to the Archbishop, and a third appeal from the Archbishop to the Queen in Council. The having so many as three appeals was one ground for introducing the Church Discipline Act. But so far from altering that state of things, the Church Discipline Act endorsed it. The jurisdiction was certainly handed from the smaller court, and began with a Bishop, but the Bishop was to issue a commission, and when that commission proceeded to its work it formed really and truly a solemn trial, and it underwent exactly the same stages as any after trial in the appeal courts. Hence, in respect of appeals, the Church Discipline Act had not done them any good, and it had taken work out of the hands of the court-leaving only minor matters which would not even realise fees to pay its officer— and which, in consequence, failed in its efficiency. If, with this state of things before them, they looked to the future, lawyers, as a body, would agree that, legally speaking, it was desirable to make a court which should conduct the trial, with only one appeal from that court. The difficulty in the way of forming this court arose from the ecclesiastical principle of precedent, viz.,-clergy to Bishop, Bishop to Archbishop, and Archbishop to Queen-and the question, therefore, was, how they should form that court and establish a single appeal without sacrificing ecclesiastical principle. He must confess that he did not see any way by which it could be done. It had been to him a problem for years. All they could do was to get rid of as much paraphernalia as they could at the least cost of principle. (Hear, hear.) He had heard many things suggested, and one, which was a clever attempt to get out of the difficulty, was-that the Bishop should be a Queen's Judge, or that there should be a Judge appointed by the Crown, and that the Bishops should, by letters of request, bring that Judge into their diocese to try the causes that it was necessary to bring before his notice; but this would be passing over the appeal to the Archbishop. That was perhaps as good a compromise as could be effected, but he must certainly let it be known that he was not pledged to it.

The Venerable ARCHDEACON RANDALL (Berks) said that under the present system there were what he might term two jury trials, and he thought there ought not to be more than one. The commission ought to be simplified so as to make it what it was originally intended it should be--a mere grand jury proceeding to inquire whether there was a prima facie case; if there was, then let the matter go before the bishop's court. He agreed with Dr. Bayford that there should only be one appeal. There was another point to which he should like to refer. Ecclesiastical council courts passed far too light sentences on offending clergymen. Why, if a man was proved to be incontinent, it was thought a heavy sentence if he was suspended for three years; and if at the end of that time he could get a recommendation signed by three beneficed clergymen, he was allowed to go back to his parish. But three years did not set up a man's character. (Applause.) One of the greatest improvements in the administration of ecclesiastical law would be that some understanding or some direction should be given that the courts should in future visit cases of immorality with much heavier sentences than they inflict now. (Hear, hear.) They ought even to go to the extent of deprivation. (Applause.) Some, however, might say that patronage might stand in the way of such a measure, and that the patron would not like the clerk to lose the position in which he had been placed. Perhaps the patron had bought the living for that man, and he might think it a hardship that his son or nephew should be deprived for that one slip. But they could not help that. (Applause.) The patron should be made to understand that, if he bought an advowson, he did so subject to the condition that the clerk he should provide should not prove injurious to the Church of England. (Applause.)

The Venerable ARCHDEACON MOORE (Isle of Man) asked whether, in cases of appeal, the whole matter had to be re-argued, or whether it could be disposed of on the report of the former trial?

Dr. BAYFORD replied that no court would dispose of any case which had not been tried before it.

The time having arrived for the section to close,

The Right Rev. CHAIRMAN said the question was of the utmost importance and one they ought to re-discuss. First of all he wanted to lodge this in the mind of all (his own belief, after what had been said, was quite unshaken) that it would be of very doubtful expediency to alter the existing law. In the first place he had a dislike to Clergy Discipline Bills being ventilated in parliament. (Applause.) It gave an opinion that crimes of the sort to be comprehended by the bill abounded; whereas they were scarce. He believed that a series of debates upon a new bill would do more harm than good. (Applause.) Secondly,

