Music in the History of the Western Church

We must, therefore, recognize certain conditions of the time working in alliance with the authority of Calvin to bring into vogue a conception and method of public worship absolutely in contradiction to the almost universal usage of mankind, and nullifying the general conviction, we might almost say the instinct, in favor of the employment in devotion of those artistic agencies by which the religious emotion is ordinarily so strongly moved. For the first time in the history of the Christian Church, at any rate for the first time upon a conspicuous or extensive scale, we find a party of religionists abjuring on conscientious grounds all employment of art in the sanctuary. Beginning in an inevitable and salutary reaction against the excessive development of the sensuous and formal, the hostility to everything that may excite the spirit to a spontaneous joy in beautiful shape and color and sound was exalted into a universally binding principle. With no reverence for the conception of historic development and Christian tradition, the supposed simplicity of the apostolic practice was assumed to be a constraining law upon all later generations. The Scriptures were taken not only as a rule of faith and conduct, but also as a law of universal obligation in the matter of church government and discipline. The expulsion of organs and the prohibition of choirs was in no way due to a hostility to music in itself, but was simply a detail of that sweeping revolution which, in the attempt to level all artificial distinctions and restore the offices of worship to a simplicity such that they could be understood and administered by the common people, abolished the good of the ancient system together with the bad, and stripped religion of those fair adornments which have been found in the long run efficient to bring her into sympathy with the inherent human demand for beauty and order.

With regard to the matter of art and established form in public worship Calvinism was at one with itself, whether in Geneva or Great Britain. A large number of active Protestants had fled from England at the beginning of the persecution of Mary, and had taken refuge at Geneva. Here they came under the direct influence of Calvin, and imbibed his principles in fullest measure. At the death of Mary these exiles returned, many of them to become leaders in that section of the Protestant party which clamored for a complete eradication of ancient habits and observances. No inspiration was really needed from Calvin, for his democratic and anti-ritualistic views were in complete accord with the temper of English Puritanism. The attack was delivered all along the line, and not the least violent was the outcry against the liturgic music of the established Church. The notion held by the Puritans concerning a proper worship music was that of plain unison psalmody. They vigorously denounced what was known as “curious music,” by which was meant scientific, artistic music, and also the practice of antiphonal chanting and the use of organs. Just why organs were looked upon with especial detestation is not obvious. They had played but a very incidental part in the Catholic service, and it would seem that their efficiency as an aid to psalm singing should have commended them to Puritan favor. But such was not the case. Even early in Elizabeth’s reign, among certain articles tending to the further alteration of the liturgy which were presented to the lower house of Convocation, was one requiring the removal of organs from the churches, which was lost by only a single vote. It was a considerable time, however, before the opposition again mustered such force. Elizabeth never wavered in her determination to maintain the solemn musical service of her Church. Even this was severe enough as compared with its later expansion, for the multiplication of harmonized chants and florid anthems belongs to a later date, and the ancient Plain Song still included a large part of the service. Neither was Puritanism in the early stages of the movement by any means an uncompromising enemy to the graces of art and culture. The Renaissance delight in what is fair and joyous, its satisfaction in the good things of this world, lingered long even in Puritan households. The young John Milton, gallant, accomplished, keenly alive to the charms of poetry and music, was no less a representative Puritan than when in later years, “fallen on evil days,” he fulminated against the levities of the time. It was the stress of party strife, the hardening of the mental and moral fibre that often follows the denial of the reasonable demands of the conscience, that drove the Puritan into bigotry and intolerance. Gradually episcopacy and ritualism became to his mind the mark of the beast. Intent upon knowing the divine will, he exalted his conception of the dictates of that will above all human ordinances, until at last his own interpretations of Scripture, which he made his sole guide in every public and private relation of life, seemed to him guaranteed by the highest of all sanctions. He thus became capable of trampling with a serene conscience upon the rights of those who maintained opinions different from his own. Fair and just in matters in which questions of doctrine or polity were not involved, in affairs of religion the Puritan became the type and embodiment of all that is unyielding and fanatical. Opposition to the use of the surplice, the sign of the cross in baptism, the posture of kneeling at the Lord’s Supper, and antiphonal chanting, expanded into uncompromising condemnation of the whole ritual. Puritanism and Presbyterianism became amalgamated, and it only wanted the time and opportunity to pull down episcopacy and liturgy in a common overthrow. The antipathy of the Puritans to artistic music and official choirs was, therefore, less a matter of personal feeling than it was with Calvin. His thought was more that of the purely religious effect upon the individual heart; with the Puritan, hatred of cultured church music was simply a detail in the general animosity which he felt toward an offensive institution.

