The canonical book of Psalms may be viewed properly as the Bible’s own devotional book. Dietrich Bonhoeffer made this point in his brief work The Psalms: Prayer Book of the Bible.2 Indeed, it is the primary source from which all other devotional books have been drawn. … “There is no one book of Scripture that is more helpful to the devotions of the saints than this,” says Matthew Henry, “and it has been so in all ages of the church, ever since it was written.”3 But the Psalter is not only our prayer book, it is also and even primarily God’s hymnbook, given by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: “God…by the mouth of thy servant David hast said,” as the apostle Peter expressed it (Acts 4:24, 25). “From earliest times the Psalter has been both the hymn-book and the prayer book of the Christian Church,” say Derek Kidner and J. G. Thomson.4

Apostolic Church

“Psalmody was a part of the synagogue service that naturally passed over into the life of the church,” says E. F. Harrison.5 Morning prayers at the synagogue normally began with the chanting of Psalms 145 to 150. Not surprisingly, we find the early Christians lifting their voices “with one accord” (Acts 4:24), likely indicating singing or reciting psalms in unison. These were not spontaneous free prayers. Luke supplies us with the text of Psalm 146:6, likely indicating that they sang the whole psalm, if not a series of psalms, following the pattern of the synagogue: “And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with one accord, and said, Lord, thou art God, which hast made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is” (Acts 4:24).…

Hughes Old reckons that Acts 4 holds “a rather thorough description of a daily prayer service.”6 He says, “This prayer service held by the Apostles, like the prayer service of the synagogue, was made up of three elements, the chanting of psalms, a passage of Scripture, and prayers of supplication and intercession.”7 Note as well the instinct to interpret the Psalms christologically and to allow the Psalms to shape the prayer life of the church.

“The Psalms formed the core of the praises of the New Testament church,” as Hughes Old has observed.8 The Apostle Paul commanded both the Ephesian and Colossian churches to sing psalms (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16) and commented on the Corinthian practice of doing so (1 Cor. 14:15, 26). James instructed his readers (“the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad” [l:l], apparently referring to the whole church) to sing psalms (5:13, ψάλλω). With surprising frequency the New Testament cites the Psalms (e.g. Acts 2:24-26; Heb. 1:5-13; 2:5-10,12,13; 3:7 -4:7; 5:1-7), demonstrating as they do a keen awareness of both their christological and devotional importance.9 “From the earliest times the Christian community sang the psalms,” summarizes Mary Berry, “following the practice of the synagogue.”10

Patristic Church

The church fathers and earliest Christian writings demonstrate a devotion to the Psalms, and particularly to the singing of the Psalms, that is startling.11 Calvin Stapert speaks of the fathers’ “enthusiastic promotion of psalm singing,” which, he says, “reached an unprecedented peak in the fourth century,”12 James McKinnon speaks of “an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm” for the Psalms in the second half of the fourth century.13 The writers of The Psalms in Christian Worship and others, including most recently John D. Witvliet, have collected a number of testimonies of psalm singing from the church fathers that survive to this day.14 For example, Tertullian (c. 155-230), in the second century, testified that psalm singing was not only an essential feature of the worship of his day but also had become an important part of the daily life of the people. Athanasius (300-343) says it was the custom of his day to sing psalms, which he calls “a mirror of the soul,”15 and even “a book that includes the whole life of man, all conditions of the mind and all movements of thought.”16 Eusebius (c. 260-c. 340), bishop of Caesarea, left this vivid picture of the psalm singing of his day: “The command to sing Psalms in the name of the Lord was obeyed by everyone in every place: for the command to sing is in force in all churches which exist among nations, not only the Greeks but also throughout the whole world, and in towns villages and in the fields.”17 Augustine (343-430), in his Confessions (ix.4), says, “[The Psalms] are sung through the whole world, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.”18 Jerome (d. 420) said that he learned the Psalms when he was a child and sang them daily in his old age. He also writes, “The Psalms were continually to be heard in the fields and vineyards of Palestine. The plowman, as he held his plow, chanted the Hallelujah; and the reaper, the vinedresser, and the shepherd sang something from the Psalms of David. Where the meadows were colored with flowers, and the singing birds made their plaints, the Psalms sounded even more sweetly. These Psalms are our lovesongs, these the instruments of our agriculture.”19 Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 431-c. 482) represents boatmen, who, while they worked their heavy barges up the waters of ancient France, “[sing] Psalms till the banks echo with ‘Hallelujah.’” Chrysostom (d. 407), the renowned Greek father and patriarch of Constantinople, says, All Christians employ themselves in David’s Psalms more frequently than in any other part of the Old or New Testament. The grace of the Holy Ghost hath so ordered it that they should be recited and sung night and day. In the Church’s vigils the first, the middle, and the last are David’s Psalms. In the morning David’s Psalms are sought for; and David is the first, the midst, and the last of the day. At funeral solemnities, the first, the midst, and the last is David. Many who know not a letter can say David’s Psalms by heart. In all the private houses, where women toil—in the monasteries—in the deserts, where men converse with God, the first, the midst, and the last is David.20

