e instrument
than the Irish harp of the eleventh century, or the Saxon of the
tenth. (See Fig. 28.)

[Illustration]

CHAPTER X.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

It is not easy to define the influence of the Christian Church in this
transformation, for the reason that upon the technical side it was
slight, although upon the aesthetic side it was of very great
importance. From the circumstance that all the early theoretical
writers from the sixth century to the thirteenth were monks or
ecclesiastics of some degree, and from the very important part played
by the large cathedrals in the development of polyphonic music, many
historians have concluded that to the Church almost this entire
transformation of the art of music is due. This, however, is wide of
the truth. The Church as such had very little to do with developing an
art of music through all the early centuries. The early Christians
were humble people, for the most part, who had embraced a religion
proscribed and at times persecuted. Their meetings were private, and
attended by small numbers, as, for instance, in the Catacombs at Rome,
where the little chapels in the dark passage ways under ground were
incapable of holding more than twenty or thirty people at a time.
Under these circumstances the singing cannot have been essentially of
more musical importance than that of cottage prayer meetings of the
present day. In another way the Church, indeed, exercised a certain
amount of influence in this department as in all others, an influence
which might be described as cosmopolitan. The early apostles and
bishops traveled from one province to another, and it is likely that
the congregation in each province made use of the melodies already in
existence. The first Christian hymns and psalms were probably sung to
temple melodies brought from Jerusalem by the apostles. As new hymns
were written (something which happened very soon, under the
inspiration of the new faith and hope), they were adapted to the best
of these old melodies, just as has been done continually down to
nearly our own time. Our knowledge of the early Church, in this side
of its activity, is very limited. It is not until the time of St.
Ambrose, who was bishop of Milan in the last part of the fourth
century, that the Church began to have an official music. By this time
the process of secularization had been carried so far that there was a
great want of seriousness and nobility in the