The congregational song of the Anglican Church in the first century and a half of its existence likewise kept close to the Psalter. Hymns, in the German sense of spontaneous expression of individual religious sentiment, were practically unknown in English religious song until just before the period of Watts and the Wesleys. The idea that nothing should be used in public worship that was not strictly Scriptural dominated the services of Conformists and Non-conformists alike. To be sure, a few ancient hymns, such as the _Te Deum_ and _Veni Creator_, together with some canticles and ‘spiritual songs,’ were admitted into the Appendix to the Psalter, to be sung in private devotions, but it was not until the closing years of the seventeenth century that the hymn emerged from the protecting care of the Psalms and asserted itself as an independent form in the service. The first successful collection in which it assumed a place of its own was ‘Select Psalms and Hymns’ for St. James’s, Westminster, 1697. A new and glorious era for English hymnody was at hand, in which the hard, prosaic lines of the old psalmody were to be laid aside for more spontaneous, inspired religious utterance. But if the verses of the old poets of an austere, unloving religion were to be discarded and gradually forgotten, many of the melodies to which they were sung have lived to be joined to words of sweeter comfort and more joyous hope than the English religionists of those olden days permitted themselves. Most of the early tunes were written in the then prevalent church modes, many were undoubtedly adapted from English folk-songs and continental melodies, but the names of many of the greatest English composers of this period--Tye, Tallis, Gibbons, Byrd--lived on in their inspired church tunes and are still to be found in nearly every modern hymnal in use, whether prepared for liturgical or non-liturgical services. FOOTNOTES: [41] In the ‘Thuringian Mystery, or the Parable of the Ten Virgins,’ written evidently by monks and performed for the first time at Eisenach, Thuringia, on April 24, 1322, the futility of intercessory prayers to saints or even to the Virgin is asserted. [42] This substitution was not entirely accomplished during Luther’s lifetime, however, as a few Latin motets were retained for a long time. [43] Philip Wackernagel in his collection of old German hymns (_Das deutsche Kirchenlied_) gives 1,448 examples of these, dating from 868 to 1518. [44] Only two can with certainty be ascribed to him--_Jesaia dem Propheten das geschah_ and _Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott_--while five more are probably by him. [45] The first chorale-book to adopt this as a fixed principle was the one published in 1586 at Nuremberg by Lucas Osiander, ‘Fifty Sacred Songs and Psalms, arranged contrapuntally for four voices, so that a whole Christian congregation may unite in the singing of them.’