Greatly disgusted at the manner of singing. 1. Twelve or fourteen persons kept it to themselves, and quite shut out the congregation: 2. These repeated the same words, contrary to all sense and reason six or eight or ten times over: 3. According to the shocking custom of modern music, different persons sang different words at one and the same moment: an intolerable insult on common sense, and utterly incompatible with any devotion.” Excerpted from Abide With Me: The World of Victorian Hymns by Ian Bradley.

Mr. Wesley wrote this criticism after a preaching visit to a parish church in Neath. He sounds just like the twentieth and twenty-first century critics of contemporary praise and worship music. There’s nothing new under the sun, is there?

I’m in a fine pickle as far as this hymn project is concerned—the reason you haven’t seen any new hymns in the Top 100 Hymn Project in the past few days. My computer, with the list of the survey results, died and won’t turn back on. The Apple store is holding my Mac hostage, and they say it may or may not be reparable. In the meantime, not only have I lost the survey results, I’ve also lost the syllabus and plans for the Texas history class that I’m supposed to teach for our homeschool co-op. I can’t get to our household budget, which was in dreadful need of revision anyway. All of my best recipes are inside that computer. All of the hymns I bought and loaded into iTunes as a result of the hymn project are trapped inside my Mac. I am bewildered and bumfuzzled, and I find myself exasperated with my own computer dependence.

Maybe there is something new under the sun, computer dependency, and it’s not good.

The people at the Apple store say they’ll give me a diagnosis and a verdict within a week to ten days.