His great work in hymnody is that he took both the psalm and the hymn from the clergy, put them into the vernacular in metrical form, with popular tunes, and restored them to the people. He added to the function of the hymn as worship those of instruction, meditation, and exhortation. He added an entirely new dimension to the value of the hymn, making it a means of creating a religious atmosphere for the whole life of the Christian—personal, family, community. He made the German people a singing people and laid the foundations for their later musical pre-eminence. As Dr. Benson says, “He took it [the hymn] out of the liturgies and put it into the people’s hearts and homes. He revived, that is to say, Paul’s conception of hymnody as a spiritual function.”[2] Luther’s hymns are the root out of which grew all our Protestant hymnody. They are like Ambrose’s in their plainness but, owing to their popular models, are superior in their metrical variety and in their cheerfulness. They are purposely cheerful: “When we sing, both heart and mind should be cheerful and merry.” They had also a more definite evangelical content, both objective and subjective, more personal experience, more exhortation, thus immensely widening the horizon of the hymn. Much of this was doubtless due to the Hussite influence. Luther anticipated Isaac Watts in demanding that the psalm should be transformed into a hymn, retaining its important subject matter, but excluding “certain forms of expression and employing other suitable ones.” The most important characteristic of the hymns of Luther and his associates was the burden of biblical truth. “What I wish is to make German hymns for this people, that the Word of God may dwell in their hearts by means of song also,” gives us his ideal and his practical purpose. Luther’s hymns bear the characteristics of their writer. They were straightforward, clear, and unpretentious, full of force and strong of conviction. He was no poet. He was not conscious of literary impulses. His diction often is more forcible than elegant. Indeed, he was a peasant within whose horizon the elegant did not appear. Dr. Philip Schaff says of him: “He had an extraordinary faculty of expressing profound thought in the clearest language. In this gift he is not surpassed by any uninspired writer; and herein lies the secret of his power.... His style is racy, forcible, and idiomatic.” Lord Selborne, an English hymnologist, remarks on Luther’s hymns, “Homely and sometimes rugged in form, and for the most part objective in tone, they are full of fire, manly simplicity, and strong faith.”