and the time is near when every dependent on the conference funds will be comfortably cared for by the fifth collection.

How far it is best to encourage or to allow men to take the relation of superannuated, may, at some day, be a question which the Church will be required to answer with caution. It certainly should never be denied to any who have wrought in the vineyard and become disabled. But that any who have usual health, and are wholly devoting themselves to worldly business, should be placed on the roll of honor of the wornout is a serious question, both of duty and expediency. Whatever may be the attractions to induce the "able-bodied" to ask for this relation, it ought never to come from any inducement from pecuniary advantage. A faithful adherence to the present discriminating rule will remove all temptations from such inducements. While an Annual Conference has power to decide who are needy, it has also power to determine who are able to obtain a living from their own resources. While it may refuse to give to the affluent, it can also refuse to help the lazy and improvident. And while it is true to itself and the Church, in a kind, but firm and consistent answer to these questions, it may also exert a healthful influence in preserving the integrity of the answer to the question, "Who are the superannuated?"

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ART. III.-METHODISTS AND MUSIC.

FOR more than a century the Methodists have been attractive singers without being great musicians. Of "scientific music " they have been as fearful as the Church fathers, and as jealous as the Puritans. With Augustine, they have thought the pleasures and delights" of harmony "too sensual;" and with Thomas Aquinas, that "musical instruments do more stir up the mind to delight than frame it to a religious disposition." With the reformers they have called the "playing of orgayns a foolish vanitie," and looked upon the violin as the incarnation of evil. Nevertheless they have sung, and the world has listened, admired, and been edified. It is no reproach to them that their auditors were largely those whom the father of

Mozart denominated the "long-ears." Musically speaking, a large and respectable portion of mankind belongs to this class. It includes poets and metaphysicians; orators, statesmen, and philosophers; great men, wise men, good men; all that extensive tribe who are so fortunate or unfortunate as to have " no ear for music." It has been truthfully said, "feeling belongs to the many, appreciation to few." Queen Mary of Orange preferred an old Scotch song to Purcell's music. "A common ballad afforded Pope more pleasure than Handel's finest compositions." Johnson was "insensible to the power of music." Garrick possessed every possible inflexion of voice, except for singing. Swift wrote to Stella of the finest Italian singer in England, "I went to the rehearsal, and there was Margarita and another drab and a parcel of fiddlers; in half an hour I was tired of their fine stuff." Walter Scott relished no singing so much as a Scottish song. The biographer of Burns regrets that he sacrificed the higher walks of poetry to setting ballads to old Scotch airs. Pugnani wrote of Voltaire, "He makes fine verses, but he knows no more about music than the devil."

The higher walks of music lie in the same regions with the higher mathematics. There are philosophies and poetries that lie in the same transcendental regions; regions into which the uninitiated never venture, and into which they perhaps seldom peer without a sense of vagueness or dismay. Few besides amateurs or professed musicians can appreciate Mozart, follow the mystic flights of Beethoven, or interpret truthfully the weird strains of Chopin.

It is not necessary. The animate life of our globe is not the less happy because confined to the surface, and because few only are privileged to climb its mountain heights or explore its ocean caverns. Speech is given to all, though oratory is a rare perquisite. All sing after a fashion, though only a few are gifted musicians. The nine muses represent mankind: one is astronomical, another rhetorical, another poetic, all are musical. There are few who are totally destitute of voice and ear. cases are of the rarest where one cannot distinguish Old Hundred from Yankee Doodle, or where all music is unmeaning jargon, as painful to the sense as jingling together shovel and tongs and warming-pan. If any are so constituted, they

The

are the sport of nature, victims of malformation, objects of pity rather than of contempt or ridicule.

It is not to be wondered at that the musical and unmusical fail to understand each other. It is, perhaps, to be regretted that the cultured and artistic of all ages have disdained the vulgar level. Aristotle finds fault with those musicians who "flatter the corrupt taste of the multitude." Horace sneers at the "clowns and mechanics of the theater, whose chief delight is in the glare and glitter of the decorations, and such music as is suited to their rude ears." Ovid seems to regret that "the style of airs at the theater is adapted to the taste of the common people, that their construction is so artless and practicable that they are sung by plowmen in the fields." The world-renowned pianist and beautiful biographer of Chopin, the accomplished Liszt, calls the multitude "a sea of lead, heavy to set in motion, whose waves require to be melted by heat, made malleable and moulded, and which it requires a Cyclops to manipulate." The "masses prefer the conclusions of impulse to the fatigue of a logical argument." "Is he a musiker?" was the question asked by the infant prodigy Charles Wesley, before he would consent to give a display of his wonderful powers on the harpsichord or organ. Martini wrote to Jomelli, "he who possesses the art of accommodating himself to the spirit of the times will bear away the palm. It should be your aim so to please the learned as not to disgust the unlearned. The plain and unbred will have noise; they are never pleased except when they are astonished.”

