few who impressed me as being able and liberal-minded men—nor do I know that, under the conditions in which they are placed, I could have done any better myself. But they were dancing in fetters, and so tied down by conventionalities that it was simply impossible for them to depart from the paths of a decorous routine. The fact is that the whole point of view of our religious services, especially in Protestant countries, has become a mistaken one. It is far too much an appeal to the intellect and to abstract dogmas, and too little, one to the realities of actual life and to the vague emotions and aspirations which constitute the proper field of religion. In the great reaction of the Reformation it was perhaps inevitable that an appeal should be made to reason against the abuses of an infallible Church; and as long as the literal inspiration of the Bible and other theological premises were held to be undoubted axioms by the whole Christian world, there might be a certain interest in hearing them repeated over and over again in becoming language, and in listening to sermons which explained shortly conclusions which might be drawn from these admitted axioms. But this is no longer the case. It is impossible to touch the merest fringe of the questions now raised by the intellectual side of religion in discourses of half an hour’s length; even if the preacher were perfectly free, and not hampered by the fear of scandalising simple, pious souls by plain language. Spoken words have to a great extent ceased to be the appropriate vehicle for appealing either to religious reason or to religious emotion—books for the former, music for the latter, are infinitely more effective. Music especially seems made to be the language of religion. Not only its beauty and harmony, but its vagueness, and its power of exciting the imagination and stirring the feelings, without anything definite which has to be proved and can be contradicted, fit it to be the interpreter of those emotions and aspirations which fill the human soul in presence of the universe and of the Great Unknown. Demonstrate, with St. Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus, how many angels can stand on the point of a needle, and I remain unaffected; but let me hear Rossini’s ‘Cujus Animam,’ or Mozart’s ‘Agnus Dei,’ and I say, ‘Thus the angels sing.’