attendances at places of
worship have long been familiar. We must rate the influence of church
music more modestly; it has a great influence in its own sphere, but its
sphere is only one among many.

We may, I think, envisage this religious development on its practical
side as a process of differentiation by which the sincere standers in
the old and the middle and the new paths have little by little drawn
apart intellectually--but not, in societies that are happily able to
take broad views of human nature, otherwise than intellectually--not
only from each other but still more from those who, whatever their
ostensible labels, are in reality followers of Gallio and routine. And
something like the same process is observable in the religious music of
the past generation. Many of its old conventions have silently dropped
away, unregarded and unregretted: whatever the outlooks, and they are
many and various, they are more clear-sighted, more sincere. Here in
England we have somewhat lagged behind: we have had, not perhaps
altogether fairly but indubitably, a reputation for national hypocrisy
to sustain, and our religious music has only with difficulty shaken
itself loose. Not very long ago, Saint-Saens's _Samson and Delilah_, now
one of the most popular of operas, could only be performed as an
oratorio: it dealt with biblical incidents and characters, therefore it
was religious music, therefore it could not be given stage presentation.
Of course this kind of attitude is never logical: for a long time we
closed Covent Garden to Strauss's _Salome_ for the same reason, but no
one, so far as I know, ever proposed to endow it with a religious halo.
Now, when Sunday secular music is everywhere, its origins seem lost in
antiquity; but the chamber-music concerts at South Place in London and
Balliol College in Oxford, which are, I think I am right in saying, the
twin pioneers, are both little over thirty years old. In most other
countries, however, music has suffered far fewer checks of this kind;
and it is of more importance to correlate musical and religious
development on more general lines. Particularly interesting, I think, is
the history of the decline of the oratorio, which I should myself be
inclined to date from the production of the German Requiem of Brahms
about half a century ago, though the real impetus has become apparent
only during the last generation.

Brahms's Requiem was indeed something of a portent: it was a defi