It must be remembered that the Greek hymns of the Eastern church, and the Latin hymns of the Western, were not in dead languages, as they appear to us, but in living languages, the vernacular of the persons producing and using them. While the common people may have spoken a different dialect, the monks and clergy used the classic speech as a very mother tongue. The hymns were for the most part a perfectly spontaneous expression of religious conviction and feeling, a living product of vital experience, an instinctive expression of profound faith. In closing this rapid survey of a thousand years of Greek and Latin hymns, one is impressed that they are all clerical—even monastic—in type and character. There are in many of them spontaneity, genuine feeling, and personal experience, a profound sense of spiritual realities; yet over all of them falls the shadow of the tonsured ecclesiastic, with his heart set on the impressiveness of the forms of worship rather than on the ultimate result in creating spiritual reactions in the individuals of the congregation. V. MEDIEVAL POPULAR HYMNODY Although the hymns whose origin we have been tracing were used in enriching the services of the Roman Church, and for guiding the meditations and devotions of the clerical spiritually-minded readers, we get hints of a people’s hymnody used privately and in public processions, usually in the common speech of the region. It was the age of the Troubadours, a time of universal song. It is unthinkable that a people in whose lives religion was a commanding influence should have no songs of their own about it. But among the Albigenses and Waldenses and other pietistic sects in remoter regions there must have been a hymnody all their own. They had no clergy, no connection with the Romish Church—were in utter opposition to its forms and organization. Hence their natural impulse for worship and praise compelled the creation of hymns of their own. They were spontaneous utterances expressing their spiritual life in a native vocabulary all could understand and appropriate. Although this people’s hymnody has perished, because it was produced and used by the populace and contemptuously ignored or denounced by the clerical custodians of the literature of their day, or by those of succeeding generations, the hymns were widely sung in the homes, on the streets, at popular religious festivals, and even in the remoter village churches where the clerical choirs were wanting. It was these popular religious songs, rather than the more stately hymns read and chanted by clerical and monastic choirs, that kept alive the vital spark of religious feeling and devotion to Christ. If most of the doves of song hovered over the head of the Madonna during this long period, it was because she was the mother of Jesus. It was as the representative of all motherhood that she brought home the true manhood of our Lord.