The dignity, orderliness, tranquillity, and graciousness in outward form and inward spirit which have come to distinguish the Anglican Establishment are reflected in its anthems and “services,” its chants and hymns; while the simplicity and sturdy, aggressive sincerity of the non-conformist sects may be felt in the accents of their psalmody. The clash of liturgic and non-liturgic opinions, conformity and independence, Anglicanism and Puritanism, may be plainly heard in the church musical history of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and even to-day the contest has not everywhere been settled by conciliation and fraternal sympathy. The study of English church music, therefore, is the study of musical forms and practices more than of works of art as such. We are met at the outset by a spectacle not paralleled in other Protestant countries, _viz._, the cleavage of the reformed Church into two violently hostile divisions; and we find the struggle for supremacy between Anglicans and Puritans fought out in the sphere of art and ritual as well as on the battlefield and the arena of theological polemic. Consequently we are obliged to trace two distinct lines of development—the ritual music of the Establishment and the psalmody of the dissenting bodies—trying to discover how these contending principles acted upon each other, and what instruction can be drawn from their collision and their final compromise. The Reformation in England took in many respects a very different course from that upon the continent. In Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands the revolt against Rome was initiated by men who sprung from the ranks of the people. Notwithstanding the complication of motives which drew princes and commoners, ecclesiastics and laymen, into the rebellion, the movement was primarily religious, first a protest against abuses, next the demand for free privileges in the Gospel, followed by restatements of belief and the establishment of new forms of worship. Political changes followed in the train of the religious revolution, because in most instances there was such close alliance between the secular powers and the papacy that allegiance to the former was not compatible with resistance to the latter.