are in the habit of sneering at Wagner's steadfast belief in the
saving power of art for human society would do well to cast a glance
at the course of each development of the Christian ideal, the
political and the artistic respectively. In the Middle Ages the one
showed itself in councils like those of Nicea and Ephesus, in
political popes like Gregory VII. and Innocent III., in Isidorian
decretals, excommunications, interdicts, tortures, indulgences; the
other in our mediaeval cathedrals, in the poetry of a Dante, the
paintings of a Giotto and a Raphael, the sculpture of a Michael
Angelo, the music of a Palestrina, and our politician might then ask
himself which he thought had been the more beneficial as a social
force. There still remain as our meagre heritage from these times of
"faith," on the one hand the orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed, on the
other certain festivals and celebrations in the cathedral of a small
Bavarian town, little known, scarcely noticed, but still in the full
glory of their pristine mediaeval beauty.

No one who has not attended the celebrations in the cathedral of
Regensburg can fully measure what has been lost for mankind through
the domination of human rationalism in the place of religious
devotion. Here alone in Europe all who will may yet hear the great
masters of the sixteenth century rightly performed with the ancient
ritual, and Gregorian chant that belongs to it, without pretence,
without pomp or pageant, with the single purpose of serving God
worthily in that true spirit of mediaeval sincerity and purity which
our historians are apt to pass over unnoticed in their rancorous
eagerness to proclaim the sins of the Church. The compositions of
Palestrina and his compeers represent music in its highest form as
pure song in its most perfect consummation, attaining as song an
elevation which has never even been distantly approached since. "The