It will be readily inferred that Methodist singing has had little affinity with the artistic; that, in fact, it was such music, and such alone, as the masses could participate in and appreciate. Busby characterizes it when he says of Whitefield, “he was almost as much attached to the charms of cheerful melody as to his own Arminian doctrines. His enthusiasm and love of singularity, not confined to his praying and preaching, were carried into his partiality for music. Decidedly averse to all cathedral and church compositions, especially the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of our parochial melody, he would not suffer a bar of it to be vociferated under his conventicle roofs, nor anything less lively than ballad airs. He urged in defense of this sprightly taste that it was shameful to praise God in

the drawling strains of the Church and let the devil have all the pretty tunes to himself."* Of John Wesley the same author says: "He heard a sailor singing in the street, and it struck him that the melody would suit some of his own hymns. He committed the notes of the tune to paper, on the spot, and always declared it was the most solemn and appropriate of the tunes that his congregation sung." Dr. Burney, in his history of Music, says: "The modern Methodists have introduced a light and ballad kind of melody into their tabernacles, which seems as much wanting in reverence and dignity as the psalmody of other sects in poetry and good taste."

It is not to be denied that Methodists from the beginning have made great use of "spiritual songs." Their singing has been a practical application of the trite aphorism, "Let me make the ballads, I care not who makes the laws." As the Jesuits are said to have fiddled their way to the good graces of some of the Indian tribes, Methodists have sung their way through all parts of nominal christendom. If their music has been "light and ballad-like," it was admirably adapted to those whom Dr. Burney contemptuously calls "cordwainers and tailors," and involved, as he further says, "the absolute necessity of such a simple kind of music as would suit whole congregations." The doctor waxes irate when he adds, "It seems to have been the wish of illiterate and furious reformers that all the religious offices should be performed by field preachers and street singers."

Huss and Jerome, Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin, Wesley and Whitefield were reformers, neither illiterate nor furious, who regenerated the religious singing of their times, as well as the morals of the people. The music of modern civilization is one of its most remarkable features, and it all hails from the era of the Reformation. At the time when Luther had set all Germany to singing hymns, the music of the Romish Church had become so foppish that the reigning powers thought of suppressing "curious music," when Palestrina arose, who brought choral harmony to a degree of perfection that has never since been exceeded."

Cornelius Agrippa, cotemporary with the great German reformer, shows what need there was for this reformation, when *The biographer of Handel attributes this saying to Rowland Hill.

he says the "prayers are chanted by wanton musicians, hired with great sums of money, not to edify the understanding, but to tickle the ears of the auditory. The church is filled with noise and clamor, the boys whining the descant, while some bellow the tenor, and others bark the counterpoint; others again squeak the treble, while others grunt the bass. A great variety of sounds is heard, yet neither sentences nor even words can be understood." It was for quoting this passage rather coarsely, with other like offensive matter, that Prynne lost his ears a century later.

Puritanism was the natural rebound of the human mind from the excesses of Romanism; but Puritanism went to excess when it described "the synging of mass " as "roryng, howling, whistelyng, mummying, conjuryng, and jogelyng." English Cathedral music, now being sedulously introduced in this country, where the psalms are "trowled from side to side " by "flocks of boys,"* is such as the masses do not appreciate. "Boys," said Della Valle, “are so devoid of taste, judgment, and grace, so mechanical and unfeeling, that I hardly ever heard a boy sing without receiving more pain than pleasure.' If the first Methodists had the objections to this style of music which have been attributed to them, they would be founded, not on questions of taste, but on the propriety of restricting a portion of God's worship, which ought to be shared in by all, to one sex and a particular age.

In Wesley we find no opposition to choirs or organs, nor, indeed, any evidences of attachment to "ballad airs." He was a judicious musical critic, heard Handel's oratorios frequently with pleasure, and criticized both the music and performance. He has left us a sensible essay on music. In his efforts at popular enlightenment and elevation he was a century ahead of his times. His zeal for the people was the direct result of his mingling with them. Knowing their condition, and philanthropically and religiously feeling their needs and endeavoring to supply them, he published music books for the use of the common people as well as grammars and philosophies, and gave full directions for their use. In addition to nearly fifty collections of hymns, he published some half dozen compilations of tunes. One of these, the "Sacred Harmony, a choice

* Erasmus.