“Callida cum frigidis pugnant, humentia siccis,
Mollia cum duris, sine pondere habentia pondus.”
—Ovid, Metam.
But to approach the comparison. If in the divine idea of the Christian song there is necessarily contained the notion of a working and efficient system, the simple truth is, that there is no such system, either in the works of modern music themselves, or in the manner of their use. On the one side is the important fact, that the modern art of music leaves the vastly larger portion of the Ritual without any music at all, embracing positively not more than its merest fraction; on the other, the equally great fact of a total absence of any thing like rule to determine their selection. As a working system, then, full and complete in all its points, the Ritual chant stands alone the only realization of that part of the divine idea which contemplates order and system in the use of Christian song.
RESPECTIVE MORAL FITNESS: I. AS A SACRIFICIAL SONG; II. AS A SONG FOR THE OFFICES OF THE CHURCH.
I. As a Sacrificial Song.
It has been already remarked that ecclesiastical song is not everything or anything that is beautiful in music, nor merely a work of art. It is, strictly speaking, a sacrificial chant, the song of those engaged in offering sacrifice to God, Tibi sacrificabo hostiam laudis. Such a song is obviously not any kind of song, but one that possesses a moral type and character, rendering it a fit companion for the holy and bloodless victim offered on the Christian altar; becoming an offering, offered not to man, but to the ears of the Most High, and akin to the solemnity of its subject—redemption from sin and death through the blood and sufferings of a sinless victim, the crucified Son of God. The divine idea may then, I think, be said to contemplate sacred song as possessing a sacrificial character.
And the reason, if required, will appear, on considering to how great an extent music possesses the remarkable gift of absorbing and becoming possessed with an idea. When song has been successfully united to language, the ideas contained in the latter are found to take possession of the music, and to form the sound or tune into an image and reflection of themselves, in a manner almost analogous to the way in which the mind within moulds the outward features of the face, so as to make them an index and expression of itself. What I mean by this alleged power of music to absorb, and afterwards to express, ideas, even those the most opposite to each other, may be exemplified, if an instance be wanted, by contrasting any popular melody from the Roman Gradual, as the Dies Iræ, or the Stabat Mater, with one of our popular street tunes, “Cherry ripe,” or “Jim Crow”; and it will be seen at once, on humming over these tunes, with what perfect truth and to how great an extent music is able to ally itself to the most opposite ideas, and how, through the ear, it has the power, not merely to convey them to the mind, but to leave them there, firmly and vividly impressed. If, then, by virtue of this power, music may, on the one hand, become the channel of the most exquisite profaneness in divine worship, so it certainly may, on the other, contribute wonderfully to its majesty and power of attraction. And since the music of the field of battle, the military march, and the roll of the drum, has a character not shared by other kinds, as the song of the banquet, and of the dance, of the drunkard over his cups, of the peasant at his plough, of the sailor at sea, of the village maiden at her home, have each their own stamp and form: so also in the song of Christian worship, God will regard it as the song of men offering sacrifice to himself, as having a character inherent in its subject—the life, sufferings, and death of him who died to take away the sins of the world—in a word, as a sacrificial chant.
Now that a sacrificial chant has in all ages accompanied the offering of sacrifice, is a truth to which history, if examined, will be found to bear abundant testimony. In the sacrifice described by Virgil in the Æneid,
“pueri innuptæque puellæ