The most conspicuous of the agitators during the reign of Elizabeth was Thomas Cartwright, Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, who first gained notoriety by means of public lectures read in 1570 against the doctrine and discipline of the established Church. The coarseness and violence of this man drew upon him the royal censure, and he was deprived of his fellowship and expelled from the University. His antipathy was especially aroused by the musical practice of the established Church, particularly the antiphonal chanting, “tossing the psalms from one side to the other,” to use one of his favorite expressions. “The devil hath gone about to get it authority,” said Cartwright. “As for organs and curious singing, though they be proper to popish dens, I mean to cathedral churches, yet some others also must have them. The queen’s chapel and these churches (which should be spectacles of Christian reformation) are rather patterns to the people of all superstition.”

The attack of Cartwright upon the rites and discipline of the Church of England, since it expressed the feeling of a strong section of the Puritan party, could not be left unanswered. The defence was undertaken by Whitgift and afterward by Richard Hooker, the latter bringing to the debate such learning, dignity, eloquence, and logic that we may be truly grateful to the unlovely Cartwright that his diatribe was the occasion of the enrichment of English literature with so masterly an exposition of the principles of the Anglican system as the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

As regards artistic and liturgic music Hooker’s argument is so clear, persuasive, and complete that all later contestants upon the ritualistic side have derived their weapons, more or less consciously, from his armory. After an eloquent eulogy of the power of music over the heart, Hooker passes on to prove the antiquity of antiphonal chanting by means of citations from the early Christian fathers, and then proceeds: “But whosoever were the author, whatsoever the time, whencesoever the example of beginning this custom in the Church of Christ; sith we are wont to suspect things only before trial, and afterward either to approve them as good, or if we find them evil, accordingly to judge of them; their counsel must needs seem very unseasonable, who advise men now to suspect that wherewith the world hath had by their own account twelve hundred years’ acquaintance and upwards, enough to take away suspicion and jealousy. Men know by this time, if ever they will know, whether it be good or evil which hath been so long retained.” The argument of Cartwright, that all the people have the right to praise God in the singing of psalms, Hooker does not find a sufficient reason for the abolition of the choir; he denies the assertion that the people cannot understand what is being sung, after the antiphonal manner, and then concludes: “Shall this enforce us to banish a thing which all Christian churches in the world have received; a thing, which so many ages have held; a thing which always heretofore the best men and wisest governors of God’s people did think they could never commend enough; a thing which filleth the mind with comfort and heavenly delight, stirreth up flagrant desires and affections correspondent unto that which the words contain, allayeth all kind of base and earthly cogitations, banisheth and driveth away those evil secret suggestions which our invisible enemy is always apt to minister, watereth the heart to the end it may fructify, maketh the virtuous in trouble full of magnanimity and courage, serveth as a most approved remedy against all doleful and heavy accidents which befall men in this present life; to conclude, so fitly accordeth with the apostle’s own exhortation, ‘Speak to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, making melody, and singing to the Lord in your hearts,’ that surely there is more cause to fear lest the want thereof be a maim, than the use a blemish to the service of God.”80