Over against this devotion to singing psalms, there was a growing skepticism about hymns “of human composition” throughout this period because of the use to which they were put by heretics. For this reason the Council of Braga (350) ruled, “Except the Psalms and hymns of the Old and New Testaments, nothing of a poetical nature is to be sung in the church.”21 The important Council of Laodicea, which met about AD 360, forbade “the singing of uninspired hymns in the church, and the reading of uncanonical books of Scripture” (canon 59).22 While these were not the decisions of ecumenical councils, nearly one hundred years later, the Council of Chalcedon (451), the largest of all the general councils, confirmed the Laodicean canons.

We cite these decisions to underscore the point that the Psalter clearly was the primary songbook of the early church. Worship in the early church was “according to Scripture” and consequently filled with scriptural praise.

Middle Ages

It is certain that during the patristic period all of the people participated in singing psalms.23 But during the Middle Ages, congregational singing eroded. “More and more it was the monks who were charged with the praise of the church,” notes Hughes Old.24 The people gave way to the monastic schola cantorum. Over time the church’s music also became increasingly sophisticated. The tunes were difficult, and the words were in Latin. The common people could neither sing nor understand them.

Still, the use of the Psalms was, if anything, intensified by the medieval monastic orders, which, following the rules of St. Benedict, chanted their way through the entire Psalter each week.25 “Psalmody is also at the heart of the music of the mass,” Mary Berry reminds us.26 Most of the texts used for the choral propers (the parts of the service that changed according to the calendar) were taken from the Psalms. The Psalms dominated the music of the monastery and the cathedral, even if the music and language proved too remote for the town church or village chapel.27

The Reformation

The Reformers were aware of much of this history, as Hughes Old has demonstrated, and sought to restore congregational psalmody.28 They appealed to the kind of scriptural and patristic evidence that we have already noted. For example, Bucer appealed to Pliny the Younger’s report on the worship of the early church. Calvin appealed to the church historians (e.g. Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen) as well as the church fathers (e.g. Augustine, Basil, Chrysostom). While the Reformers did not advocate the exclusive singing of Psalms, says Old, they did express “a partiality for Psalms and hymns drawn from Scripture.”29 The Reformers did not oppose moderate use of hymns “of human composition” in principle. Rather, congregational psalmody was a preference that grew out of their consistent concern that worship be conducted according to Scripture. For their ideal to be realized, it would be necessary to develop a simpler music as well as vernacular translations. The new psalmody would be designed for congregations rather than trained monastic choirs.

It was Luther who first suggested that congregations should sing the Psalms. Luther specified in his Formula missae (1523) the use of German hymns in the still Latin mass. In a letter to Georg Spalatin he described his plan to develop vernacular psalmody. His reason for doing so is typical of the whole program of reform: “so that the Word of God may be among the people also in the form of music.”30…

Moreover, among Reformed Protestants, it was whole psalms and the whole Psalter that were to be sung. Why sung? Because they were written to be sung—and sung in context. The biblical texts the Reformers cited, the same ones mentioned previously in this chapter, demonstrated that the early church sang psalms and the New Testament commanded them to be sung, an understanding reinforced by testimonies from the early church fathers, also already cited in this chapter. The Psalms are not merely a collection of poems to be recited. They are songs, each one complete in itself and having its own integrity, to be sung. “The Psalms may be spoken;’ says Paul Westermeyer, “but they cry out to be sung.”31 That in itself is worth pondering. “The Psalms are poems,” adds C. S. Lewis, “and poems intended to be sung.”32 Calvin further explains the Reformers’ partiality to the Psalms in his preface to the Psalter (1543). The Psalms, he argued, were the songs of the Holy Spirit.

Moreover, that which St. Augustine has said is true, that no one is able to sing things worthy of God except that which he has received from Him. Therefore, when we have looked thoroughly, and searched here and there, we shall not find better songs nor more fitting of the purpose, than the Psalms of David, which the Holy Spirit spoke and made through him. And moreover, when we sing them, we are certain that God puts in our mouths these, as if He Himself were singing in us to exalt His glory.33

John D. Witvliet points out that one of the distinguishing dynamics of Reformation-era psalm singing was “the singing of whole or large portions of individual Psalms rather than the versicles used in the medieval Mass.”34 The Reformers would not have been content with the “versicles,” or fragments of psalms, that are virtually all that have been available in recent years. This would be true of the partial collections of Psalms (sixty-five to eighty psalm settings) found in the Presbyterian hymnals of the last century (e.g. The Presbyterian Hymnal [1933], The Hymnbook [1955], Trinity Hymnal [1961, 1980], as well as their compilers’ “too prissy” (as Hughes Old calls it) editing of those that were included. They “went much too far in trying to clean up the treasury of David.”35 Neither would they have been content with the practice of isolating particular verses of psalms to be sung as “Scripture songs.” To sing the Psalms is to sing the Psalter. Each psalm has its own thematic integrity. The Book of Psalms as a whole is characterized by theological, christological, and experiential wholeness. The Holy Spirit gave the Psalter as a complete collection whose strength is collective: laments not isolated from praise, imprecations not isolated from confessions of sin, but all together. The whole gospel of the whole Christ is found in the whole Psalter.

Consequently, the Reformers produced collections of psalms for singing as an early part of their liturgical reforms. The Strasbourg German Service Book of 1525 (just eight years after Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses) included a collection of metrical psalms. This collection was increased in the Strasbourg Psalter of 1526 and subsequent editions (1530, 1537). The Constance Hymn Book of 1540, called by Hughes Old “one of the most important monuments in the history of Reformed liturgy,” included hymns by Zwingli, Leo Jud, Luther, Wolfgang Capito, and Wolfgang Musculus, among others.36 But half of the collection was metrical psalms.

Genevan psalmody began with the French Evangelical Psalm Book of 1539 and grew into the Geneva Psalter of 1542, and finally the Geneva Psalter of 1562, a complete psalter of 150 psalms, metered for singing, most with a distinctive tune.

The singing of psalms became one of the most obvious marks of Reformed Protestantism. The Genevan psalms were translated into Spanish, Dutch, German, and English, among others, 24 languages in all. English editions developed and evolved both in the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. The French refugees streaming into Geneva in large numbers immediately embraced psalmody. Louis F. Benson, the leading hymnologist of a previous generation, wrote a series of scholarly articles in 1909 for the Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society entitled “John Calvin and the Psalmody of the Reformed Churches.”37 In these articles he discussed the impact that the Geneva Psalter had upon the French exiles in Geneva as they first encountered psalm singing: “The sight of the great congregation gathered in St. Peter’s, with their little Psalm books in their own hands, the great volume of voices praising God in the familiar French, the grave melodies carrying holy words, the fervor of the singing and the spiritual uplift of the singers,—all of these moved deeply the emotions of the French exiles now first in contact with them.”38 As these refugees flowed in and out of France, they took with them a love for the Psalms that they had learned in Geneva. By 1553 the Genevan Psalms were sung in all of the Protestant churches of France.39 In 1559 it became the official “hymnal” of the Reformed churches of France. These psalms played a great part in “spreading the Genevan doctrines in France,” says Benson.40 When the first complete edition was published in 1562 it was immediately consumed, going through 25 editions in its first year of publication.…41

The completion of the Genevan Psalms proved to be a providential provision for the French Protestants, as attempts at reconciliation with Rome and the French crown failed, and civil war broke out that year. “They found in it,” Benson says, “a well opened in the desert, from which they drew consolation under persecution, strength to resist valiantly the enemies of their faith; with the assured conviction that God was fighting for them, and also (it must be added) would be revenged against their foes.”42 “To know the Psalms,” says Benson, “became a primary duty” for the Huguenots, as French Protestants became known.43 The powerful appeal of the Psalms sung “made Psalmody as much a part of the daily life as of public worship.”44 Families at home, men and women in the workplace or engaged in daily tasks, were recognized as French Protestants because they were overheard singing psalms. “The Psalter became to them the manual of the spiritual life.”45 Moreover, the Psalter “ingrained its own characteristics deep in the Huguenot character, and had a great part in making it what it was,” says Benson.46 For the Huguenot, “called to fight and suffer for his principles, the habit of Psalm singing was a providential preparation.”47 Benson elaborates: “The Psalms were his confidence and strength in quiet and solitude, his refuge from oppression; in the wars of religion they became the songs of the camp and the march, the inspiration of the battle and the consolation in death, whether on the field or at the martyrs’ stake. It is not possible to conceive of the history of the Reformation in France in such a way that Psalm singing should not have a great place in it.”48

