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.