The just arguments and fervent appeals of Hooker produced no effect upon the fanatical opponents of the established Church. Under the exasperating conditions which produced the Great Rebellion and the substitution of the Commonwealth for the monarchy, the hatred against everything identified with ecclesiastical and political oppression became tenfold confirmed; and upon the triumph of the most extreme democratic and non-conformist faction, as represented by the army of Cromwell and the “Rump” Parliament, nothing stood in the way of carrying the iconoclastic purpose into effect. In 1644 the House of Lords, under the pressure of the already triumphant opposition, passed an ordinance that the Prayer Book should no longer be used in any place of public worship. In lieu of the liturgy a new form of worship was decreed, in which the congregational singing of metrical psalms was all the music allowed. “It is the duty of Christians,” so the new rule declares, “to praise God publicly by singing of psalms, together in the congregation and also privately in the family. In singing of psalms the voice is to be tunably and gravely ordered; but the chief care is to sing with understanding and with grace in the heart, making melody unto the Lord. That the whole congregation may join herein, every one that can read is to have a psalm-book, and all others not disabled by age or otherwise are to be exhorted to learn to read. But for the present, where many in the congregation cannot read, it is convenient that the minister, or some fit person appointed by him and the other ruling officers, do read the psalm line by line before the singing thereof.”81

The rules framed by the commission left the matter of instrumental music untouched. Perhaps it was considered a work of supererogation to proscribe it, for if there was anything which the Puritan conscience supremely abhorred it was an organ. Sir Edward Deering, in his bill for the abolition of episcopacy, expressed the opinion of the zealots of his party in the assertion that “one groan in the Spirit is worth the diapason of all the church music in the world.”

As far back as 1586 a pamphlet which had a wide circulation prays that “all cathedral churches may be put down, where the service of God is grievously abused by piping with organs, singing, ringing, and trowling of psalms from one side of the choir to the other, with the squeaking of chanting choristers, disguised in white surplices; some in corner caps and silly copes, imitating the fashion and manner of Antichrist the Pope, that man of sin and child of perdition, with his other rabble of miscreants and shavelings.”

Such diatribes as this were no mere idle vaporing. As soon as the Puritan army felt its victory secure, these threats were carried out with a ruthless violence which reminds one of the havoc of the image breakers of Antwerp in 1566, who, with striking coincidence of temper, preluded their ravages by the singing of psalms. All reverence for sacred association, all respect for works of skill and beauty, were lost in the indiscriminate rage of bigotry. The ancient sanctuaries were invaded by a vulgar horde, the stained glass windows were broken, ornaments torn down, sepulchral monuments defaced, libraries were ransacked for ancient service-books which, when found, were mutilated or burned, organs were demolished and their fragments scattered. These barbarous excesses had in fact been directly enjoined by act of Parliament in 1644, and it is not surprising that the rude soldiery carried out the desires of their superiors with wantonness and indignity. A few organs, however, escaped the general destruction, one being rescued by Cromwell, who was a lover of religious music, and not at all in sympathy with the vandalism of his followers. Choirs were likewise dispersed, organists, singers, and composers of the highest ability were deprived of their means of livelihood, and in many cases reduced to the extreme of destitution. The beautiful service of the Anglican Church, thus swept away in a single day, found no successor but the dull droning psalmody of the Puritan congregations, and only in a private circle in Oxford, indirectly protected by Cromwell, was the feeble spark of artistic religious music kept alive.