every new piece of legislation took a long time before it established itself. There must be settlements of questions and decisions, and these must grow at last into a practical amendment of a very imperfect measure. They had got now, he thought, into the practically-improved-imperfect measure; and he thought it was very much better than it could be made if the thing were sent to be boiled up again in the great cauldron of House of Commons legislation. (Applause.) Speaking from his experience, which had extended over the last eighteen years, during which he had presided over a diocese, which contained, he believed, as many clergy as any other diocese except two in England-presiding with what vigour God had given him to administer that diocese-he had had a few of those painful cases, very few; and never yet had he met with one where the preliminary inquiry did not satisfy the accused and the accusers, so that he was able to pronounce sentence by consent and settle the case. He had never yet had, in those eighteen years, one appeal to the archbishop or the Privy Council; and (as he believed) because they saw that the matter was dealt with in so kindly, so fatherly a spirit, and yet in such a determined spirit to do the Church right, that they were content to let their case abide his decision. And this feeling had been so far displayed that he had had clergymen who had resigned their benefices, instead of merely calling upon him to suspend them for a time as a result of one of those miserable inquiries. He did really believe that the Church Discipline Bill would in the main do what was wanted, and he should be very unwilling to have a re-investigation of it. Of course he was not speaking of heresy cases. In that excellent paper of Mr. Beamont's, teaming as it did with valuable suggestions, and with which he to a great extent agreed, there was one suggestion with which he could not agree. In the proposal of a jury of churchwardens and incumbents he saw great danger. He should be sorry to see any such jury as that—it would be putting churchwardens in a painful position. (Applause.) What he had felt to be one of the worst evils was that pointed out by the Archdeacon-Randallof Berkshire-the slight sentence for grievous offences; and especially the allowing of an offender to go back to his old parish. It was one of the miserable inheritances from the corruptions of the Church of Rome-to put the saddle on the right horse-who, binding her ministers to celibacy, made it up to the clergy by winking at their transgressions; and they had inherited the system and could not easily throw it off. That was the difficulty; and there was also a difficulty arising out of the jealousies of the law of England as to the upholding of rights, being ready to sacrifice souls in order to let a creditor, who had allowed a clergyman to run into debt-when he ought not to have done-have a chance of being paid out of the sequestrations of the revenue, while perhaps during the following twenty years souls were to be lost. (Applause.)

WEDESDAY, OCTOBER 14th.

EVENING MEETING.

THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF CHICHESTER IN THE CHAIR.

The CHAIRMAN said the subject for their consideration was not music in general, but church music. By church music men meant, generally speaking, cathedral music. On this, as on other subjects, there was much difference of opinion. Some thought modern church music was too ornate; others that the ancient church music was not scientific. In this, as in all other things, there was a safe way, and that safe way was by a medium. (Applause.) He had to introduce one of the most distinguished church musicians, a reverend baronet who had devoted his time to the subject, and who was selected by the University of Oxford to be professor of music, and who had done more for the promotion of the science of music, by encouraging young men to study the science-both practically and theoretically-than any other man in the country. (Applause.) He then put it to the

meeting whether the rev. baronet should be limited to the twenty minutes for his paper, in which case the musical illustrations would have to be omitted, or whether the time of the paper should be left to his own discretion; and the decision was that the time should be left to his discretion.

CHURCH MUSIC.

BY THE REV. SIR F. A. GORE OUSELEY, BART.

Before proceeding to speak of the church music of our own times, I think it will not be amiss to enquire into its origin and development, for although many have talked and written on the subject, yet few branches of history have been so superficially handled as the history of music, especially in its more remote periods. The wildest and most untenable theories have been put forward on this subject, both concerning the music of the ancient Egyptians, and that of the Jews and Greeks of old, and these theories, although almost unsupported by any reliable evidence whatsoever, have been adopted by one writer after another, without research, and without scruple, till mere conjecture has often assumed the garb of historical truth, and books otherwise useful and carefully compiled, have contained statements on this particular subject so ill grounded and loosely worded as to tend to mislead the unwary reader, and perpetuate errors which ought to have been confuted long ago.

It is not my object on the present occasion to go at large into these various theories and prove their absurdity. It would appear more desirable to mention several facts bearing on the history of music, and especially church music, which have seldom or never been brought together before with that object in view, and to see whether a rational account of musical progress and development may not be made out of these facts, which may satisfactorily illustrate the subject, to guide us in our judgment as to the present state of the art, and its future, in connection with the Church of England.

Not to waste more time, then, in preliminary observations, let us turn our attention to the origin of our church music, to enquire how it came to be what it is. Now this is by no means an easy question to answer, on account of the small information we possess concerning the music of the ancients in primæval times. At best our knowledge is but a negative knowledge. We can tell pretty well what it was not, but it is hard to say with anything like certainty what it really was. If we study the music of those nations of the present day who have changed their manners and customs the least, we shall find, in almost every case, that not only are they devoid of all acquaintance with harmony, but that harmonized music is absolutely painful to their ears. This is undoubtedly true in the case of the Oriental Jews, the Arabs, the Hindoos, and the Chinese. Moreover, the Hindoo division of the scale into quarter-notes, and that of the Arabian scale into thirds of notes, render all idea of harmony, such as we understand by the term, absolutely impossible. Perhaps no people in the world are more tenacious of their old customs and habits than the Arabs, and it is to the last degree improbable that they would ever have abandoned a semitonal scale, capable of harmony, in order to adopt so

L

very different a system as their present one. We may therefore conclude, with very little chance of error, that this same crude and yet elaborate system of music was in use among the Arabian tribes from the time of Ishmael himself. And in the case of the Hindoos, there are extant many treatises in Hindoostanee and Sanscrit, many works also in which music is incidentally mentioned, in all of which clear reference is made to the Indian system of quarter tones. In Persia the division is the same as in Arabia and Egypt, viz., into thirds of tones. From these premises the conclusion is almost irresistible, not only that these nations know nothing of harmony, but that they never have known anything about it at any period of their history.

