fragments scattered. These barbarous excesses had in fact been directly enjoined by act of Parliament in 1644, and it is not surprising that the rude soldiery carried out the desires of their superiors with wantonness and indignity. A few organs, however, escaped the general destruction, one being rescued by Cromwell, who was a lover of religious music, and not at all in sympathy with the vandalism of his followers. Choirs were likewise dispersed, organists, singers, and composers of the highest ability were deprived of their means of livelihood, and in many cases reduced to the extreme of [372] destitution. The beautiful service of the Anglican Church, thus swept away in a single day, found no successor but the dull droning psalmody of the Puritan congregations, and only in a private circle in Oxford, indirectly protected by Cromwell, was the feeble spark of artistic religious music kept alive.
The reëstablishment of the liturgy and the musical service of the Church of England upon the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 has already been described. The Puritan congregations clung with tenacity to their peculiar tenets and usages, prominent among which was their invincible repugnance to artistic music. Although such opinions could probably not prevail so extensively among a really musical people, yet this was not the first nor the last time in history that the art which seems peculiarly adapted to the promotion of pure devotional feeling has been disowned as a temptation and a distraction. We find similar instances among some of the more zealous German Protestants of Luther’s time, and the German Pietists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At many periods of the Middle Age there were protests against the lengths to which artistic music had gone in the Church and a demand for the reduction of the musical service to the simplest elements. Still further back, among the early Christians, the horror at the abominations of paganism issued in denunciation of all artistic tendencies in the worship of the Church. St. Jerome may not inaccurately be called the first great Puritan. Even St. Augustine was at one time inclined to believe that his love for the moving songs of the Church was a snare, [373] until, by analysis, he persuaded himself that it was the sacred words, and not merely the musical tones, which softened his heart and filled his eyes with tears. As in all these cases, including that of the Puritans, the sacrifice of aesthetic pleasure in worship was not merely a reactionary protest against the excess of ceremonialism and artistic enjoyment. The Puritan was a precisian. The love of a highly developed and sensuously beautiful music in worship always implies a certain infusion of mysticism. The Puritan was no mystic. He demanded hard distinct definition in his pious expression as he did in his argumentation. The vagueness of musical utterance, its appeal to indefinable emotion, its effect of submerging the mind and bearing it away upon a tide of ecstasy were all in exact contradiction to the Puritan’s conviction as to the nature of genuine edification. These raptures could not harmonize with his gloomy views of sin, righteousness, and judgment to come. And so we find the most spiritual of the arts denied admittance to the sanctuary by those who actually cherished music as a beloved social and domestic companion.
More difficult to understand is the Puritan prohibition of all hymns except rhymed paraphrases of the psalms. Metrical versions were substituted for chanted prose versions for the reason, no doubt, that a congregation, as a rule, cannot sing in perfect unity of coöperation except in metre and in musical forms in which one note is set to one syllable. But why the psalms alone? Why suppress the free utterance of the believers in hymns of faith and hope? In the view of that day the [374] psalms were directly inspired by the Holy Spirit and contemporary hymns could not be. We know that a characteristic of the Puritan mind was an intense, an impassioned reverence for the Holy Scripture, so that all other forms of human speech seemed trivial and unworthy in comparison. The fact that the psalms, as the product of the ante-Christian dispensation, could have no reference to the Christian scheme except by far-fetched interpretation as symbolic and prophetic, did not escape the Puritans, but they consoled themselves for the loss in the thought that the earliest churches, in which they found, or thought they found their ideal and standard, were confined to a poetic expression similar to their own. And how far did they feel this to be a loss? Was not the temper of the typical Puritan, after all, thoroughly impregnated with Hebraism? The real nature of the spiritual deprivation which this restriction involved is apparent enough now, for it barred out a gracious influence which might have corrected some grave faults in the Puritan character, faults from which their religious descendants to this day continue to suffer.
The rise of an English hymnody corresponding to that of Germany was, therefore, delayed for more than one hundred and fifty years. English religious song-books were exclusively psalm-books down to the eighteenth century. Poetic activity among the non-conformists consisted in translations of the psalms in metre, or rather versions of the existing translations in the English Bible, for these sectaries, as a rule, were not strong in Hebrew. The singular passion in that period [375] for putting everything into rhyme and metre, which produced such grotesque results as turning an act of Parliament into couplets, and paraphrasing “Paradise Lost” in rhymed stanzas in order, as the writer said, “to make Mr. Milton plain,” gave aid and comfort to the peculiar Puritan views. The first complete metrical version of the psalms was the celebrated edition of Sternhold and Hopkins, the former a gentleman of the privy chamber to Edward VI., the latter a clergyman and schoolmaster in Suffolk. This version, published in 1562, was received with universal satisfaction and adopted into all the Puritan congregations, maintaining its credit for full two hundred and thirty years, until it came at last to be considered as almost equally inspired with the original Hebrew text. So far as poetic merit is concerned, the term is hardly applicable to the lucubrations of these honest and prosaic men. As Fuller said, “their piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon.” In fact the same comment would apply to all the subsequent versifiers of the psalms. It would seem that the very nature of such work precludes all real literary success. The sublime thought and irregular, vivid diction of the Hebrew poets do not permit themselves to be parcelled out in the cut and dried patterns of conventional metres. Once only does Sternhold rise into grandeur—in the two stanzas which James Russell Lowell so much admired: