It is the high festival ode of the ages, used in celebrating victories or other stately occasions of great public interest. Its comprehensiveness, nobility of thought, and elevated style befit the coronation of kings or the investiture of popes. For the mass of our churches, great as it is, it has only a historical interest. It might find impressive use as a responsive reading. II. EARLY LATIN HYMN WRITERS Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (circa 300-367), “the hammer of the Arians,” was exiled into Phrygia by Constantius because he called the Arian emperor “The Antichrist.” In his exile he came in touch with the fierce propaganda waged on both sides by means of hymns. His controversial zeal recognized the opportunity, and he wrote a great many anti-Arian hymns, which he gathered on his return to France into his _Liber Mysteriorum_. That his book was lost was no great calamity, for his fiery, combative spirit, valuable enough at the time, had no message for future generations. He woke a new interest in singing and furnished a more practicable model. He undoubtedly suggested the antiphonal singing he found in the “Hinterland” of Asia Minor and thus prepared the way for his fellow-countryman, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. If the latter is recognized as the father of Latin hymnody, and even of all the Western hymnody, Catholic and Protestant, Hilary is its grandfather. Ambrose (340-397) had been a lawyer, not a product of the ecclesiastical system, and he brought to his office a freshness of insight and of resources that might have been atrophied in the mechanical clerical education of his day. The value of song in supporting the spirits of his followers when besieged for days in his cathedral suggested to his practical mind, stimulated by his musical nature, its wider use when the battle was won. Ambrose broke new ground for Latin hymnody in several essential particulars. He transformed the merely reading hymn, confined to the clergy, to a singing hymn for the congregation, writing hymns for the express purpose of promoting congregational song. He passed by the artificial classical meters for the simplest of lyrical meters, four lines of four iambic measures each, which has come down to us through the centuries as Long Meter. He also introduced the free use of rhymes. Ambrose was not only a learned man of great ability, but—what is more to our present purpose—a man of great piety and devotion. He sought to vitalize and actualize the devotions, personal and collective, of the Christian Church, to make them genuine and heartfelt as against the formalists to whom the mere letter is all-important. His hymns are evidences of his spirituality. There is room for stanzas from only a few of them: “O splendor of the Father’s face, Affording light from light, Thou Light of light, thou fount of grace, Thou day of day most bright.