They had men who devoted themselves to the playing of instruments as an accompaniment to song, and the Bible mentions more varieties of instruments than can be found in profane history of those times. Worship was such an important feature of Jewish life, and praise was so essential an element in their worship, that the masses must have learned and sung those great lyrics which to-day represent the culmination of human awe, reverence, prayer, and thanksgiving. It is impossible to imagine David singing his psalms to crude or inadequate musical settings. Here we have a situation apparently full of vital contradictions. Most of the influences which have proven themselves necessary to the development of music were wanting, and still there is evidence that it had grown to be an expressive means. The Jews were actuated by profound religious feeling and by an exquisite sense of nature's forms. No poet has yet equalled David's simple but beautiful appreciation of the universe, and of its influence upon mankind. The Jews of Poland, Spain, and Germany have diverse musical settings of the Psalms, so there is no traceable line of inheritance from David. This line has been obliterated by the changes incident to generations of unassisted memory. That there may be rare exceptions to this rule of change in form during extended oral transmission was abundantly proven recently by a German Hebrew musician and scholar. He played me an unwritten Passover hymn which his father had always sung at that festival time, and told me that he had not long before been entertained by a Spanish Hebrew, who sang the same melody tone for tone. This gentleman's hearing and memory are so absolute that there is no question to be raised as to this case; but as far as my investigations have gone, it stands alone. The composer of the nineteenth century can nowhere else find such earnest and suggestive texts as in the Old Testament. They voice the hopes, sorrows, despair, reverence, and joys of our hearts just as aptly as they did those of the Hebrew bards who wrote them thousands of years ago. Their natural and direct method of expressing the emotions, and their incomparable elevation of spirit, make them appeal especially strongly to the musician, whose flights of imagination start from these emotions. We are denied the privilege of scanning the forms and substance of Biblical melodies or chants, and must content ourselves with tracing the more prominent features of the _rôle_ which was assigned to music during that older era, and the mechanical devices which were employed to enhance rhythmic precision and sonority.