Again, just as the cloud of melancholy which from time to time
darkened the moody mind of Saul was viewed as an evil spirit from
the Lord vexing him, so on the other hand the solemn strains of the
harp, which soothed and composed his troubled thoughts, may well
have seemed to the hag-ridden king the very voice of God or of his
good angel whispering peace. Even in our own day a great religious
writer, himself deeply sensitive to the witchery of music, has said
that musical notes, with all their power to fire the blood and melt
the heart, cannot be mere empty sounds and nothing more; no, they
have escaped from some higher sphere, they are outpourings of
eternal harmony, the voice of angels, the Magnificat of saints. It
is thus that the rude imaginings of primitive man are transfigured
and his feeble lispings echoed with a rolling reverberation in the
musical prose of Newman. Indeed the influence of music on the
development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic
study. For we cannot doubt that this, the most intimate and
affecting of all the arts, has done much to create as well as to
express the religious emotions, thus modifying more or less deeply
the fabric of belief to which at first sight it seems only to
minister.
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