"As for Wisdom, what she is, and how she came up, I will tell you, and will not hide mysteries from you, but will seek her out from the beginning of her nativity, and bring the knowledge of her into Light, and will not pass over Truth."

Again, a great mediÆval cathedral like our own glorious Gloucester, inimitable in its fadeless beauty and matchless strength, surely deals a very heavy blow to human pride, and it teaches humility to the most competent and ablest of our number, for it is a conception belonging to a past age. A great gathering, however, like the present, numbering some six or seven thousand persons, is for varied reasons an inspiring one and bids us be trustful—even hopeful.

Dwell we a brief while first on our surroundings. Of all works devised by human ingenuity and carried on by human skill, the triumphs of architecture are among the most enduring, afford the most genuine and purest delight to the greater number of men and women, are confessedly the most attractive, perhaps the most instructive, as they are among the most enduring of human creations. The glories of Luxor and Karnak, which for several thousand years have been mirrored in the grey-green Nile; the white and gleaming shrines of Athens the bright and happy, the mighty ruins of Eternal Rome, are splendid instances.

But perhaps the conspicuous examples of this architecture, the most loved of human arts and crafts, are, after all, the mediÆval cathedrals. The first object of interest for the modern traveller in search of health or rest is a cathedral. All sorts and conditions of men find delight in its contemplation. The delight, of course, is varied, but the strange and witching beauty appeals to them all. This appeal to the higher and devotional side of our nature speaks to every soul, to the unlearned as to the learned, to the mill-hand as to the scholar. The wanderer from the New World beyond the seas at once seeks them out, conscious that in them he will find a beauty and a joy such as he will never see or feel outside their charmed walls.

I have said that to the custodian of such a cathedral the surroundings are, if not sad, at least pathetic, for these magnificent and loved creations of human genius belong to a somewhat remote past, and, as far as these exquisite buildings are concerned, save for purposes of necessary repair—repair simply to arrest the ravages of time—for nearly four hundred years the clink of trowel and pickaxe has been hushed.

It is scarcely an exaggerated statement which speaks of architecture, in its noblest sense, as a lost art. Very significant are the words of one of the greatest of modern architects, who, after dwelling on the decadence of his loved art, tells us how "It is a somewhat saddening reflection—but there is no escaping from the conclusion—that the art which created the glorious abbeys and minsters, the beautiful parish churches so plentifully dotted over our country—abbeys, minsters, and churches which the churchmen of the second half of the nineteenth century so reverently and wisely restore and seek to copy stone by stone, arch by arch, window by window, down to the smallest bit of ornament—is a lost art! Men have come sorrowfully to see that mediÆval architecture is the last link—perhaps the most beautiful as well as the last link—of that long chain of architectural styles, 'commencing in far-back ages in Egypt and passing on in continuous course through Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, and thence taken up by the infant nations of modern Europe, and by them prolonged through successive ages of continuous progress till it terminated in the beautiful thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Gothic, and has never since produced a link of its own.... Alas! it is the last link of that mighty chain which had stretched unbroken through nearly four thousand years—the glorious termination of the history of original and genuine architecture.'" Well may men love it and seek to preserve the examples they possess of it, and aim at copying it as well as they can. These remarkable and melancholy words above quoted were deliberately spoken by Sir Gilbert Scott, R.A., LL.D., in his first lecture on MediÆval Architecture delivered at the Royal Academy some years ago.

So much for my note of sadness. Now let me strike a different chord.

Such a gathering as the present, I repeat, is an inspiring one, for it tells me that if one great art dies, He who loves us and has redeemed us at so great a price, gives His children something in its place. Now it is strange that amidst all the gorgeous and striking ceremonial of the mediÆval services, with their wealth of colour and ornament, with all their touching and elaborate symbolism, music, as it is now understood, was unknown and comparatively neglected. In the noblest cathedral of the Middle Ages, in the stateliest Benedictine or Cistercian abbey, while the eye was filled with sights of solemnity and beauty, each sight containing its special and peculiar teaching, the ear was comparatively uncared for. Strangely monotonous and even harsh would chaunt and psalm and hymn, as rendered in the mighty abbeys of Westminster, Durham, or Gloucester in the days of the great Plantagenets, of the White Rose or Red Rose kings, sound to the musically trained ears of the worshippers of the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, music as a great science was unknown in pre-Reformation times. The most complete anthem-book may be searched through by the curious scholar, but scarcely a musical composer of any note will be found in these collections of a date earlier than the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It would seem as though, when architecture ceased in the sixteenth century to be a living craft, a new art was discovered and worked at by men.

A new art! I say these words, strange to some, with emphasis. One who has indeed a right to speak of music[1] thus voices my assertion. While telling us that certain grand forms of music loom out of the darkness of the earlier centuries of our era, the famous musician to whom I refer adds that little of what we understand of music existed before the later years of the fifteenth century. It was no mere renaissance, for that which had never been born could not be born again.

In case some should think that too strong expressions are here used, it may be well to quote some of Professor Hullah's own words, which he used in the above-mentioned lecture at the Royal Institution:—"Music is a new art.... What we now call music ... what answers to our definition of music, has come into being only within comparatively few years; almost within the memory of men living." "I should say that in the scholastic music there was no art, and in the popular music no science; whence it is that the former has ceased to please, and the latter has for the most part perished utterly."

