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Untitled Article
it is the mark of the beast upon the establishment , if ever there vy&s a mark of the beast in this world . Attend : 4 The Editor of this work has endeavoured to contribute his share towards these efforts , ( for reviving and rendering popular the highest kind of sacred music , ) by bringing- forward this collection of sterling compositions for the church service . Hitherto his endeavours have been but very little assisted or encouraged by the clergy , who have the control in choirs , where these anthems would be found most
useful : —for out of the forty-two cathedral and collegiate establishments in England , which were endowed with funds for the support of no fewer than three hundred and sixty-eight choristers , only three choirs have come forward to give the least support to this collection of Purcell ' s Sacred Music : viz . St . Paul ' s Cathedral , Westminster Abbey , and Durham , which have each subscribed to the work , but for one copy only /—p . 43 .
Positively , ' this is too bad . ' Are the public never to have anything for their money when it goes church-ward ? j The extortion which locks up the cathedral doors , except in servicetime , when the law forbids the exaction of entrance money , is fitly paired with the meanness which reduces that service to the
cheapest and poorest performance that can be got up . And these are the people who affect to despise the simplicity of Presbyterian worship . Verily their own worship is the simple adoration of mammon . However little heaven might care about the difference , mankind would be the better for the substitution of such
music as this for the meagre and insipid compositions which are everlastingly repeated in the amply endowed choirs of our cathedrals . If there be propriety and beauty , a devotional and purifying influence in sacred music , let the public have it , not only at festivals where they have to pay for it at an enormous rate ,
but in cathedral services where it has already been paid for at an enormous rate . ' If not , if the clergy be really become puritans on this point , let them resign the funds which they have so long ceased to make available for their professed object , and let those funds be made conducive in some other way to the enjoyment and improvement of the people .
We have often thought that , without destroying its popular character , dissenting worship might bear a larger infusion of ' harmony divine . ' We never could understand the immense distinction which Nonconformists make between supplication and thanksgiving , the prayer and the psalm . In the latter , everybody must sing every word , in the former nobody but the
minister must say one syllable . If there be music at all in worshi p * why should it not be good music , why not the best ? Why should the congregation be incapable of benefiting by the one unless they onl y listen , but equally incapable of benefiting by the other unless tney hear themselves ? Why should not listening to ar > anthem be as devout as listening to a prayer ? The fact is , that
Untitled Article
296 Henry Pnrcell .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1833, page 296, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/8/
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