An essay equal to the subject on the vicissitudes and varieties of sacred music, would be one of the most interesting passages in the history of art. In their long wanderings to the land of promise, sacred music was among the hosts of Israel; and in that great temple of nature, floored by the desert, and roofed by the sky, they chanted the song of Miriam and of Moses. It was in their Sabbath meetings—it resounded with the rejoicings of their feasts, and with the gladness of their jubilees. When Solomon built a house to the Lord, it was consecrated with cymbals, and psalteries, and harps, with the sounds of trumpets, and the swell of voices. As long as the temple stood, music hallowed its services; and that music must have been supremely grand which suited the divine poetry of the inspired and kingly lyrist. Israel was scattered—the temple was no more. Silence and desolation dwelt in the place of the sanctuary. Zion heard no longer the anthems of her Levites. A new word that was spoken first in Jerusalem had gone forth among the nations; and that too had its music. At first it was a whisper among the lowly in the dwellings of the poor. Stealthily it afterward was murmured in the palace of the Cæsars. In the dead night, in the depths of the catacombs, it trembled in subdued melodies filled with the love of Jesus. At length the grand cathedral arose, and the stately spire; courts and arches echoed, and pillars shook with the thunder of the majestic organ, and choirs, sweetly attuned, joined their voices in all the moods and measures of the religious heart, in its most exalted, most profound, most intense experience put into lyrical expression. I know that piety may reject, may repel this form of expression, still these sublime ritual harmonies cannot but give the spirit that sympathizes with them, the sense of a mightier being. But sacred music has power without a ritual. In the rugged hymn, which connects itself, not alone with immortality, but also with the memory of brave saints, there is power. There is power in the hymn in which our father’s joined. Grand were those rude psalms which once arose amidst the solitudes of the Alps. Grand were those religious songs, sung in brave devotion by the persecuted Scotch, in the depths of their moors and their glens. The hundredth psalm, rising in the fullness of three thousand voices up into the clear sky, broken among rocks, prolonged and modulated through valleys, softened over the surface of mountain-guarded lakes, had a grandeur and a majesty, contrasted with which mere art is poverty and meanness. And while thus reflecting on sacred music, we think with wonder on the Christian Church—on its power and on its compass. Less than nineteen centuries ago, its first hymn was sung in an upper chamber of Jerusalem; and those who sung it were quickly scattered. And now the Christian hymn is one that never ceases—one that is heard in every tongue; and the whisper of that upper chamber is now a chorus that fills the world.