The anthem was recognized as a regular part of divine service early in Elizabeth’s reign, but the word was not actually used in the Prayer Book until the revision of 1662, which simply states after the third collect, ‘In quires and places where they sing here followeth the anthem.’ A few years after Elizabeth issued the ‘Injunctions’ granting permission to use ‘a hymn or such like song in churches,’ the word anthem appears in the second edition of Day’s choral collection, entitled ‘Certain Notes set forth in four and five Parts to be sung at the Morning and Evening Prayer and Communion.’ The high place that church music has occupied in the thought of English musicians is amply evidenced by the fact that practically every composer that England has produced has given his most serious efforts to this form. The actual output of anthems has been enormous; and, while it may be said with much truth that the qualities of pedantry and dryness are too much in evidence to permit the use of the terms ‘inspiring’ or ‘inspired’ for the bulk of them, it may be maintained with equal truth that in no other class of church music, except the mighty individual contributions of Palestrina and Bach, has the element of secularity been so rigorously excluded as in the English anthem and its allied forms. While the religious music of Protestant Germany and Catholic Italy and France suffered a lamentable relapse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the insinuating influence of the operatic style, the music of the English cathedral service maintained on the whole a serenity and certain austerity of style entirely consistent with ecclesiastical ideals and dignity. The best examples of this style--and they are numerous--give to the music of the Anglican Church an honorable place in the literature of the worship music of the four great historic branches of the church universal, notwithstanding its average mediocrity and the absence of really great names among English church composers. The anthem is the culminating point of the ritual-music of the Anglican Church, as the cantata was of the early Lutheran Church. In its more extended form it has much the same general musical structure as the cantata, comprising choruses, solos, duets, etc., but it has never attained the large dimensions of its German analogue. Like the church cantata, it made use of the vernacular from the beginning, and, thus established on the basis of a direct verbal appeal to the congregation, it in time evolved a musical type of its own, clearly differentiated from other distinctive types of church-music and embodying the essential qualities of the church from whose innermost being it blossomed.