It is one of the happier signs of the times that we have advanced so far on the road of reform in our liturgical music that the Bishops can now order (what, in the past, they could only recommend) that, whenever the priest sings his peculiar part of the Mass, the choir should sing theirs. Yet, on account of certain fixed ideas, the new regulation is more honoured in the breach than the observance. One is that the Kyriale must always be sung to some harmonised setting taken from Cary’s or Fischer’s catalogue. No parochial body but a select choir can sing such a composition and therefore the peculiar business of the choir is the Kyriale. This duty they have always carried out to the best of their ability; but as it exhausts all their energies, any additional work must be ignored as a counsel of perfection. It takes time to absorb such a revolutionary idea as that the Kyriale, which the choir have only recently usurped, is the canonical right of the people; and that the Proper, which the choir have systematically neglected, is their only raison d’être.

Another fixed idea is that the Proper of Mass, like that of Vespers, if sung at all, must be sung to the official chant. The choir know nothing of this ancient idiom and there’s an end on’t. Now Catholic choristers are sensible men and women, quite as ready as other parochial workers to do the right thing when they know it.

‘Soeur Marie Bernard est morte : quelles souf-frances depuis vingt ans!’ Sister Mary Bernard is dead : how she must have suffered all these twenty years.’ Nearly fifty years have come and gone since the day in Easter week when these words fell on my ears from the holy and revered priest, the friend and guardian of my childhood. He had known and loved the little peasant-girl of the Pyrenees and had often spoken about her to the child, still unfamiliar with death, who listened to his words. To the latter the name of Sr. Marie Bernard had hitherto called up only wonder and admiration. She had seen more than once the Mother of fair Love, the Cause of our Joy! Had not the Beloved Mother promised, too, to make her happy in the kingdom of her Son?

But there was no mistaking the accents of compassion in the mouth of the good priest. He knew so well what poor Bernadette had had to endure for those twenty-one years she still dwelt in this vale of tears, after having beheld, fleetingly no doubt, perhaps ‘through a glass, darkly,’ the Vision of incomparable Loveliness.

In his Dedication of the Encomium, Moriae Erasmus writes to More:

Mr. Chesterton derives a divine joy from the use of words. ‘ Thunder-throated hounds,’ ‘ starspotted, violet leopards,’ ‘ torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,’ ‘ red rust like crawling gore,’ ‘ dim drums throbbing,’ ‘ strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far’ are phrases that, like the rare wine of Montefiascone, he loves to roll on his tongue with a beatific relish. He wrote with praiseworthy humility, yet needless regret in the verse which runs :

Words, for alas my trade is words, a barren burst Rubbed by a hundred rhymes,

Rubbed by a hundred rhymsters, battered a thousand times,

Take them, you, that smile on strings, those nobler sounds than mine,

The words that never lie, or brag, or flatter, or malign.