The attitude of Paul toward glossolaly among his converts strikingly resembles Plato's opinion as expressed in the Timaeus, p. 72, of the enthusiastic ecstasies of the ancient plains (sooth sayer). The gift of tongues and of their interpretation was not peculiar to the Christian Church, but was a repetition in it of a phase common in ancient religions. The very phrase XaXEIv, "to speak with tongues," was not invented by the New Testament writers, but borrowed from ordinary speech.
Virgil (Aen. vi. 46, 98) draws a life-like picture of the ancient prophetess "speaking with tongues." He depicts her quick changes of colour, her dishevelled hair, her panting breast, her apparent increase of stature as the god draws nigh and fills her with his divine afflatus. Then her voice loses its mortal's ring : "nee mor tale sonans." The same morbid and abnormal trance utterances recur in Christian revivals in every age, e.g., among the mendicant friars of the 13th century, among the Jansenists, the early Quakers, the converts of Wesley and Whitefield, the persecuted protestants of the Cevennes, the Irvingites, and the revivalists of Wales and America.
Oracular possession of the kind above described is also corn mon among savages and people of lower culture; and Dr. Tylor, in his Primitive Culture, ii. 14, gives examples of ecstatic utter ance interpreted by the sane. Thus in the Sandwich Islands the god Oro gave his oracles through a priest who "ceased to act or speak as a voluntary agent, but with his limbs convulsed, his features distorted and terrific, his eyes wild and strained, he would roll on the ground foaming at the mouth, and reveal the will of the god in shrill cries and sounds violent and indis tinct, which the attending priests duly interpreted to the people." See E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture; H. Weinel, Die Wirkungen des Geistes and der Geister (Freiburg, 1899) Shaftesbury's Letter on Enthusiasm; Mrs. Oliphant, Life of Irving, vol. ii. ; G. B. Cutten, Speaking with Tongues, Historically and Psychologically Considered (1927) (the most complete existing survey of the subject). See also Thouless, Introduction to the Psychology of Religion, chap. xi.
What, then, is Tonic Sol-fa? It is a letter-notation, as dis tinguished from a staff-notation. The initials of seven old syllables are used. They formed what was later called a "movable do" system, and Tonic Sol-fa follows this old practice. Guido d'Arezzo
(995-1050) noticed that each line of a hymn to St. John began stepwise, forming his hexachord instead of the former Greek tetrachords, and he took the first syllable of each line of the hymn as a sound-name, thus ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. The last line of the hymn was Sancte Iohannes. The initial letters, si, were added in the 16th century to represent the seventh of the modern major scale. In the 17th century do (probably from Dominus) was substitued in most countries for ut. In the 19th century in England si was changed to te to avoid confusion with the initial of sol, and the spelling of all the syllables was adapted to the English language, with the advantage of having an open vowel sound for every note. The higher octave was shown by a small figure on the right above the note (d'), and the lower octave syllables had a figure below the note at the right side as shown.
Besides the signs for tune already given, a notation of time was adopted, and equal spacing represented duration pictorially. A vertical line (D precedes the accent at the beginning of the bar (measure). A short perpendicular line (1) shows the middle or medium accent of common time (four-pulse measure). An accent mark if followed by an unfilled (un-syllabled) space in dicates a rest. When a note follows the accent mark it occupies the time from that accent to the next. A long dash (—) after a note requires the sound to be continued through the next pulse or beat. A dot (full point) between two notes divides the pulse into equal parts (d.r). A dot before a continuation mark (short dash) indicates that the previous note is to be continued through half of that pulse. A comma is the sign for a quarter-pulse (d,r). A dot and comma placed together show that the preceding note is of length, and the following note +-pulse length (d.,r). An inverted comma is placed after a note of one-third pulse length (d,r). A line placed below two or more notes signifies that the notes are to be sung to the single syllable or word under neath the notes (d.r). A brace binds each line of the score, and a double bar shows the end of the music. A tune may be quoted which gives within one bar five signs for rhythm: Key A.{ m :m r : .d I Oft in the stilly night, Ere The question of key arises. At the beginning of the tune the pitch of it is indicated by the standard pitch-names (Key A, etc.). Here comes the "enlightening fact" to a beginner. A tune in Tonic Sol-fa notation has the same appearance (apart from octave marks) whether pitched high or low; it is recognized as the same tune. In the song of Moore above, for example, the same syllables would be used whether sung at a pitch suitable to tenor or bass. The Tonic Sol-faist, having a movable doh method, has not to use a fresh set of syllables with every change of pitch, in the "fixed doh" way.