We did not think it necessary, writing as we did for a special class of readers, to explain the distinguishing characteristics of the church’s “prayer,” being, as our learned friend says, fourfold—latreutic, impetratory, propitiatory, and eucharistic. To us the church was not wanting in wisdom in the adoption alone of plain chant to express her divine prayer, whether it happen to be latreutic, impetratory, propitiatory, or eucharistic. She never made any distinction that we know of. But our learned friend, while he cannot help but admit that for the purposes of adoration, propitiation, and supplication it is not only all that could be desired, but is also better than any other melody, denies, with an _ipse dixit_, its capability of expressing praise and thanksgiving. Argument does not seem to be worth seeking. “Plain chant,” he says, “is confessedly unequal to the task of evoking and expressing the feelings of Christian joy and triumph.” And again: “It certainly must borrow from figured music the triumphant strains of praise and thanksgiving.” Neither one nor the other. We confess to nothing of the kind. And although, by the rule of argumentation, we are not called upon to prove a negative, we refer to the response good Brother Gregorius has already made, and would furthermore ask if the _Te Deum_, the _Exultet_, the _Preface_ for Easter Sunday, the _Alleluia_ of Holy Saturday, or the _Lauda Sion_, are confessedly unequal to the task assigned them? As far as the question has any practical importance, we feel that not another word need be said. Plain chant is in lawful possession, and cannot be ousted by personal caprice or taste, nor by gratuitous assumptions of its inability to answer the end proposed by the wise authority of the church; still less by a proposed substitution of a system which, after three centuries of vain efforts to supplant the rightful possessor, is declared, even by its own friends, to be “a failure,” and the majority of its painfully‐produced works fit only to be consigned to the flames.