That this popular hymnody of the medieval period has failed to survive is no proof of its worthlessness. It is no condemnation of the sermons of Chrysostom, of Peter the Hermit, of Martin Luther, or of a thousand sermons preached every Sunday that they perish with the breath that gave them utterance. They served a good purpose in their brief hour. That hundreds of Watts’ hymns, and thousands by Charles Wesley, are no longer sung, does not establish their uselessness, but only that their spiritual as well as verbal idiom is not adapted to the needs of our day. _Chapter XI_ LUTHER AND THE GERMAN HYMN I. PRE-REFORMATION VERNACULAR HYMNS While there has been a traceable logical progress in the development of the Christian hymn, as in that of material creation, the generative relations are not always clear. The link between Greek and Latin hymnody may be found in Hilary of Poitiers in the fourth century, but thereafter for five centuries they developed side by side along independent lines. The same may be said regarding the Latin and German hymns, Luther furnishing the connection. But his connection is not so apparent with the clerical Latin hymn as with the general impulse toward the vernacular hymn. Luther did not directly build upon the Latin hymns, although he did translate a few of them, but on the popular songs and hymns that were current in his day. Since the eleventh century vernacular hymns and religious songs had been in private use. The Gregorian rule that Scripture psalms and canticles only should be sung in public services had been strictly enforced in the monasteries and larger centers; but even there the proses and sequences had been allowed—in Latin, of course. The first hymns sung in the common speech were enlargements of the short responses allowed the people, “Kyrie eleison” and “Christe eleison” being surviving Greek phrases which were used as refrains to the stanzas of the hymns. They were called “Leisen,” or “Leichen.” Our English word “lay” is a derivative from the same source. Many of these “Leisen” mingled German and Latin words. Back of the wrong conception of the way of salvation and the fanaticism expressed in self-torture, the Flagellant Monks of the later medieval period had an intensity of conviction and a selfless devotion that inevitably found expression in song. Bands of them made pilgrimages through Christian lands in processions, singing hymns to Mary and her Son in the common speech, little recking that they were helping to fertilize the soil from which should spring the Great Reformation. When King Conrad was anointed in 1024, our information is that “joyfully they marched, the clergy singing in Latin, the people in German, each after his own fashion”, but this was not a church service, it was a festival procession.