Before the middle of the century the Episcopal Church had arrived at a point at which it was much looked to to set the fashions in such matters as church music and architecture. Its influence at this time was very bad. It was largely responsible for the fashion, still widely prevalent, of substituting for the church choir a quartet of professional solo singers, and for the degradation of church music into the dainty, languishing, and sensuous style which such "artists" do most affect. The period of "The Grace Church Collection," "Greatorex's Collection," and the sheet-music compositions of George William Warren and John R. Thomas was the lowest tide of American church music.
A healthy reaction from this vicious condition began about 1855, with the introduction of hymn-and-tune books and the revival of congregational singing. From that time the progressive improvement of the public taste may be traced in the character of the books that have succeeded one another in the churches, until the admirable compositions of the modern English school of psalmody tend to predominate above those of inferior quality. It is the mark of a transitional period that both in church music and in church architecture we seem to depend much on compositions and designs derived from older countries. The future of religious art in America is sufficiently well assured to leave no cause for hurry or anxiety.
In glancing back over this chapter, it will be strange if some are not impressed, and unfavorably impressed, with a disproportion in the names cited as representative, which are taken chiefly from some two or three sects. This may justly be referred in part, no doubt, to the author's point of view and to the "personal equation"; but it is more largely due to the fact that in the specialization of the various sects the work of theological literature and science has been distinctively the lot of the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, and preëminently of the former.[394:1] It is matter of congratulation that the inequality among the denominations in this respect is in a fair way to be outgrown.
Special mention must be made of the peculiarly valuable contribution to the liturgical literature of America that is made by the oldest of our episcopal churches, the Moravian. This venerable organization is rich not only in the possession of a heroic martyr history, but in the inheritance of liturgic forms and usages of unsurpassed beauty and dignity. Before the other churches had emerged from a half-barbarous state in respect to church music, this art was successfully cultivated in the Moravian communities and missions. In past times these have had comparatively few points of contact and influence with the rest of the church; but when the elements of a common order of divine worship shall by and by begin to grow into form, it is hardly possible that the Moravian traditions will not enter into it as an important factor.
A combination of conditions which in the case of other bodies in the church has been an effective discouragement to literary production has applied with especial force to the Roman Catholic Church in America. First, its energies and resources, great as they are, have been engrossed by absolutely prodigious burdens of practical labor; and secondly, its necessary literary material has been furnished to it from across the sea, ready to its hand, or needing only the light labor of translation. But these two conditions are not enough, of themselves, to account for the very meager contribution of the Catholic Church to the common religious and theological literature of American Christendom. Neither is the fact explained by the general low average of culture among the Catholic population; for literary production does not ordinarily proceed from the man of average culture, but from men of superior culture, such as this church possesses in no small number, and places in positions of undisturbed "learned leisure" that would seem in the highest degree promotive of intellectual work. But the comparative statistics of the Catholic and the Protestant countries and universities of Germany seem to prove conclusively that the spirit and discipline of the Roman Church are unfavorable to literary productiveness in those large fields of intellectual activity that are common and free alike to the scholars of all Christendom. It remains to be seen whether the stimulating atmosphere and the free and equal competitions of the New World will not show their invigorating effect in the larger activity of Catholic scholars, and their liberation from within the narrow lines of polemic and defensive literature. The republic of Christian letters has already shown itself prompt to welcome accessions from this quarter. The signs are favorable. Notwithstanding severe criticisms of their methods proceeding from the Catholic press, or rather in consequence of such criticisms, the Catholic institutions of higher learning are rising in character and in public respect; and the honorable enterprise of establishing at Washington an American Catholic university, on the upbuilding of which shall be concentrated the entire intellectual strength and culture of this church, promises an invigorating influence that shall extend through that whole system of educational institutions which the church has set on foot at immense cost, and not with wholly satisfactory results.
Recent events in the Catholic Church in America tend to reassure all minds on an important point on which not bigots and alarmists only, but liberal-minded citizens apostolically willing to "look not only on their own things but also on the things of others," have found reasonable ground for anxiety. The American Catholic Church, while characterized in all its ranks, in respect of loyal devotion to the pope, by a high type of ultramontane orthodoxy, is to be administered on patriotic American principles. The brief term of service of Monsignor Satolli as papal legate clothed with plenipotentiary authority from the Roman see stamped out the scheme called from its promoter "Cahenslyism," which would have divided the American Catholic Church into permanent alien communities, conserving each its foreign language and organized under its separate hierarchy. The organization of parishes to be administered in other languages than English is suffered only as a temporary necessity. The deadly warfare against the American common-school system has abated. And the anti-American denunciations contained in the bull and syllabus of December 8, 1864, are openly renounced as lacking the note of infallibility.[396:1]
Of course, as in all large communities of vigorous vitality, there will be mutually antagonist parties in this body; but it is hardly to be doubted that with the growth and acclimatization of the Catholic Church in America that party will eventually predominate which is most in sympathy with the ruling ideas of the country and the age.
FOOTNOTES: