But music, even more than painting and poetry, fulfils this condition. It reveals that which the artist has seen, and reveals it with no distracting circumstance of subject, necessary to the picture or the poem. The hearer who listens to a great composition is not drawn aside to think of some historical or romantic incident; he is free to think of that of which such incidents are but the clothes. Age succeeds to age; the music which sounded in the ears of the fathers sounds also in the ears of the children. Place and circumstance force men asunder, but still for those of every party or sect and for those in every quarter of the world the great works of the masters of music remain. The works may be performed in the West End or in the East End--the hearers will have different conceptions, will see from different points of view the vision which inspired the master, but will nevertheless have the sense that the music which serves all alike creates a bond of union. Music then would seem fitted to be in this age the expression of that which men in their inmost hearts most reverence. Creeds have ceased to express this and have become symbols of division rather than of unity! Music is a parable, telling in sounds which will not change of that which is worthy of worship, telling it to each hearer just in so far as he by nature and circumstance is able to understand it, but giving to all that feeling of common life and assurance of sympathy which has in old times been the strength of the Church. By music, men may be helped to find God who is not far from any one of us, and be brought again within reach of that tangible sympathy, the sympathy of their fellow-creatures. There is, however, still one other requisite in a perfect form of religious expression. The age is new and thoughts are new, but nevertheless they are rooted in the past. More than any one acknowledges is he under the dominion of the buried ages. He who boasts himself superior to the superstitions of the present is the child of parents whose high thoughts, now transmitted to their child, were intertwined with those superstitions. Any form of expression therefore which aims at covering emotions said to be new must, like these emotions, have associations with the past. A brand new form of worship, agreeable to the most enlightened reason and surrounded with that which the present asserts to be good, would utterly fail to express thoughts and feelings, which, if born of the present, share the nature of parents who lived in the past. It is interesting to notice how machines and institutions which are the product of the latest thought bear in their form traces of that which they have superseded; the railway carriage suggests the stage-coach, and the House of Commons reminds us of the Saxon Witanagemot. The absolutely new would have no place in this old world, and a new form of expression could not express the emotions of the inner life.