The reëstablishment of the liturgy and the musical service of the Church of England upon the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 has already been described. The Puritan congregations clung with tenacity to their peculiar tenets and usages, prominent among which was their invincible repugnance to artistic music. Although such opinions could probably not prevail so extensively among a really musical people, yet this was not the first nor the last time in history that the art which seems peculiarly adapted to the promotion of pure devotional feeling has been disowned as a temptation and a distraction. We find similar instances among some of the more zealous German Protestants of Luther’s time, and the German Pietists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At many periods of the Middle Age there were protests against the lengths to which artistic music had gone in the Church and a demand for the reduction of the musical service to the simplest elements. Still further back, among the early Christians, the horror at the abominations of paganism issued in denunciation of all artistic tendencies in the worship of the Church. St. Jerome may not inaccurately be called the first great Puritan. Even St. Augustine was at one time inclined to believe that his love for the moving songs of the Church was a snare, until, by analysis, he persuaded himself that it was the sacred words, and not merely the musical tones, which softened his heart and filled his eyes with tears. As in all these cases, including that of the Puritans, the sacrifice of aesthetic pleasure in worship was not merely a reactionary protest against the excess of ceremonialism and artistic enjoyment. The Puritan was a precisian. The love of a highly developed and sensuously beautiful music in worship always implies a certain infusion of mysticism. The Puritan was no mystic. He demanded hard distinct definition in his pious expression as he did in his argumentation. The vagueness of musical utterance, its appeal to indefinable emotion, its effect of submerging the mind and bearing it away upon a tide of ecstasy were all in exact contradiction to the Puritan’s conviction as to the nature of genuine edification. These raptures could not harmonize with his gloomy views of sin, righteousness, and judgment to come. And so we find the most spiritual of the arts denied admittance to the sanctuary by those who actually cherished music as a beloved social and domestic companion.

More difficult to understand is the Puritan prohibition of all hymns except rhymed paraphrases of the psalms. Metrical versions were substituted for chanted prose versions for the reason, no doubt, that a congregation, as a rule, cannot sing in perfect unity of coöperation except in metre and in musical forms in which one note is set to one syllable. But why the psalms alone? Why suppress the free utterance of the believers in hymns of faith and hope? In the view of that day the psalms were directly inspired by the Holy Spirit and contemporary hymns could not be. We know that a characteristic of the Puritan mind was an intense, an impassioned reverence for the Holy Scripture, so that all other forms of human speech seemed trivial and unworthy in comparison. The fact that the psalms, as the product of the ante-Christian dispensation, could have no reference to the Christian scheme except by far-fetched interpretation as symbolic and prophetic, did not escape the Puritans, but they consoled themselves for the loss in the thought that the earliest churches, in which they found, or thought they found their ideal and standard, were confined to a poetic expression similar to their own. And how far did they feel this to be a loss? Was not the temper of the typical Puritan, after all, thoroughly impregnated with Hebraism? The real nature of the spiritual deprivation which this restriction involved is apparent enough now, for it barred out a gracious influence which might have corrected some grave faults in the Puritan character, faults from which their religious descendants to this day continue to suffer.

The rise of an English hymnody corresponding to that of Germany was, therefore, delayed for more than one hundred and fifty years. English religious song-books were exclusively psalm-books down to the eighteenth century. Poetic activity among the non-conformists consisted in translations of the psalms in metre, or rather versions of the existing translations in the English Bible, for these sectaries, as a rule, were not strong in Hebrew. The singular passion in that period for putting everything into rhyme and metre, which produced such grotesque results as turning an act of Parliament into couplets, and paraphrasing “Paradise Lost” in rhymed stanzas in order, as the writer said, “to make Mr. Milton plain,” gave aid and comfort to the peculiar Puritan views. The first complete metrical version of the psalms was the celebrated edition of Sternhold and Hopkins, the former a gentleman of the privy chamber to Edward VI., the latter a clergyman and schoolmaster in Suffolk. This version, published in 1562, was received with universal satisfaction and adopted into all the Puritan congregations, maintaining its credit for full two hundred and thirty years, until it came at last to be considered as almost equally inspired with the original Hebrew text. So far as poetic merit is concerned, the term is hardly applicable to the lucubrations of these honest and prosaic men. As Fuller said, “their piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon.” In fact the same comment would apply to all the subsequent versifiers of the psalms. It would seem that the very nature of such work precludes all real literary success. The sublime thought and irregular, vivid diction of the Hebrew poets do not permit themselves to be parcelled out in the cut and dried patterns of conventional metres. Once only does Sternhold rise into grandeur – in the two stanzas which James Russell Lowell so much admired:

The Lord descended from above,And bowed the heavens most high,And underneath his feet he castThe darkness of the sky.On cherub and on cherubimFull royally he rode;And on the wings of all the windsCame flying all abroad.

