Demoralized Sunday Schools.
THE Christian World criticises the Sunday-school music of the present day as demoralized and demoralizing: "Good taste in words and music is grossly violated because the school wants stirring, shouting hymns and pitching-along choruses. It is simply shocking to have tolerably good hymns sung to so many of our 'hickory, dickory, dock' tunes, and jolted out like a two-wheeled cart over cobblestones, with a responsive refrain reminding one of a swinging chandelier in a rocking ship. Take up any one of the large batch of Sunday-school hymn books published during the last ten years, and you are sure to find a number of marching, fighting, rallying hymns, full of aspiration to quit this 'dull earth' and these 'vile bodies' and soar away to the 'evergreen shore,' the 'sweet by and by,' and the 'summer land.' Immensely charming favorites with many schools are the jump-frog choruses, in which the treble takes a start by four or six notes, and then halts on a long note until the bass and tenor hop along in time, and all parts link harmoniously together to the end of the refrain. There is a sickening amount of pretty sentimentalities and pious doggerel warped into just such Sunday-school melodies. In the laborious effort to accommodate Sunday-school music and hymns to 'the young idea' lurks a terrible danger—a danger of subverting the very foundation of religion. Such singing works on the nerves of sensitive children, but not on their minds or hearts. The effect is simply to tear down the dividing wall between the sacred and the secular, to the utter perversion of the religious idea."