Canon Dearmer in England observed the same fact and was puzzled to explain it. The explanation, however, is a simple one. With the exception of a relatively small number of writers born in other parts of the country and with different backgrounds, these Unitarian authors were men brought up in the atmosphere of the so-called “New England Renaissance,” that literary revival of which Boston, Cambridge and Concord were the chief centres in the 19^th century, and they belonged by blood, by education and by social ties to the New England literary group. The majority were also graduates of Harvard College or Harvard Divinity School, or both, in a period when the spirit of the time was most favorable to the stimulation of poetic gifts, and in a place where the intellectual level was high and there was freedom from any dogmatic control.[5] Thus they had the culture and the warmth of atmosphere needed, and the Divinity School had the admirable custom of encouraging students to write a hymn for the annual graduation exercises or for the School’s Christmas service, and so stimulated their poetic gifts. Thanks to these favorable circumstances what has been called “the Harvard school of hymnody” has had no equal in the English speaking world, the only comparable institution being Trinity College, Cambridge, England, which, for a much briefer period (1820-1845) was the nursing mother of a notable succession of Anglican hymn writers. It was this fact which led W. Garrett Horder, an English Congregationalist who was also a highly competent hymnologist, to write, “Harvard, like our English Cambridge, has been ‘a nest of singing birds’. I was struck by this when editing _The Treasury of American Sacred Songs_. Harvard provided the bulk —— of the verse I included.” And other orthodox authorities, notably F. M. Bird and Louis F. Benson, already quoted, have borne witness to the high achievements of both the editors of the long succession of Unitarian hymn books and the authors of the hymns which they included. _Catalogue of American Unitarian Hymn Books._ compiled by Henry Wilder Foote and reprinted (with revisions) from the Proceedings of the Unitarian Historical Society, May, 1938, by permission. In the 17^th century, and down to the middle of the 18^th, all churches of the Congregational order in New England used the _Bay Psalm Book_, first printed in Cambridge in 1640, except for the use of Ainsworth’s _Psalter_ in the churches of the Plymouth Plantation and in the First Church in Salem for a part of the 17^th century. In the latter part of the 18^th century, the _Bay Psalm Book_ was gradually superseded by either the New Version of the Psalms (Tate and Brady) or, more generally, by one of the editions of _Watts and Select_, i.e. Isaac Watts’ _Psalms and Hymns_, with a supplement of hymns selected from other authors.