Vernacular hymns became more and more numerous during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The troubadours and minnesingers could not but stimulate their production, furnishing the metrical and rhythmical models and no small part of the hymns themselves, especially those glorifying the divine motherhood of Mary. The monks, the custodians of the literary and scholarly product of this age, had no motive for making a record of these hymns, much less of their tunes, for which, indeed, no adequate system of notation existed; hence but little of this popular hymnody survives. It was not until Gutenberg brought in the age of printing that some of it was handed down to us.[1] The great mystic, John Tauler (1290-1361), a Dominican monk of Strassburg, and others, wrote hymns of profound personal religious experience that were widely sung. John Huss of Prague (1369-1415), the renowned Bohemian martyr, wrote hymns in both Czech and Latin. In 1501 and 1505 Czech hymnbooks were issued, the first congregational hymnbooks in the vernacular, the latter containing no less than four hundred hymns, while Luther’s first collection, in 1524, nineteen years later, contained only eight. It will be seen that the foundations of vernacular singing by the people, with popular tunes, had been laid, deep and wide, foundations on which Luther could later build his German hymnody. In almost every particular he had been anticipated by the Bohemian reformers, in vernacular hymns and psalms, in the use of the people’s tunes, in the revision of hymns current among the Catholics—by discarding their worship of Mary and the saints—in the emphasis placed on music as a vehicle for conveying Gospel truths and for the intensifying of the needed propaganda. In France, in England and Scotland, in the Netherlands, the same impulses were felt. The fullness of the times had been prepared, and the great protagonist and organizer of the spiritual revolt against the hierarchy of Rome made of the hymn, which the ecclesiastical builders had rejected, one of the cornerstones of the new Church. II. LUTHER’S RELATION TO GERMAN HYMNODY Luther’s objective in regard to the hymn was entirely different from that of these representatives of traditional worship. He did not have in mind the perfecting of a liturgical service on the lines of ecclesiastical tradition, but the spiritual edification of the mass of the people whom the liturgic monks had been ignoring. While too appreciative of the Latin liturgy to cast aside psalms and canticles, as well as sequences, he rejected them as models for his hymns, and his creative impulse made the more appealing and practical folk songs his basis of form and spirit. Luther was a great lover of poetry and music. In his youth he went about singing in the streets and in private homes. He knew both the popular and the churchly music and was well prepared for his future post of liaison officer between the Latin and the coming German hymnody.