Complex and solemnizing are the suggestions which strike across the mind of the student of church history as he hears in a venerable English cathedral the lofty strains which might elsewhere seem commonplace, but which in their ancestral home are felt to be the natural speech of an institution which has found in such structures its fitting habitation. CHAPTER XI CONGREGATIONAL SONG IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA The revised liturgy and musical service of the Church of England had not been long in operation when they encountered adversaries far more bitter and formidable than the Catholics. The Puritans, who strove to effect a radical overturning in ecclesiastical affairs, to reduce worship to a prosaic simplicity, and also to set up a more democratic form of church government, violently assailed the established Church as half papist. The contest between the antagonistic principles, Ritualism _vs._ Puritanism, Anglicanism _vs._ Presbyterianism, broke out under Elizabeth, but was repressed by her strong hand only to increase under the weaker James I., and to culminate with the overthrow of Charles I. and the temporary triumph of Puritanism. The antipathy of the Puritan party to everything formal, ceremonial, and artistic in worship was powerfully promoted, if not originally instigated by John Calvin, the chief fountain-head of the Puritan doctrine and polity. The extraordinary personal ascendency of Calvin was shown not only in the adoption of his theological system by so large a section of the Protestant world, but also in the fact that his opinions concerning the ideal and method of public worship were treated with almost equal reverence, and in many localities have held sway down to the present time. Conscious, perhaps to excess, of certain harmful tendencies in ritualism, he proclaimed that everything formal and artistic in worship was an offence to God; he clung to this belief with characteristic tenacity and enforced it upon all the congregations under his rule. Instruments of music and trained choirs were to him abomination, and the only musical observance permitted in the sanctuary was the singing by the congregation of metrical translations of the psalms.