" RHYTHMIC DRILL " IN RELIGION.
TT is interesting to observe that, according to the Times' reporter of the Salvation Army's fete on Tuesday, " General Booth takes as much pride in his musical as in his more directly spiritual achievements." He boasts that there are " saved drunkards by the score. miners from the pits of Durham and Wales who never learned a note of music till they became Salvationists," but who have learned a good deal now. And undoubtedly without the aid of music,—or what, at all events, on occasions does duty for music,—General Booth would find it extremely difficult to give the thrill of common purpose and common hope to the large masses of rather unmalleable human material which he contrives to collect together. Even an ordinary regiment would be quite crippled without its band, and still more a regiment of Salva- tionists, who have but a vague conception of what the great realities after which they are groping really are, and need all the help which a common sense of exaltation can give them to inspire them with the conviction that they really are obeying a common control, and marching to the same goal. Far from its being surprising that General Booth should rely greatly on his music for his spiritual drill, the only wonder is that there should ever have been, and should even still be, sects who grudge music the spiritual influence which it wields, and think that there is something of the nature of idolatry in using instrumental aid to express the emotions of penitence and gratitude with which their religious faith in- spires them. We have never rightly understood how a religion founded upon the Old Testament could indulge such jealousy of music. In the Psalms, at all events, the emphasis with which musical instruments are referred to as properly belong- ing to the worship of God, the minuteness with which the Psalmist insists in one place that " instruments of ten strings" shall be employed, and in another again declares,his purpose to sing praises to God on " a ten-stringed lute," to say nothing of his special enumeration of trumpet and cymbal, lute and harp, sufficiently attest that amongst the Jews there was not only no dread of instrumental music, but a positive belief in its aid as exalting the whole character of praise and supplication. Whence the jealousy of it can have arisen in any form of Christian worship, which is, of course, nothing but a developed and exalted form of Jewish worship, it is very hard to say, for it seems to be an influence specially free from any of those materialistic associations connected in the minds of the Jews with the dread of idolatrous worship. Perhaps it may have been the tendency of music to encourage the dance, though the Psalmist expressly includes,—as we all know that David himself included,—dancing in the ritual of worship, that turned the Scotch Puritans so strongly against it. But the Salvationists, though they have not exactly adopted the Oriental dance as a part of their worship, have certainly adopted the march, which is only the simplest and most stately modifica- tion of the dance, as one of the most significant of their religious ceremonies. In other words, they have certainly recognised to the full that religion should inspire Christian believers with a "rhythmic drill,"—to use Carlyle's phrase, —of its own, and should assert its power over large multitudes by giving them common impulses, and a delight in conforming themselves to common standards of obedience and hope. No doubt the gathering of sounds out of all quarters, from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South, the flowing of those sounds into one com- manding strain of united reverence, the sense of surrender to something higher which accompanies the blending of all those noisy chords which usually express only individual desire or self-will, the inward melting of eager purposes subdued by
this mighty symbol of spiritual persuasion, and the sense of exalted authority which it implies, are just what is wanted to convey to ungoverned passions and half-trained wills the meaning of divine order, and of a government which overcomes resistance without exciting it.
Mr. Gladstone, in addressing the railway employes of one of the great lines the other day, pointed out how the order of a great service which requires the same duties to be done at the same moment with unvarying punctuality, and on a perfect system of co-operation, realises what Carlyle used to call the necessity for a " rhythmic drill" of the human spirit, with a completeness that had never been reached before by any of those methods of locomotion which preceded the railway service. Previously there had been so much of chance and arbitrariness in the needs of travellers, that the men who conveyed them one day were not needed the next, and the halting-places of one journey were quite different from the halting-places of the next. Hence nothing of organised system, nothing of the rhythm of natural laws, nothing of the drill which subdues human caprice into an overmastering esprit de corps, was possible under the old travelling service ; while under the railway system, where every traveller must choose between the fixed hours for departure, and has his choice only of those halting-places where the needs of the community require the various trains to stop, there is both a real rhythm in the ramified rules, and a real drill in the necessity of conforming punctually to the common needs and supplying the missing links in the collective purpose. Mr. Gladstone's observation is as just as it is striking. It is quite true that the organisation of all those human wants that need supply on a great scale, does carry into human life that sense of rhythm, that uniformity of general laws, which sometimes seems to fill the physical world with a sense of oppressive exactness, of monotonous regularity, before which the human conscience feels a sort of dismay as if Nature were one mighty machine. Such a drilling as this is no doubt extremely useful for those who are subjected to it, inasmuch as it excludes the sense of accident and caprice ; but it is too likely to inspire rather a sense of fatalism than a sense of personal government, a disposition to think that the needs of society overflow and crush the needs of the individual, instead of accommodating themselves to those needs. But the rhythmic drill which speaks through religious music, however rude, is not drill of this monotonous and overbearing kind. It has something subduing and consolatory for each, as well as something commanding and uniting for all. Its rhythm is not the consequence of overruling every individual desire in the interest of the great whole, but consists in making each individual feel the necessity of giving his personal aid in order that the mighty whole shall be a whole, and not a rough and 'ugly assemblage of spoiled and broken purposes. The sense of irresistibleness which accompanies all great organisations is there, but not the sense of that cruel indifference to the individual, of that stern impersonality at the heart of order, Which is so apt to overwhelm the observer of either Nature or .society. The rhythm expressed by religious music, however rude it may be, is a rhythm which is jarred by any rebellion in the individual mind ; the drill which it enforces is a drill • which makes an individual appeal to each to swell and enrich the order of the whole. No wonder that General Booth prides himself almost as much on his power to inspire a love of music as on his power to inspire a penitent heart. The latter breaks ,down the most formidable obstacle to faith ; but the former supplies half the encouragement and enthusiasm which pre- vent the broken will from falling into abject despair. Fatalistic systems like Mahommedanism ignore music. They aim at riding rough-shod over the submissive will, rather than at discovering its moral secrets and subduing its restless movements, calming its fretfulness, and attuning it to a true resignation. That is the main difference between Mahommedanism and the ancient Judaism, which always represented the divine will as holy first, and only as omnipotent through holiness. The former represents the source of spiritual -order as arbitrary, absolute, in a word, as an Oriental monarch; the latter represents it as pure, subduing, and as even more exalting than exalted, in short, as " Wonderful," and " Counsellor," no less than " Mighty God," as "Everlasting Father " and " the Prince of Peace." We have often wondered that Mahommedanism should profess to derive itself from the same stream of religious teaching as Judaism, for the genius of the two are different, and are different in nothing more than this, that Judaism called music to the aid of its "rhythmic drill," and represented that rhythmic drill as penetrated by harmony and sweetness, no less than by omnipotence and dread. In other words, Judaism contained in itself the germs of Christianity, while Mahommedanism carefully excluded them. At bottom, all Calvinistic forms of Christianity should ignore music, or at least should prefer the harsher and more terrific music of the tempest to the subduing music of the " still, small voice."
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