And if the means of acquiring such a view be open, it need not be said how great a duty there is to search for it; and in whatever proportion there be ground for believing that it has been, even though imperfectly, attained, it becomes so far a duty—an element in our probation, as well as a sacred and meritorious work, by every tender, considerate, legitimate, and untiring endeavor, to seek to bring Catholic Church music into conformity with it.
I.
GENERAL STATEMENT OF THE BASIS OF THE COMPARISON.
It would be surely a superfluous labor at the outset of an inquiry which it is desirable should be as short and condensed as possible to prove, in a learned manner, the great practical importance of the question, What, under our present circumstances, is the wisest, the best, and the most effectual use of music in the Catholic Church? The œcumenical and provincial councils that have made ritual chant the subject of their legislation; the authors, such as Cardinal Bona and Abbot Gerbertus, subsequent to the Council of Trent, not to speak of those who lived before it, who spent their lives in the study of all that Christian antiquity has thought and written upon it; the line of illustrious Roman pontiffs who made it their study, with a view to the true direction of its use in the church, need but to be recalled to mind to place in its true light the exceedingly practical importance of any controversy which affects its efficiency or mode of employment in the Catholic Church.[113] Moreover, if there were no such evidence of the importance of the question at issue to be found in the history of the past, still the mere obvious fact that vocal music enters so naturally into all the feelings of humanity, and domesticates itself so easily in every people, would be sufficient to explain its importance. People in any society are so insensibly moulded by all that surrounds them, are so much the creatures of the system in which they move, and grow up so naturally in conformity with it, that in such a society as the Catholic Church, organized by a divine wisdom, with a view to the training and instruction of its members, it is simply impossible that an agency such as music, possessed of such power for good or evil, could ever be regarded with indifference, or that there should be no definite views with regard to it, and its employment be abandoned to the indiscretion and caprice of individuals.
A question of individual taste, then, the present inquiry cannot for an instant be considered. Indeed, from the moment it were thus regarded it would have lost its whole value. Persons are no doubt to be found who would take a long journey and pay a large sum to hear Beethoven’s music for the Ordinary of the Mass sung among the performances of a music-meeting, who, as far as music was concerned, and setting aside the miracle, would hardly care to go across the street to hear S. Gregory sing Mass with his school of cantors, were they all to rise from the dead. So that if music in the Catholic Church could for a moment be considered as belonging of right to the dominion of individual taste, further controversy, it is plain, would be so far quite out of the question. The tastes of individuals, if not only devoid of rule, still do not go by any rule sufficiently clear to be made the subject of a formal controversy.
But in the Catholic Church the question is not, and cannot be, one of individual taste. When the divine Redeemer called his church to the work of training every nation and people under heaven, and gave to it the gift of sacred song, to be used as a powerful auxiliary agency in their work, we are bound to conceive that there existed in his divine mind a clear and definite intention, both relatively to the end it was intended to accomplish in the midst of Christian society, and to its application to this end as time should advance.
Sacred song has certainly a mission to accomplish upon earth, as well as the proper manner of its application to its proposed end; and both alike have been, in common with the whole work of creation, from the beginning contemplated and intended by Almighty God.
Now, the end intended by Almighty God, in his work of redemption in this world, as say theologians, is primarily the manifestation of his own glory; and, secondarily, the re-establishment of order and virtue, piety and sanctity, in human society, with a view to the life to come, or, in other words, with a view to the true and eternal, as distinguished from the false and fleeting, happiness of his creatures. From whence it would seem to result that the true character of the ecclesiastical song and its true application will be that in which it tends, in its own proper degree, to become an auxiliary in the accomplishment of this great end. Nor is it a second or a third rate efficaciousness that should be deemed sufficient. For if Almighty God, as many theologians seem with so much justice to say, not from any external necessity, but from his own perfections, in virtue of which he is a law to himself, freely chooses only those means that are most efficacious to the end he proposes, so, in like manner, the Catholic Church, filled as she is with the outpouring of the divine Spirit, and called to the imitation of the divine perfections, cannot but in like manner feel constrained to choose that alone for her music which tends, with the best and most certain efficacy, to the attainment of the end which God has designed in the gift.
The foregoing remarks have, I hope, now laid the foundation on which the proposed inquiry may be conducted. And I think I may be allowed to say in the outset that an inquiry which has for its object to ascertain what that may be in music and in the manner of its use which answers best to the idea existing in the mind of God, unless it very much belie its pretensions and profession, may justly claim respect; and that the whole investigation is thus at once raised beyond the horizon of anything like human partisanship, as well as the sphere of those little irritabilities with which discussions upon music may so easily be disfigured. And without at all presuming that the views here advocated ought necessarily to be adopted, the inquiry is still not a valueless service rendered to religion, if it succeed no further than in impressing upon the minds of those into whose way it may fall the fundamental idea upon which it is built, viz., that the mission of sacred song in the Catholic Church is to realize, not the ideas of men, which may and do differ in each individual, but the idea of the merciful and good God, who gave it for his own purposes of mercy and benevolence.
And since the idea, as it subsists in the mind of God, relative to the use of song in the Catholic Church, is made the sole keystone of the whole inquiry, as well to guard an avenue against possible misconceptions as also the more clearly to lay the basis of the discussion, it will be necessary to state, at a somewhat greater length, what the divine idea of sacred song, in its first broad outline, may be taken to be.
Sacred song, it has been said, is to be regarded as the musical associate and auxiliary of the work of Christian instruction and sanctification in the church. It cannot be anything or everything that is luscious or pleasing in music; moreover, it is an idea that goes beyond the notion of mere tune or melody, or even of the richest combination of sound that art ever produced. Sacred song, in the divine idea, must be more than mere music. For though it be true that tunes and other works of art in music are so far things by themselves as to be capable of being written in notation, and thus preserved, still it seems impossible that mere tunes and mere music should answer to the divine idea of sacred song.