The practical question now arises. We know the need; how is it to be supplied? We require music which will reach the emotions of uneducated people, and in which they will delight to join, and in which it shall be easy to join: and it must be dignified and not secular. If we condemn and reject the music which the professional church-musicians have supplied with some popular success to meet the need, what is there to take its place? Of what music is our hymn-book to be constructed, which shall be at once dignified, sacred, and popular? The answer is very simple: it is this, _Dignified Melody_. Good melody is never out of fashion; and as it is by all confession the seal of high musical genius, so it is that form of music which is universally intelligible and in the best sense popular; and we have a rich legacy of it. What we want is that our hymn-books should contain a collection of the best ecclesiastical and sacred hymn-melodies, and _nothing but these_, instead of having but a modicum of these, for the most part mauled and illset, among a crowd of contributions of an altogether inferior kind; the whole collection being often such that if an ill-natured critic were to assert that the compilers had degraded and limited the old music in order to set off their own, it would be difficult to meet him with a logical refutation. The shortest and most practical way of treating this subject will be to give some account of the sources from which the music of such a hymn-book as I propose would be drawn. I will take these in their chronological order. First in order of time are the Plain-song melodies.