My father, the late Sir Gore Ouseley, who was both a good musician and a learned oriental linguist, and who during his long sojourn in the East had made the music of the various Asiatic nations an object of study, has left behind him many MS. letters and essays on the subject, in which he shows plainly the correctness of the view I have been advocating.

It has been contended by some that the ancient Greeks were cognizant of harmony. But I cannot find any support for this doctrine, either in the documents which have come down to us from them on the subject, or from what we know of their musical instruments. Indeed the word harmony, as used by the ancients, had a very different meaning from that which it has now, and referred rather to a succession than to a simultaneous concurrence of musical sounds. The melodies of the Greeks were probably, for the most part, simple, and only rhythmical as far as they followed the prosody of the words to which they were set. Some, again, have contended that harmony. in the modern acceptation of the term, was well known to the Jews of old; and they found this opinion on the description of the orchestra and chorus employed in the service of the Temple. This argument is certainly a specious one; yet concerts of voices and instruments have been described as not unfrequent among oriental nations in which only the melody was performed in various octaves, or, at best, the accompaniment was merely that of a single invariable note, or drone bass; and if we remember that the Jews probably derived their music from Egypt, and that the Copts (Abyssinians and Nubians), who may be supposed to have deviated the least from the manners and customs of the ancient Egyptians, are totally incapable of appreciating harmony; and when we remember, moreover, that the structure of the ancient Egyptian musical instruments, ascertained by sculptures on their monumental buildings, and even by the remains which have been discovered of the instruments themselves, leads one strongly to the conviction that they, like the modern inhabitants of their soil, divided their octave, not into twelve semitones, but into eighteen thirds of tones, so as to be incapable of harmony. When we put all these considerations together, we must be forced to conclude that the evidence is much stronger against than for the position that harmony was known to the Israelites of old.

The melodies of the ancient nations would appear to have been of two styles-one simple and the other complex. All the oriental melodies of the present day are (in performance) so overcharged with ornaments and minute variations of pitch and pace, that often the melody is well-nigh lost. And such was probably the case with the ancient Egyptian and Syrian music also; hence the need of thirds

of tones, to which we have alluded already; hence the absence of harmony. But the Greek melodies would appear to have been simpler in character; and, accordingly, their instruments were notoriously deficient in compass and in variety of pitch. Ornament, therefore, is probably oriental in its origin; beauty more modern, and European; while sublimity-the sublimity of simplicity-is most likely the oldest of all styles. When Christianity was introduced into Europe, it is probable that music was in a transitional and unsettled state; moreover, it is not easy to say for certain what were the melodies which were used in divine worship before the time of St. Ambrose and St. Gregory. What would appear to be the most probable supposition is that the converts from Judaism clung to Jewish melodies and adapted them to Christian words; while the converts from heathenism preferred the music of the hymns which they had been in the habit of singing before they became Christians. When St. Ambrose and St. Gregory set themselves to reform the music of the Church, and to introduce into it some more uniform and universal system, it would appear that they did just what any sensible reformer would do now-a-days, i.e., they chose the best melodies they could find, whether of heathen or Jewish origin, and digested them carefully into one homogeneous collection, according to a definite and well considered system. Such a process naturally issued in the production of a complete series of church melodies, adequate to Christian requirements, founded indeed on much that had been used before, but so modified and arranged as to become something quite new, something superior to any previously known music; simple, imposing, grand, solemn, and suggestive of devotion. In fact, the melodies thus firmly established were purely sublime.

Of the secular music of that date we know absolutely nothing; but it is probable that in Southern Europe it partook more or less of the character of the music of the church. But of both alike, we may safely assert one negative fact they were not accompanied by harmony of any kind, neither were they easily susceptible of such accompaniment. The earliest specimens of harmony, and of a melodic scale capable of harmonic accompaniment, must be sought among the Northern nations of Europe This music has not the slightest analogy with the Gregorian or Ambrosian systems, nor yet with the music of the Greeks, or of the oriental nations. The Vandals, from whom the Polish race is descended; the Goths, the ancestors of the Swedes; the Scandinavians, now represented by the Danes; the Scythians, from whom have sprung the Russians, Cossacks, and Tartars, have left traces behind them of a peculiar and harmonized species of music, the antiquities of which have not received the attention they deserve. these nations the Scythians are the most ancient, and claim prior notice. If we examine the traditional molodies of the Russian peasants, we cannot fail to observe, first, the remarkable form of their musical scale; and, secondly, the regularity of their cadence. The scale is that which we call minor, only extending upwards to the minor 7th, and having a sharp 7th, or leading note, added below the key note. Thus, suppose the key to be A minor, the ascending scale will be G sharp, A, B, C, D, E, F, G natural. Such a scale as this is so suggestive of modern harmony, that if we find the melodies in it closing regularly on A or on C, we are almost forced to conclude them to have been originally composed in a harmonized form. And it

Of