kind of worship.  Perhaps, too, it was thought to border upon ‘enthusiasm,’ that other religious bugbear of the age.  A paper in the ‘Tatler’ speaks of it not with disapproval, but with something of condescension to weaker minds, as ’the rapturous way of devotion.’[1179] In fact, cathedrals in general were almost unintelligible to the prevalent sentiment of the eighteenth century.  Towards the end of the period a spirit of appreciation grew up, which Malcolm speaks of as being in marked contrast with the contemptuous indifference of a former date.[1180] They were regarded, no doubt, with a certain pride as splendid national memorials of a kind of devotion that had long passed away.  Some young friends of David Hume, who had been to service at St. Paul’s and found scarcely anybody there, began to speak of the folly of lavishing money on such useless structures.  The famous sceptic gently rebuked them for talking without judgment.  ‘St. Paul’s,’ he said, ’as a monument of the religious feeling and taste of the country, does it honour and will endure.  We have wasted millions upon a single campaign in Flanders, and without any good resulting from it.’[1181] There was no fanatic dislike to cathedrals, as when Lord Brooke had hoped that he might see the day when not one stone of St. Paul’s should be left upon another.[1182] They were simply neglected, as if both they and those who yet loved the mode of worship perpetuated in them belonged to a bygone generation.  In the North this was not so much the case.  Durham Cathedral especially seems to have retained, in a greater degree than any other, not only the grandeur and hospitality of an older period, but also the affections of the townsmen around it.  Defoe, in 1728, found a congregation of 500 people at the six-o’clock morning service.[1183] In most cases, even on Sundays, the attendance was miserably thin.  Doubtless, many individual members of cathedral chapters loved the noble edifice and its solemn services with a very profound attachment; but, as a general rule, they belonged to the past and to the future far more than to the present.  The only mode of utilising cathedrals which seems to have been thoroughly to the taste of the last century was the converting them into music-halls for oratorios.  Early in the century we find Dean Swift at Dublin consenting—­not, however, without much demur—­to ’lend his cathedral to players and scrapers,’ to act what he called their opera.[1184] Next, in St. Paul’s, at the annual anniversary of the Sons of the Clergy, sober Churchmen saw with disgust a careless, pleasure-loving audience listening to singers promiscuously gathered from the theatres, and laughing, and eating, and drinking their wine in the intervals of the performance.[1185] Then came the festivals of the Three Choirs at Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford, very open to objection at a time when the managers thought of little but how to achieve for their undertaking popularity and pecuniary success.  Sublime as is the music of ‘The Messiah,’ it was not often performed in the last century without circumstances which jarred strongly against the devotional feeling of a deeply religious man like John Newton, and led him to what might otherwise seem a most unreasonable hatred of oratorios.[1186]