a still further abandonment of the old routine; they form a connected exposition of his philosophy of life, on the whole theistic rather than specifically Christian, and always transparently individual.  Individual—­that is the real issue.  According to their differing temperaments, different composers may swing towards either the right or the left wing of thought in these non-ecclesiastical expressions of ultimate things:  Stanford may join with Whitman or Robert Bridges, Vaughan-Williams with Whitman or George Herbert, Frank Bridge with Thomas a Kempis, Walford Davies with a mediaeval morality-play, Gustav Hoist with the Rig-Veda, Bantock with Omar Khayyam.  But the essentials, for any composer worth the name, are that his theme shall have its birth in personal vision and shall appeal to personal intelligence.  The routine oratorio fulfilled neither of these conditions; and it is dead beyond recall.  It was a curious illustration of foreign ignorance of British musical life that Saint-Saens, when asked to write a choral work for the Gloucester Festival of 1913, should have imagined that he was meeting our national tastes with an oratorio on the most prehistoric lines.  However, the unanimous chilliness with which The Promised Land was received must have effectually disillusioned him.

But the liberalisers, though the more numerous force, have no monopoly of sincerity:  among the genuine conservatives also we can find, I think, signs of the correlation of musical with religious development.  We have had, during the last generation, many works that are in the legitimate line of descent from the great classical settings of ritual words or (as with the Passions and Cantatas of Bach) words that are intended anyhow to appeal not as literature but as dogma.  When Elgar prints on the title-pages of his oratorios the letters A.M.D.G.—­ad majorem Dei gloriam—­the personal note is, in these days, obvious.  His own libretti to The Apostles and its sequel The Kingdom (and to the further sequels which had been sketched out twelve years ago, though none has as yet seen the light) resemble those of the older type of oratorio in so far as they include narrative and dramatic incident and religious moralizing; but there is not a trace of the old lethargic taking things for granted, it is all a ringing sacramental challenge to the individual soul.  Elgar’s work is indeed the typical musical expression of recent Roman Catholic developments; but there are others also.  There was Perosi, the Benedictine priest, whose oratorios, tentative, childishly sincere mixtures of Palestrina and Wagner, were forced upon Europe in the late ’nineties with the full driving power of his Church, and who, when his musical insufficiency became palpable, was dropped in favour of Elgar himself, whose sudden rise into deserved fame coincides in time.  There was again the allocution of Pius X, known as the Motu proprio, which sought to reform ecclesiastical