The graces of style, however, were not greatly prized by the Puritan mind. Sternhold and Hopkins held the suffrages of their co-religionists so long on account of their strict fidelity to the thought of the original, the ruggedness and genuine force of their expression, and their employment of the simple homely phraseology of the common people. The enlightened criticism of the present day sees worth in these qualities, and assigns to the work of Sternhold and Hopkins higher credit than to many smoother and more finished versions.

Sternhold and Hopkins partially yielded to Tate and Brady in 1696, and were still more urgently pushed aside by the version of Watts in 1719. The numerous versions which have since appeared from time to time were written purely for literary purposes, or else in a few cases (as, for example, the psalms of Ainsworth, brought to America by the Pilgrim Fathers) were granted a temporary and local use in the churches. Glass, in his Story of the Psalter, enumerates one hundred and twenty-three complete versions, the last being that of Wrangham in 1885. This long list includes but one author – John Keble – who has attained fame as a poet outside the annals of hymnology. No other version ever approached in popularity that of Sternhold and Hopkins, whose work passed through six hundred and one editions.

Social hymn singing, unlike liturgic choir music, is entirely independent of contemporary art movements. It flourishes only in periods of popular religious awakening, and declines when religious enthusiasm ebbs, no matter what may be going on in professional musical circles. Psalm singing in the English Reformation period, whatever its aesthetic shortcomings, was a powerful promoter of zeal in moments of triumph, and an unfailing source of consolation in adversity. As in the case of the Lutheran choral, each psalm had its “proper” tune. Many of the melodies were already associated with tender experiences of home life, and they became doubly endeared through religious suggestion. “The metrical psalms,” says Curwen, “were Protestant in their origin, and in their use they exemplified the Protestant principle of allowing every worshiper to understand and participate in the service. As years went on, the rude numbers of Sternhold and Hopkins passed into the language of spiritual experience in a degree only less than the authorized version of the Bible. They were a liturgy to those who rejected liturgies.”82 It was their one outlet of poetic religious feeling, and dry and prosaic as both words and music seem to us now, we must believe, since human nature is everywhere moved by much the same impulses, that these psalms and tunes were not to those who used them barren and formal things, and that in the singing of them there was an undercurrent of rapture which to our minds it seems almost impossible that they could produce. In every form of popular expression there is always this invisible aura, like the supposed imperceptible fluid around an electrified body. There are what we may call emotionalized reactions, stimulated by social, domestic, or ancestral associations, producing effects for which the unsympathetic critic cannot otherwise account.

Even this inspiration at last seemed to fade away. When the one hundred years’ conflict, of alternate ascendency and persecution, came to an end with the Restoration in 1660, zeal abated with the fires of conflict, and apathy, formalism, and dulness, the counterparts of lukewarmness and Pharisaical routine in the established Church, settled down over the dissenting sects. In the eighteenth century the psalmody of the Presbyterians, Independents, and Separatists, which had also been adopted long before in the parochial services of the established Church, declined into the most contracted and unemotional routine that can be found in the history of religious song. The practice of “lining out” destroyed every vestige of musical charm that might otherwise have remained; the number of tunes in common use grew less and less, in some congregations being reduced to a bare half-dozen. The conception of individualism, which was the source of congregational singing in the first place, was carried to such absurd extremes that the notion extensively prevailed that every person was privileged to sing the melody in any key or tempo and with any grotesque embellishment that might be pleasing to himself. These fantastic abuses especially prevailed in the New England congregations in the last half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, but they were only the ultimate consequences of ideas and practices which prevailed in the mother country. The early Baptists forbade singing altogether. The Brownists tried for a short time to act upon the notion that singing in worship, like prayer, should be extempore. The practical results may easily be imagined. About the year 1700 it seemed as though the fair genius of sacred song had abandoned the English and American non-liturgic sects in despair.