music, a movement that has had great influence in the purification of popular taste. And the pivot round which all this turns is the dogmatic faith that definitely Christian expression in music is the property, the exclusive property, of those who by temperament and conviction are Christians. The attitude, like the conditions which have brought it about, is, I think, new: but some of its adherents go surely too far when they urge that those whose minds work otherwise cannot really appreciate this music at its due worth. Cesar Franck, that simple-minded childlike genius, once pronounced Kant's _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_ 'very amusing'--a surely unique criticism--simply, it would seem, because it was eccentric enough not to take Catholicism as a primary postulate: I do not myself happen to have any information about Kant's musicianship--perhaps, like too many great thinkers, he knew little about music and cared less--but I think we may venture to say, in the abstract, that his philosophy would have made him fairer to Franck than Franck was to him. And thus perhaps we may conclude that recent musical development has kept pace with religious development in concentrating more and more on individual sincerity, whether on the one side or the other, and abandoning the old easy-going haphazard routine. But, in reaction from the extreme right and the extreme left of the movement, we have also the sincere dislikers of stark thinking, whom their opponents call by dignified names of abuse, such as pragmatists or undenominationalists: and here again music keeps pace with religion. It is not the old routine again (though perhaps in practice it may at times come rather perilously near it); it is the more or less conscious adoption of a compromise. We can see its musical working best of all in the recent history of church music in England; it is true that the great mass of the younger musicians, here as in all other countries, stand outside these developments, and look both for ideals and practice elsewhere, but the developments have none the less been very significant. There have been three stages. A couple of generations ago there was no conflict and no call for compromise. The ecclesiastical musician of the time was expected, whether as composer, as organist, or as administrator, to do his best according to his lights: it was his accepted business, as presumably knowing more about the matter than the artistic laity, to lead their taste, not to follow. Then came the reign of men like Dykes and Stainer and Gounod, whose normal attitude involved the sacrifice by the musician of some of his musicianship in the supposed interests of religion. The supposed interests, I say; for the whole point of the third stage of development, the conflict in which English church music is now involved, is the denial by one of the opposing parties that the interests of religion are in any way served by such a sacrifice. It is a