The musical part of the service was, to begin with, taken slow--incredibly slow; no one now would, who is not old enough to remember, believe how slow it was. The voluntary at the beginning was a slow rumble; the Psalms were very slowly read by the clergyman and the clerk alternately, the Gloria alone being sung, also to a slow rumble. The choir was generally stationed in the organ loft, which has been known to be built over the altar at the east end--as at St. Mary’s, Cambridge--but was generally at the west end. It was not a choir of boys and men only, but of women and men. The ‘Te Deum’ was always ‘Jackson’--from my youth up have I loathed ‘Jackson’; there was just one lively bit in it for which one looked and waited; but it lasted a very few bars; and then the thing dragged on more slowly than ever till it came to the welcome words, ‘Let me never be confounded.’ Two hymns were sung--very slowly; they were always of the kind which expressed either the despair of the sinner or the doubtful joy of the believer. I say doubtful, because he was constantly being warned not to be too confident, not to mistake a vague hope for the assurance of election, and because, with the rest of the congregation, he was always being told how few in number were those elect, and how extremely unlikely that there could be many of those few in that one flock. Read any of the theological literature of the period, and mark the gulf that lies between us and our fathers. There were many kinds of preachers, just as at present--the eloquent, the high and dry, the low and threatening, the forcible-feeble, the florid, the prosy, the scholarly--but they all seemed to preach the same doctrine of hopelessness, the same Gospel of Despair, the same Father of all Cruelty, the same Son who could at best help only a few; and when any of the congregation dared to speak the truth, which was seldom, these blasphemous persons whispered that it was best to live and enjoy the present, and to leave off trying to save their souls against such fearful odds, and with the knowledge that if they were going to be saved it would be by election and by no merit or effort of their own, while, if the contrary was going to happen, it was no use striving against fate. Wretched, miserable creed! To think that unto this was brought the Divine Message of the Son of Man! And to think of the despairing deathbeds of the careless, the lifelong terror of the most religious, and the agony of the survivors over the death of one ‘cut off in his sins’!