Now, if all the tunes are new, there will be no temptation to the people.  They will not keep humming along, hoping they will find some bars down where they can break into the clover pasture.  They will take the tune as an inextricable conundrum, and give it up.  Besides that, Pisgah, Ortonville and Brattle Street are old fashioned.  They did very well in their day.  Our fathers were simple-minded people, and the tunes fitted them.  But our fathers are gone, and they ought to have taken their baggage with them.  It is a nuisance to have those old tunes floating around the church, and sometime, just as we have got the music as fine as an opera, to have a revival of religion come, and some new-born soul break out in “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me!” till the organist stamps the pedal with indignation, and the leader of the tune gets red in the face and swears.  Certainly anything that makes a man swear is wrong—­ergo, congregational singing is wrong.  “Quod erat demonstrandum;” which, being translated, means “Plain as the nose on a man’s face.”

What right have people to sing who know nothing about rhythmics, melodies, dynamics?  The old tunes ought to be ashamed of themselves when compared with our modern beauties.  Let Dundee, and Portuguese Hymn, and Silver Street hide their heads beside what we heard not long ago in a church—­just where I shall not tell.  The minister read the hymn beautifully.  The organ began, and the choir sang, as near as I could understand, as follows: 

  Oo—­aw—­gee—­bah
    Ah—­me—­la—­he
  O—­pah—­sah—­dah
    Wo—­haw—­gee-e-e-e.

My wife, seated beside me, did not like the music.  But I said:  “What beautiful sentiment!  My dear, it is a pastoral.  You might have known that from ‘Wo-haw-gee!’ You have had your taste ruined by attending the Brooklyn Tabernacle.”  The choir repeated the last line of the hymn four times.  Then the prima donna leaped on to the first line, and slipped, and fell on to the second, and that broke and let her through into the third.  The other voices came in to pick her up, and got into a grand wrangle, and the bass and the soprano had it for about ten seconds; but the soprano beat (women always do), and the bass rolled down into the cellar, and the soprano went up into the garret, but the latter kept on squalling as though the bass, in leaving her, had wickedly torn out all her back hair.  I felt anxious about the soprano, and looked back to see if she had fainted; but found her reclining in the arms of a young man who looked strong enough to take care of her.

Now, I admit that we cannot all have such things in our churches.  It costs like sixty.  In the Church of the Holy Bankak it coats one hundred dollars to have sung that communion, piece: 

  “Ye wretched, hungry, starving poor!”

But let us come as near to it as we can.  The tune “Pisgah” has been standing long enough on “Jordan’s stormy banks.”  Let it pass over and get out of the wet weather.  Good-bye, “Antioch,” “Harwell” and “Boylston.”  Good-bye till we meet in glory.