“Hail, glad’ning Light, of His pure glory poured Who is the immortal Father heavenly, blest, Holiest of holies, Jesus Christ, our Lord! Now we are come to the sun’s hour of rest; The lights of evening round us shine; We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit divine.” _The Relation of Hymns to Psalms and Canticles._ In the very nature of the case, these individual songs and hymns and psalms had no authority back of them. They were the “spirituals,” the Gospel songs of their day and generation. Most of them were improvisations for a single service—flying sparks from the anvil of the Spirit. Undoubtedly others had a longer life, were written out and passed from hand to hand and even from generation to generation. These hymns were mostly in Greek, though some were in Syriac, and as far as they were given a standard form they used Greek classical meters. Some were modeled on the Septuagint psalms and were known as “private psalms.” Many were odes, like the “Odes of Solomon.” But it is quite evident that this body of song was never regarded as on an equality with the Psalms of the Jewish church, or with the Canticles of the New Testament. These had the sanctions of the rapidly crystallizing canon of the New Testament, and the established canon of the Old, which gave an authority that was lacking in the current hymnody. The relation was even more pronounced than that in our own day between the body of hymns surviving through the generations recognized as “standard” and the current religious songs of the hour. In addition to the Psalms taken over from the Jewish psalter (not over one-half of which were ever sung) and the Canticles of Luke’s Gospel, there gradually rose a subsidiary body of canticles which by the fourth century had been for the most part fully formulated. They were developments of passages from both the Old and New Testament. In addition to the ejaculatory responses, “Alleluia” and “Hosanna,” the following were hymns authorized to be used in Christian services: 1. The _Gloria in Excelsis_, developed from the song of the angels as found in Luke, known as the Greater Doxology. 2. The _Ter Sanctus_, based on Isaiah 6:3, possibly later associated with Revelation 4:8, and called the Cherubical Hymn. 3. The _Benedicite_, the song of the three Hebrew children in the furnace, a paraphrase of the forty-eighth Psalm, likely taken from the Apocrypha. 4. The _Gloria Patri_ or Lesser Doxology, apparently handed down from the Apostolic time, developed from the baptismal formula. It was expanded during the Arian controversy, adding “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”[2] _The Hymn as Propaganda._