Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Morris

There is a quiet sting in Morris's "nowadays": a word that pretends to be casual while smuggling in cultural diagnosis. As a clergyman, he isn't merely reporting a musical trend; he's claiming a monopoly of the singable. Hymns, in his framing, have become "the norm" not because they are uniquely true or beautiful, but because the wider culture has been stripped of alternative, shared repertoire. It's pastoral concern dressed as observation, and it doubles as an argument for the church's relevance.

The subtext is scarcity. Communal singing needs common material: ballads, work songs, civic anthems, folk traditions passed hand to hand. In 19th-century Britain, the forces that eroded that commons were real: industrial schedules replacing seasonal labor, urban migration dissolving village customs, rising respectability policing "rough" popular songs, and a rapidly commercializing entertainment market that turned music into something you consumed rather than practiced. If people "don't have much else to sing", the hymn steps in as a ready-made script for belonging.

Morris also lets himself off the hook. If hymns dominate by default, the church can read its own cultural authority as providential rather than competed-for. Yet the line carries an unintended melancholy: it admits that hymnody is filling a vacuum. The religious song becomes less a pure expression of faith than the last surviving place where ordinary people are still permitted to raise their voices together without embarrassment. In that sense, it's not triumphalist; it's a lament for a culture losing its informal, everyday music.