And to come to times nearer our own, the well-known Massillon, in one of his charges to his clergy, delivered at the Conference at which he presided, earnestly recommends them to make the study of the Plain Chant a part of their recreation; for, adds he, “le peuple souvent se calme au chant du sacerdoce dans le temple.” (Conferences, vol. iii.) And our own times have witnessed a remarkable instance of the same medicinal power of the church chant when in the Champs Élysées of Paris, during the summer of 1848, the citizens met in the open air, to celebrate a Requiem Mass for the repose of those who had fallen in the great civil commotion of that year, which had been suppressed with such loss of life. Here were to be seen the murderer and the relations of the murdered, forgetting that strongest and deadliest feud of the human heart—the thirst for vengeance for the shedding of kindred blood—joining their own to the thousands of voices that poured forth the well-known church chant of the Dies iræ. Ten thousand voices supplicating Almighty God to pardon the past, to grant rest to the souls of the slain, to bear in mind that he had come on earth to save them, and to beg that he would remember them in mercy at the day of his judgment, in the language and song of the church! Of a truth, then, may the church chant say, Unxit me Spiritus Domini, ut mederer contritis corde.
It is also curious to observe in what a marked manner, even in the recent Protestant literature of our own country, this medicinal character of the church chant is still recognized. Mr. Wordsworth has the following lines in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets (xxx.):
CANUTE.
“A pleasant music floats along the Mere,
From monks in Ely chanting service high,
While—as Canute the King is rowing by—
‘My oarsmen,’ quoth the mighty king, ‘draw near,
That we the sweet song of the monks may hear.’
He listens (all past conquests and all schemes
Of future vanishing like empty dreams)