Contracted into one loud din.”
Hudibras, canto ii. book ii.
And I would ask, considering the endlessly varying caprices of the human mind, how any thing else except confusion and disorder is to be expected from the principle of the supremacy of individual taste; and if music in the Christian Church is to be regarded as called to fulfil the intention of a God of order, in what way it is expected that this end will ever be realized, where the safeguards of a fixed order and system are discarded, and individual discretion enthroned in their stead?
LAST POINT OF THE COMPARISON.
Catholicity of the Ecclesiastical Song, or its Companionship of the Catholic Doctrines over the whole Globe.
This last point of the comparison, though far from the least weighty, to those who will fairly consider it, may happily be much more shortly stated. The Prophet Malachi predicted that, from the rising of the sun to its setting, God’s name should be great among the Gentiles, and a “pure offering” (munda oblatio) should be offered to him; a prediction fulfilled by the fact of the Christian missionaries having carried the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass over the globe. If, then, there be a song which has ever been the faithful companion of this Holy Sacrifice, wherever it has been conveyed; that has ever been present with it when solemnly offered; which has survived the passing away of generations; has undergone no change, but is now what it was of old; is the same to the priests of one nation which it is to those of another—if such a song there be, it will hardly be disputed that such is an accredited and authentic song of the Christian kingdom. Yet such is the Ritual Chant, which, at least in its well-known parts, has literally overspread the whole globe. A French traveller in Russia, finding there the Ecclesiastical Chant, and that the Greek Church had preserved it equally with the Latin, speaks of it as a part of the “Dogme Catholique”—these church traditions of song seeming to him as great a bondage as the church traditions of faith. (See a very well written paper in the Ecclesiastic for July, 1846, a magazine conducted by clergy of the Established Church.)
If, then, the advocate for modern music be unable to point to any such fact as this for his art—if he be compelled to acknowledge that it is necessarily confined to people either of European origin or education; that it is no song for the Caffre of Africa, the Tartar of Asia, the savage of Australia, the Red Indian of North America, the Esquimaux, the Paraguay Indian—nothing but the luxury of the European; there can be little room to doubt that, on this last particular also, the Ritual Chant is the only adequate fulfilment of the divine idea.
DR. DRAPER.
In consequence of the eulogy passed by Prof. Tyndall on Dr. Draper’s book, which is entitled a History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, we inquired with some curiosity for this work, and have since examined it. It is evident that Prof. Tyndall himself is largely indebted to it, as he states; but a more flimsy and superficial attempt to trace the history of philosophy we have never met with. It seems that this gentleman, Dr. Draper, is a professor of chemistry and physiology at New York. His object, as he informs us, in this compilation, was to arrange the evidence of the intellectual history of Europe on physiological principles. The style is feeble and incorrect, and the analysis of the Greek philosophy positively ludicrous. As, however, it might be inferred from Prof. Tyndall’s address that Dr. Draper was, like himself, a disciple and admirer of Democritus, we will give the American philosopher the benefit of citing his own appreciation of the atomic theory. After stating that the theory of chemistry, as it now exists, essentially includes the views of Democritus (a point on which we bow to his authority), he proceeds thus, if we may be permitted slightly to abridge a very clumsy sentence: