CHAPTER XLVI. P. I.

DANIEL DOVE'S ARRIVAL AT DONCASTER. THE ORGAN IN ST. GEORGE'S CHURCH. THE PULPIT. MRS. NEALE'S BENEFACTION.

Non ulla Musis pagina gratior
Quam quæ severis ludicra jungere
    Novit, fatigatamque nugis
        Utilibus recreare mentem.
                                           DR. JOHNSON.

It was in the Mayoralty of Thomas Pheasant (as has already been said) and in the year of our Lord 1739, that Daniel Dove the younger, having then entered upon his seventeenth year, first entered the town of Doncaster and was there delivered by his excellent father to the care of Peter Hopkins. They loved each other so dearly, that this, which was the first day of their separation, was to both the unhappiest of their lives.

The great frost commenced in the winter of that year; and with the many longing lingering thoughts which Daniel cast towards his home, a wish was mingled that he could see the frozen waterfall in Weathercote Cave.

It was a remarkable era in Doncaster also, because the Organ was that year erected, at the cost of five hundred guineas, raised by voluntary subscription among the parishioners. Harris and Byfield were the builders, and it is still esteemed one of the best in the kingdom. When it was opened, the then curate, Mr. Fawkes, preached a sermon for the occasion, in which after having rhetorized in praise of sacred music, and touched upon the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer and all kinds of instruments, he turned to the organ and apostrophized it thus;—“But O what—O what—what shall I call thee by? thou divine Box of sounds!”

That right old worthy Francis Quarles of quaint memory,—and the more to be remembered for his quaintness,—knew how to improve an organ somewhat better than Mr. Fawkes. His poem upon one is the first in his Divine Fancies, and whether he would have it ranked among Epigrams, Meditations, or Observations, perhaps he could not himself tell. The Reader may class it as he pleases.

Observe this Organ: mark but how it goes!
'Tis not the hand alone of him that blows
The unseen bellows, nor the hand that plays
Upon the apparent note-dividing keys,
That makes these well-composed airs appear
Before the high tribunal of thine ear.
They both concur; each acts his several part;
The one gives it breath, the other lends it art.
Man is this Organ; to whose every action
Heaven gives a breath, (a breath without coaction,)
Without which blast we cannot act at all;
Without which Breath the Universe must fall
To the first nothing it was made of—seeing
In Him we live, we move, we have our being.
Thus filled with His diviner breath, and back't
With His first power, we touch the keys and act:
He blows the bellows: as we thrive in skill,
Our actions prove, like music, good or ill.

The question whether instrumental music may lawfully be introduced into the worship of God in the Churches of the New Testament, has been considered by Cotton Mather and answered to his own satisfaction and that of his contemporary countrymen and their fellow puritans, in his “Historical Remarks upon the discipline practised in the Churches of New England.”—“The Instrumental Music used in the old Church of Israel,” he says, “was an Institution of God; it was the Commandment of the Lord by the Prophets; and the Instruments are called God's Instruments, and Instruments of the Lord. Now there is not one word of Institution in the New Testament for Instrumental Music in the Worship of God. And because the holy God rejects all he does not command in his worship, he now therefore in effect says to us, I will not hear the melody of thy Organs. But on the other hand the rule given doth abundantly intimate that no voice is now heard in the Church but what is significant, and edifying by signification; which the voice of Instruments is not.”

Worse logic than this and weaker reasoning no one would wish to meet with in the controversial writings of a writer from whose opinions he differs most widely. The Remarks form part of that extraordinary and highly interesting work the Magnalia Christi Americana. Cotton Mather is such an author as Fuller would have been if the old English Worthy, instead of having been from a child trained up in the way he should go, had been calvinisticated till the milk of human kindness with which his heart was always ready to overflow had turned sour.

“Though Instrumental Music,” he proceeds to say, “were admitted and appointed in the worship of God under the Old Testament, yet we do not find it practised in the Synagogue of the Jews, but only in the Temple. It thence appears to have been a part of the ceremonial Pedagogy which is now abolished; nor can any say it was a part of moral worship. And whereas the common usage now hath confined Instrumental Music to Cathedrals, it seems therein too much to Judaize,—which to do is a part of the Anti-Christian Apostacy,—as well as to Paganize.—If we admit Instrumental Music in the worship of God, how can we resist the imposition of all the instruments used among the ancient Jews? Yea, Dancing as well as playing, and several other Judaic actions?”

During the short but active reign of the Puritans in England, they acted upon this preposterous opinion, and sold the Church organs, without being scrupulous concerning the uses to which they might be applied. A writer of that age, speaking of the prevalence of drunkenness, as a national vice, says, “that nothing may be wanting to the height of luxury and impiety of this abomination, they have translated the organs out of the Churches to set them up in taverns, chaunting their dithyrambics and bestial bacchanalias to the tune of those instruments which were wont to assist them in the celebration of God's praises, and regulate the voices of the worst singers in the world,—which are the English in their churches at present.”

