It was a perfectly natural result of this principle that congregational song should hold a place in the Protestant cultus which the Catholic Church has never sanctioned. The one has promoted and tenaciously maintained it; the other as consistently repressed it,—not on aesthetic grounds, nor primarily on grounds of devotional effect, but really through a more or less distinct perception of its significance in respect to the theoretical relationship of the individual to the Church. The struggles over popular song in public worship which appear throughout the early history of Protestantism are thus to be explained. The emancipated layman found in the general hymn a symbol as well as an agent of the assertion of his new rights and privileges in the Gospel. The people’s song of early Protestantism has therefore a militant ring. It marks its epoch no less significantly than Luther’s ninety-five theses and the Augsburg Confession. It was a sort of spiritual _Triumphlied_, proclaiming to the universe that the day of spiritual emancipation had dawned. The second radical distinction between the music of the Protestant Church and that of the Catholic is that the vernacular language takes the place of the Latin. The natural desire of a people is that they may worship in their native idiom; and since the secession from the ancient Church inevitably resulted in the formation of national or independent churches, the necessities which maintained in the Catholic Church a common liturgic language no longer obtained, and the people fell back upon their national speech.