Now it is evident that music is less willing than any other art to assume this inferior station. Architecture serves a utilitarian purpose, the pleasure of the eye being supplementary; painting and sculpture may easily become didactic or reduced to the secondary function of ornament. But of all the arts music is the most sensuous (I use the word in its technical psychologic sense), direct, and penetrating in its operation. Music acts with such immediateness and intensity that it seems as though it were impossible for her to be anything but supreme when she puts forth all her energies. We may force her to be dull and commonplace, but that does not meet the difficulty. For it is the very beauty and glory of music which the Church wishes to use, but how shall this be prevented from asserting itself to such an extent that devotion is swept away upon the wings of nervous excitement? Let any one study his sensations when a trained choir pours over him a flood of rapturous harmony, and he will perhaps find it difficult to decide whether it is a devotional uplift or an aesthetic afflatus that has seized him. Is there actually any essential difference between his mental state at this moment and that, for instance, at the close of “Tristan und Isolde”? Any one who tries this experiment upon himself will know at once what is this problem of music in the Church which has puzzled pious men for centuries, and which has entered into every historic movement of church extension or reform.
A little clear thinking on this subject, it seems to me, will convince any one that music alone, in and of itself, never makes people religious. There is no such thing as religious music _per se_. When music in religious ceremony inspires a distinctly prayerful mood, it does so mainly through associations and accessories. And if this mood is not induced by other causes, music alone can never be relied upon to create it. Music, even the noblest and purest, is not always or necessarily an aid to devotion, and there may even be a snare in what seems at first a devoted ally. The analogy that exists between religious emotion and musical rapture is, after all, only an analogy; aesthetic delight, though it be the most refined, is not worship; the melting tenderness that often follows a sublime instrumental or choral strain is not contrition. Those who speak of all good music as religious do not understand the meaning of the terms they use. For devotion is not a mere vague feeling of longing or transport. It must involve a positive recognition of an object of worship, a reaching up, not to something unknown or inaccessible, but to a God who reveals himself to us, and whom we believe to be cognizant of the sincerity of the worship offered him; it must involve also a sense of humility before an almighty power, a penitence for sin, a desire for pardon and reconciliation, a consciousness of need and dependence, and an active exercise of faith and love. Into such convictions music may come, lending her aid to deepen them, to give them tangible expression, and to enhance the sense of joy and peace which may be their consequence; but to create them is beyond her power.