the vanishing subjunctive mood

Wow!    I just came across something striking.

We all know that the main features of the subjunctive mood have been disappearing, and in a generation or two will be gone.    But much has already been lost, even before an old person's lifetime.

We always trot out the usual examples and say that if Tevye were singing today instead of in the 60s he'd say, "If I was a rich man . . . ."    (Of course, Browning said "If this was ever granted" a hundred years before, in his prosily sublime "Guardian Angel".)    Fewer people notice the source of Ray Charles's mistake in those same 60s, when he sang "America, America, God shed his grace on thee . . .    He crowned thy good with brotherhood . . . ."    Charles misses that both phrases ("God shed his grace," "and crown thy good") are actually subjunctive:  May God shed his grace, may God crown thy good.    So he, quite naturally, assumes it's in past tense.    In some versions, he sings "God done shed his grace on thee."    And no one blinks!

OK, anyway.    I was reading some Chesterton, which you should always do after discussing what was wrong with the Stoics.    It all came from a Facebook discussion, in which I'd said that, as opposed to their fellow pagans, who lived in festive cities in a dark cosmos, and to later Christians, who lived in gloomy towns in a joyous cosmos, the Stoics somehow decided that gloominess and festivity are all peripheral to the issue of goodness —– something a Christian today can only half-agree to.    My phrasing owed much to a vivid thought, in "Orthodoxy," that has stayed with me since college.    In a shimmeringly Chestertonian passage, he says:

I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything —– they were quite jolly about everything else.    I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything —– they were at war about everything else.    But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus.    Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe. 

BAM!  Ya gotta love him.  But did you hear that:  "if the question turn . . . ."    That knocked me for a loop.    I've read that passage a dozen times, but never really noticed that lost subjunctivism.    Plenty of people would still say "If I were a rich man," and plenty would still say something like "God give you grace."    . . .    But there is no living person on this planet who would say "If the question turn on it."    That's just crazy!