It was a new art which charmed and delighted men as they listened to the magic of the sounds evoked by the majesty of the compositions of Palestrina, or by the sweetness of the music of Marenzio. It is true, as I said, that certain grand forms of music loom out of the darkness of the remote past—shadowy forms—and the rare composers and writers of the music of the past are, as far as music is concerned, but the shadow of names now. I allude, as famous examples of these shadows of names, to names such as Gregory and Isidore, Hucbald and the eleventh-century maestro, Guido Aretino.

With extraordinary rapidity developed the new craft. To give here some familiar landmarks—

Henry VIII. was reigning before Josquin DeprÈs, whom all musicians revere as one of the earliest, certainly the most renowned, of the pioneers of modern music, became generally known in Europe. Josquin DeprÈs was born somewhere about the year 1466, dying about 1515, some ten or fifteen years before Palestrina was born. Luther said of him, "Other musicians do what they can with notes; Josquin does what he likes with them." The Abbate Baini alludes to him as "the idol of Europe"; and again writes, "Nothing is beautiful unless it be the work of Josquin."

The famous Roman School of music only dates from 1540. The oratorio, even in its more simple forms, made its appearance some seventy years later.

Not until the last years of our Queen Elizabeth were the names of Palestrina and Marenzio, those great early composers, conspicuous, and the Queen so loved of Englishmen had long fallen asleep before Carissimi, the earliest master of the sacred cantata in its many forms, gave his mighty impulse to the new-born art; while the works of his world-famed pupil Scarlatti, and of our own English Purcell, belong to the art-records of the days of William and Mary and Queen Anne. See how the whole of the marvellous story of music—as we understand music—belongs to quite recent days!

All through the eighteenth century, when the Georges reigned, architecture slept its well-nigh dreamless sleep. But the new art of music grew with each succeeding year, while the men whose names will never die lived and wrote.

It was this eighteenth century which saw a Beethoven, a Handel, a Bach, a Haydn, and a Mozart. As masters of the new-born craft none can be conceived greater.

The century now closing boasts, however, a long line of true followers and worthy disciples of those great ones, men whose names are household words in every European city.

But my brief record, necessarily dry and bald, of a momentous change in the teaching of the world would be incomplete without one word on the glorious instrument—the voice, so to speak—of these masters of a new art, the organ. The first organ known in Western Europe traditionally was sent to Pepin in France by the Emperor of Constantinople in 759, but Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, in his poem on Virginity, some half a century earlier, apparently describes what appears to have been the organ. Elphege, Abbot of Winchester in the tenth century, is said to have caused a very large organ to be constructed; but, with this solitary exception, all the mediÆval organs seem to have been small and comparatively unimportant instruments. The oldest organ-cases preserved do not date back further than the last years of the fifteenth century, and these by the side of modern organs are insignificant in size. Viollet le Duc, in his great work, gives us a picture of the Perpignan organ, one of the earliest (early in the sixteenth century). From this date the size rapidly increased.

In the "Rites of Durham," where a great mediÆval church is described at the period of the Dissolution (1530-40), there were three organs in use in the abbey church, the principal one being only used at "principall Feasts," the pipes being "very faire and partly gilded." "Only two organs in England," says the "Rites," "of the same makinge, one in Yorke and another in Paules."

The most magnificent organ-case in Europe is the one in St. Janskirk at Bois le Duc, and, like the vast majority of the great organ-cases, is Renaissance in style. Viollet le Duc sums up the question in the following sentence:—

"It does not appear that great organs were in use before the fifteenth century, and it was only towards the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries that the idea of building organs of dimensions hitherto unknown was first conceived."

The organ, as we now know it, was born among us at the same date when architecture died. Like the music of the Middle Ages, in the days when these vast and peerless buildings arose, it is true the organ was not unknown; but, like mediÆval music, it was a small, poor thing compared with the stupendous instrument we know and love. There was no great organ before the last years of the fifteenth century, when the Tudors reigned. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed its development, and acknowledged its surpassing grandeur, and recognised its fitness as one of the chief handmaids of the new great art.

Now the secret of the men who built this lordly abbey is lost; never again will such a triumph of, alas! a dead art arise to charm and to delight, to instruct and inspire the children of men. But we may still preserve and reverently use this rare and noble legacy of a vanished age as a shrine and a peerless teaching-home—a prayer-home, in which are taught the great evangelical truths by which Christian men live and breathe and have their being, the saving knowledge of the work of the Precious Blood, the glad Redemption-story, the story loved of men; the story which never ages, never palls, but which, like dew, descends on each succeeding generation of believers, and gives them new stores of faith and hope and love. This—these things—we try to do, and not without success, for as God's bright glory-cloud once brooded over the sacred desert-tent and the holy Jerusalem Temple, so now upon our beloved and ancient cathedral, with its almost countless services of praise and prayer and teaching, God's blessing surely rests.

"It sleeps," does our cathedral, as one has lately said in words beautiful as true—"it sleeps with its splendid dreams upon its lifted face." But it has, too, its many wakeful working hours. Not the least memorable of these will strike this week, when the charmed strains of Handel and Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven, and of the great Englishmen, Gibbons and Boyce and Walmisley and Wesley, and last, but not least, of Hubert Parry, peal through these fretted vaults, "lingering and wandering on" among these wondrous chambers of inspired imagery; while the almost prophetic words of that truest English song-man Wordsworth become history:—