The practical administration of music in public worship is one of the most interesting of the secondary problems with which the Christian Church has been called upon to deal. Song has proved such a universal necessity in worship that it may almost be said, no music no Church. The endless diversity of musical forms and styles involves the perennial question, How shall music contribute most effectually to the ends which church worship has in view without renouncing those attributes upon which its freedom as fine art depends?

The present volume is an attempt to show how this problem has been treated by different confessions and in different nations and times; how music, in issuing from the bosom of the Church, has been moulded under the influence of varying ideals of devotion, liturgic usages, national temperaments, and types and methods of expression current in secular art. It is the author’s chief purpose and hope to arouse in the minds of ministers and non-professional lovers of music, as well as of church musicians, an interest in this branch of art such as they cannot feel so long as its history is unknown to them. [viii] A knowledge of history always tends to promote humility and reverence, and to check the spread of capricious perversions of judgment. Even a feeble sense of the grandeur and beauty of the forms which ecclesiastical music has taken, and the vital relation which it has always held in organized worship, will serve to convince a devoted servant of the Church that its proper administration is as much a matter of concern to-day as it ever has been in the past.

A few of the chapters in this work have appeared in somewhat modified form in the American Catholic Quarterly Review, the Bibliotheca Sacra, and Music. The author acknowledges the permission given by the editors of these magazines to use this material in its present form.