When we observe the places where these fragments occur, or where singing in the church is mentioned, we find that the language naturally is Greek. No one doubts that Luke and the other New Testament writers employed the tongue which was the educated and flexible medium of conveying the loftiest truth; nor that Ephesians or Corinthians chanted in Greek. “The Greek tongue,” say Conybeare and Howson (_St. Paul_, 1:10), “became to the Christian more than it had been to the Roman or the Jew.” It lends itself most readily to that dithyrambic shape in which highly emotional natures could best express their praise. So the irregularity of the verse; its utter lack of metrical form (as Dr. Neale found when he examined eighteen quarto volumes of it), and its simplicity of diction, all combined to put the instrumental accompaniment aside. Perhaps there was a prejudice—as Archbishop Trench affirms—against a distinctively Jewish method. Perhaps there was a disposition in this, as in other matters where art had perverted the morals of men, to oppose whatever looked toward a possible laxity. Music and banqueting, music and luxury, music and profligacy, went together so much that the early Church reacted to the extreme of Puritanism—forgetting that her Lord and Master had often worshipped in the full-choired temple itself. In the catacombs, where every manner of ordinary symbol may be found, there is neither pipe nor harp, nor any sort of musical instrument—the lyre alone excepted. But neither is there any condescension to beauty in form or color. Everything betokens a rude, uncultivated simplicity—a piety which contented itself with the barest and meagerest representations. It rose high enough to portray the face of Christ, in the ancient cemetery of Domitilla, and in one carving on a sarcophagus of the fourth century. And, remembering how repugnant anything heathenish was to the souls of those who associated pipe and tabret and harp with the bloody arena and the wild revelry of Rome, can we doubt why they mingled only their unassisted voices in these chants of praise? It can be positively added that Ambrose, Basil, and Chrysostom do not include _instrumental_ music in their eulogies of the Church’s practice upon this theme. We are justified, however, in going one step beyond this bald statement, that the early Christians _sang_ together. They sang _secum invicem_, alternately. The quotations already given show the adaptation of their hymns to this use. In this, at least, they were following the Jewish habit of responses and part-singing, whatever other changes their poverty or prejudices or principles or persecutions might have produced.