viction that the main ambition and success of the musician was to be realized in the abundant production of sound; and this they signally achieved. "The wedding guest," of whom we read in "The Ancient Mariner" that "he beat his breast, for he heard the loud bassoon," would have been sorely exercised, if he had listened to our bricklayer, who was the strongest man in the parish, when he performed on that instrument; but he had a powerful rival in the blacksmith, who, though he may not have been so harmonious" 66 as Beethoven's (we had no monarchs, no autocrats, in our choir, and every man did his independent best), would, I am sure, have astonished that sublime composer with the resonance of his clarionet. I always think of him when I read Lear's words, "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks; " and passing swiftly as our thoughts do from gay to grave, the uncertain glories of an April day, how can I speak of our "Village Smith" in this land of Longfellow without recalling those lines of most tender pathos:

"He goes on Sunday to the Church,

And sits among his boys;

He hears the parson pray and preach,

He hears his daughter's voice,

Singing in the village choir,

And it makes his heart rejoice.

"It sounds to him like her mother's voice,
Singing in Paradise!

He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;

And with his hard rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes."

And the faith and the hope, expressed in these lines, commands the utterance of another sweet and sacred thought, that "if there be first a willing mind it is accepted according to that a man hath and not according to that he hath not," and that amid all this neglect and indolence of clergy and laity, for the people loved to have it so, there was a great company, who in quietness and confidence, in the purity, simplicity, and affection of family life, were steadfast in the faith, who, though their pastors "ate of the fat, and clothed themselves with the wool, but did not feed the flock," followed the Good Shepherd, for they heard His voice; and, with them, those whom you and I believe that we shall meet, when

"With the morn those angel faces smile,

Which we have lov'd long since, and lost awhile."

The question which I have to answer, as it seems to me, is this: am I a better Christian, in proportion to all the helps and inducements which have been given to us Churchfolks in England since those dismal days? and I would ask you, in illustration of the progress made, to imagine the church, which has been described as it was fifty years ago, with the same church as I saw it, not many months ago.

All is changed except the outer walls. The churchyard, God's acre, is now a garden. The silver maple grows side by side with the sombre yew human sorrow and Christian hope. The elm with its long drooping branches weeps over the tombs, and the birds sing among the bright green leaves and

sweet white flowers of the acacia, roses, and honeysuckle, and that beautiful Ampelopsis, which we call the Virginian creeper, climb up the old grey walls. There is neither speech nor language, but its sacred silence brings thoughts of rest and peace. Sometimes you will see the widow placing flowers upon her husband's grave, or the sister, like Mary of Bethany, "going there to weep.'

Epitaphs are no longer the dismal lamentations of despair, but the utterances of Faith and Hope. They testify that

"Praises on tombs are words but idly spent,

A man's good deeds are his best monument."

And confessions of unworthiness and prayers for mercy no longer suggest the little child's inquiry, "Mother, where are the bad people buried?"

The doors and gates are no longer bolted and locked, as they were, from Sunday to Sunday, but are "open continually." And when you enter, you will find that, as in the good days of Joash and Jehoiada, they have "set the House of God in its. state." The menagerie is extinct. The sleeping cars are shunted to a siding, and left to perish from the dry rot, which had long set in. Uniform benches verify George Herbert's words:

"All equal are within the church's gate,"

"One place there is, beneath the burial sod,
Where all mankind are equalized by death;
Another place there is, the Fane of God,

Where all are equal who draw living breath."

And those of one of your own bishops, Coxe of Cleveland, that

"Our mother the Church hath never a son

To honour before the rest,

But she singeth the same for mighty kings
And the veriest babe at her breast;

And the Bishop goes down to his narrow bed
As the plowman's child is laid;

And alike she blesses the dark-brow'd serf
And the chief in his robe arrayed."

The opposition to this uniformity came somewhat unexpectedly, not so much from the upper as from the so-called middle classes of society. In a certain Lincolnshire village there was a movement in favour of restoring and reseating the parish church, which so sorely exercised the mind of the principal farmer, that he wrote to the Bishop of the Diocese, protesting against the socialistic character of the alterations, and concluding his letter thus: "I know, my lord, that in heaven we shall all be equal, but so long as I am upon earth I claim the privilege of keeping myself respectable." Whereas the Duke of Wellington, when some member of the congregation pushed a poor man aside, and said, "Make way for His Grace," as he was going up the church to receive the Sacrament, declined to precede, and protested, "We are all equal here."

The pulpit, which towered, like Babel, upward (behind one of these erections, the very man who raised it had written in chalk, and where it would not be seen, his protest

“A proud young parson and a silly squire
Made me to put this pulpit higher!")

has come half-way down, to suggest to the congregation that they must not think of preachers exclusively, because this is the House of Prayer. The gallery also has humbled itself to the dust, and from the basement of the tower, which it disfigured, the singers, robed in robes clean and white, come forth and take their places in the choir, where the bassoon and the clarionet and the fiddles and flutes are all combined in one instrument, for which we owe large gratitude to you, the American Organ.

Great indeed has been our gain in these later years as to the devotional character of our Church music, instrumental, vocal, and verbal, in the earnest reverence of our musicians, for it seldom happens now that the odour of peppermint overpowers the odour of sanctity; and above all in the attainment of that which should ever be the highest ambition of a choir - not the ambition of

"One, whom the music of his own sweet voice
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony"-

66

nor his, whose interest is absorbed in the harmony, and who tolerates Messiah for Handel's sake," but his, who, singing with the spirit and with the understanding also, evokes in other hearts the enthusiasm which glows in his own, and encourages a congregation with one mind and one mouth to glorify God.

We have, moreover, in these later years got rid of those vain repetitions, which made our hymns so