It cannot be supposed that the Organs which were thus disposed of, were instruments of any great cost or value. An old pair of Organs, (for that was the customary mode of expression, meaning a set,—and in like manner a pair of cards, for a pack;)—an old pair of this kind belonging to Lambeth Church was sold in 1565 for £1. 10s. Church Organs therefore, even if they had not been at a revolutionary price, would be within the purchase of an ordinary vintner. “In country parish Churches,” says Mr. Denne the Antiquary, “even where the district was small, there was often a choir of singers, for whom forms, desks and books were provided; and they probably most of them had benefactors who supplied them with a pair of organs that might more properly have been termed a box of whistles. To the best of my recollection there were in the chapels of some of the Colleges in Cambridge very, very, indifferent instruments. That of the chapel belonging to our old house was removed before I was admitted.”

The use of the organ has occasioned a great commotion, if not a schism, among the methodists of late. Yet our holy Herbert could call Church music the “sweetest of sweets;” and describe himself when listening to it, as disengaged from the body, and “rising and falling with its wings.”

Harris, the chief builder of the Doncaster Organ, was a contemporary and rival of Father Smith, famous among Organists. Each built one for the Temple Church, and Father Smith's had most votes in its favor. The peculiarity of the Doncaster Organ, which was Harris's masterpiece, is, its having, in the great organ, two trumpets and a clarion, throughout the whole compass; and these stops are so excellent, that a celebrated musician said every pipe in them was worth its weight in silver.

Our Doctor dated from that year, in his own recollections, as the great era of his life. It served also for many of the Doncastrians, as a date to which they carried back their computations, till the generation which remembered the erecting of the organ was extinct.

This was the age of Church improvement in Doncaster,—meaning here by Church, the material structure. Just thirty years before, the Church had been beautified and the ceiling painted, too probably to the disfigurement of works of a better architectural age. In 1721 the old peal of five bells was replaced with eight new ones, of new metal, heretofore spoken of. In 1723 the church floor and church yard, which had both been unlevelled by Death's levelling course, were levelled anew, and new rails were placed to the altar. Two years later the Corporation gave the new Clock, and it was fixed to strike on the watch bell,—that clock which numbered the hours of Daniel Dove's life from the age of seventeen till that of seventy. In 1736 the west gallery was put up, and in 1741, ten years after the organ, a new pulpit, but not in the old style; for pulpits which are among the finest works of art in Brabant and Flanders, had degenerated in England, and in other protestant countries.

This probably was owing, in our own country, as much to the prevalence of puritanism, as to the general depravation of taste. It was for their beauty or their splendour that the early Quakers inveighed with such vehemence against pulpits, “many of which places,” saith George Keith in his quaking days, “as we see in England and many other countries, have a great deal of superfluity, and vain and superfluous labour and pains of carving, painting and varnishing upon them, together with your cloth and velvet cushion in many places; because of which, and not for the height of them above the ground, we call them Chief Places. But as for a commodious place above the ground whereon to stand when one doth speak in an assembly, it was never condemned by our friends, who also have places whereupon to stand, when to minister, as they had under the Law.”

In 1743 a marble Communion Table was placed in the Church, and— (passing forward more rapidly than the regular march of this narration, in order to present these ecclesiastical matters without interruption,)—a set of chimes were fixed in 1754—merry be the memory of those by whom this good work was effected! The north and south galleries were re-built in 1765; and in 1767 the church was white-washed, a new reading desk put up, the pulpit removed to what was deemed a more convenient station, and Mrs. Neale gave a velvet embroidered cover and cushion for it,—for which her name is enrolled among the benefactors of St. George's Church.

That velvet which, when I remember it, had lost the bloom of its complexion, will hardly have been preserved till now even by the dyer's renovating aid: and its embroidery has long since passed through the goldsmith's crucible. Sic transit excites a more melancholy feeling in me when a recollection like this arises in my mind, than even the “forlorn hic jacet” of a neglected tombstone. Indeed such is the softening effect of time upon those who have not been rendered obdurate and insensible by the world and the world's law, that I do not now call to mind without some emotion even that pulpit, to which I certainly bore no good will in early life, when it was my fortune to hear from it so many somniferous discourses; and to bear away from it, upon pain of displeasure in those whose displeasure to me was painful, so many texts, chapter and verse, few or none of which had been improved to my advantage. “Public sermons”—(hear! hear! for Martin Luther speaketh!) “public sermons do very little edify children, who observe and learn but little thereby. It is more needful that they be taught and well instructed with diligence in schools; and at home that they be orderly heard and examined in what they have learned. This way profiteth much; it is indeed very wearisome, but it is very necessary.” May I not then confess that no turn of expression however felicitous,—no collocation of words however emphatic and beautiful—no other sentences whatsoever, although rounded, or pointed for effect with the most consummate skill, have ever given me so much delight, as those dear phrases which are employed in winding up a sermon, when it is brought to its long-wished-for close.

It is not always, nor necessarily thus; nor ever would be so if these things were ordered as they might and ought to be. Hugh Latimer, Bishop Taylor, Robert South, John Wesley, Robert Hall, Bishop Jebb, Bishop Heber, Christopher Benson, your hearers felt no such tedium! when you reached that period it was to them like the cessation of a strain of music, which while it lasted had rendered them insensible to the lapse of time.

“I would not,” said Luther, “have preachers torment their hearers and detain them with long and tedious preaching.”