There is much to be said in favour of such an experiment. On the one side there is the failure of existing modes of expression. The prettinesses of ritualism and the social efforts of Broad Churchism, even for the comparatively small numbers who adopt these forms of worship, do not meet those longings of the inner life which go beyond the love of beauty and beyond the love of neighbours. The vast majority of the people belong to neither ritualism nor Broad Churchism; they live, at best, smothering their aspirations in activity; at worst, in dissipation, having forsaken duty as well as God. Their morality has followed their religion. In the East End of London this is more manifest, not because the people of the East are worse than the people of the West, but because the people of the East have no call to seem other than they are. Amid many signs hopeful for the future there is also among East Londoners, unblushingly declared at every street-corner, the self-indulgence which robs the young and weak of that which is their right, education and protection; the vice which saps a nation’s strength is boasted of in the shop and flaunted in the highways, and the selfishness which is death to a man is often the professed ground of action. Morality for the mass of men has been dependent on the consciousness of God, and with the lack of means of expression the consciousness of God seems to have ceased. On this ground alone there would be reason for making an experiment with music, if only because it offers itself as a possible means of that expression which the consciousness of God supports. And, on the other side, there is the natural fitness of music for the purpose. In the first place, the great musical compositions may be asserted to be, not arrangements which are the results of study and the application of scientific principles, but the results of inspiration. The master, raised by his genius above the level of common humanity to think fully what others think only in part, and to see face to face what others see only darkly, puts into music the thoughts which no words can utter and the descriptions which no tongue can tell. What he himself would be, his hopes, his fears, his aspirations, what he himself sees of that holiest and fairest which has haunted his life, he tells by his art. Like the prophets, having had a vision of God, his music proclaims what he himself would desire to be, and expresses the emotions of his higher nature.