The Songs of Deborah illumined the period of the Judges. They have been given a place by competent critics among the noblest lyrics of antiquity. One of these, Heinrich Ewald, speaks of them as so artistic, with all their antique simplicity, that they show to what “refined art poetry early aspired, and what a delicate perception of beauty breathed already beneath its stiff and cumbrous soul.” The Gospel era dawned in the midst of holy songs, hymned by angels, by holy men and women, and by the Mother of our Lord. From that day on the Church of Jesus has been vocal with psalmody. The primitive Church had her spiritual songs. The saintliness of the early Christian ages survives in the Greek and Latin hymns, and the pleasant task of translating and assembling the choicest of these has occupied many gifted minds. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was borne forward on waves of sacred song. The sweet voice of the student lad that appealed from the snowy street to the heart of Dame Ursula Cotta, and opened her doors to Martin Luther, was a type of the new time. The new songs of the Reformation and the old psalms renewed in the vernacular and in popular musical forms, prepared the way of multitudes for the revived truths of the Gospel. Luther’s musical taste and talent impressed itself upon Germany, and thence upon Europe. His free spirit found utterance outside of the Biblical forms of praise in metrical renderings of his own and other religious experiences. Calvin saw the value and authority of popular praises, and encouraged and procured their use in the new organisation of reformed worship of which he was the chief agent. But his more conservative spirit in such matters held to the ancient psalms; and this influenced all Europe outside of Germany. The Church of England used the version of Sternhold and Hopkins, and these will be found appended to the early prayer-books. Rous’s version was substantially that best liked and approved by the Church of Scotland. The historic “Huguenot Psalter” was the joint work of Clement Marot and Theodore Beza, the former having rendered into French metre the first fifty psalms, and the latter the remaining one hundred. These, set to popular music, caught the ear and heart of the people of all ranks. They ran rapidly throughout French-speaking nations, and became as well known as the “Gospel Hymns” in the palmy days of Moody and Sankey.