A similar story can be told of the Scottish Presbyterians. As John Knox and other Protestant refugees returned to Scotland from exile on the continent in the late 1550s, they came with a zeal for an English-language psalter corresponding to the Genevan Psalter. The result eventually was the Scottish Psalter of 1564, then of 1635, and finally of 1650. The last of these became the standard psalter for the Scots and “passed straight into the affections of the common people,” says Millar Patrick, in his Four Centuries of Scottish Psalmody.49 “It was a godsend,” he says, published a few years before the enormous suffering of the Killing Times (1668-88), by which time “it had won its place in the people’s hearts, and its lines were so deeply imprinted upon their memories that it is always the language thus given them for the expression of their emotions, which in the great hours we find upon their lips.”50 Note what he says: The language that they used to interpret and express their experience was the language of the Psalms, which they sang. Patrick continues: “You can imagine what it would be to them. Books in those days were few. The Bible came first. The Psalm book stood next in honor. It was their constant companion, their book of private devotion, as well as their manual of church worship. In godly households it was the custom to sing through it in family worship.”51

To their psalms they turned, he says, “to sustain their souls in hours of anxiety and peril,” and from them they “drew the language of strength and consolation.”52 He continues, “It was there that they found a voice for faith, the patience, the courage, and the hope that bore them through those dark and cruel years.”53 The Scottish metrical psalms, he says, “are stained with the blood of the martyrs, who counted not their lives dear to them that by suffering and sacrifice they might keep faith with conscience and save their country’s liberties from defeat.”54

The singing of psalms has been an important part of the “strength and consolation” of all the churches of Reformed Protestantism, including their near cousins, the Congregational and Baptist churches, for 300 years. Early collections of metrical psalms were published among the Dutch in 1540. In 1568 Peter Dathenus (c. 1531-1588) published a Dutch translation of the French psalter “carefully molded after Genevan texts and melodies,” as Butler explains, “which became the official Calvinist songbook for the next two centuries” in Protestant Netherlands.55 Similarly, the German language edition of the Genevan Psalter, the work of Ambrosius Lobwasser (1515-1585), was published in 1573. Even today the Genevan psalms form the core of the sung praises of the French, Swiss, and Dutch Reformed churches.

The Reformed and Presbyterian churches in America were exclusively psalm singing for nearly 200 years, from the Pilgrim fathers to the Jacksonian Era, as were the Congregationalists and Baptists. The first book published in North America was a psalter. The enormously popular Bay Psalm Book (1640) was the hymnal of American Puritanism, undergoing 70 printings through 1773.56 When the Bay Psalm Book and the favorite among Scots-Irish immigrants, the Scottish Psalter (1650), were eventually superseded, it was by a book that purported to be yet another psalter, Isaac Watts’s The Psalms of David Imitated (1719).57 Ironically Watts’s hymns and psalm paraphrases were the primary vehicle through which hymns finally were accepted into the public worship of Protestants, yet not without considerable controversy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Still, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that hymns began to overtake the Psalms in popular use.58

In addition to the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, the Anglican and Episcopal churches boast a 300-year history of exclusive psalmody, singing first from the Sternhold and Hopkin’s Old Version (1547, 1557), then Tate and Brady’s New Version (1696, 1698). Not until the publishing of Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861 did hymns gain entrance to the Anglican liturgy.

Decline

The supplanting of the metrical psalms by hymns was gradual in American Protestantism. From 1620 to 1800, metrical psalmody dominated the American church scene. The Pilgrim fathers arrived with their Ainsworth Psalter, which gave way, as we’ve noted, to the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the psalter of American Puritanism. Presbyterians sang from the Scottish Psalter of 1650, and Anglicans from either Steinhold and Hopkins (1562) or Tate and Brady’s New Version (1696). In the 1750s the churches of New England and beyond began to vote to adopt Watts’s Paraphrases (1719), the popularity of which, along with his hymns, could not be suppressed.

By 1800 the battles over the inclusion of hymns in public worship had largely been fought and won or lost, according to one’s perspective. Subsequent hymnbooks for the next 65 years included both psalms and hymns, typically with a large opening section of psalms. For example, both the New School Presbyterian hymnal of 1843, Church Psalmist, and the Old School hymnal of 1843, Psalms and Hymns, open with multiple versions of all 150 Psalms, making up 40 percent of the former hymnal and over 50 percent of the latter.59 The distinction between psalms and hymns was clearly maintained. As late as 1863, the New School General Assembly voiced its disapproval of hymnals which, “in the arrangement, blot out the distinction between those songs of devotion which are God-inspired and those which are man-inspired.”60 Yet with the publication of the Hymnal of the Presbyterian Church (1866), the distinction was gone, and the Psalms had all but disappeared, without even a scriptural index with which to trace them.61

The 1866 book was soon superseded by the first hymnal after the reunion of New and Old Schools in the north, The Presbyterian Hymnal of 1874. Again, psalms are nowhere evident. If one were to hunt carefully, he could find a few, but they are well hidden and nowhere identified.62 The same is true of the hymnal of 1895 and its revision in 1911, which still lacked a Scripture index by which to hunt down the Psalms.63 The southern Presbyterians published The New Psalms and Hymns in 1901, with a significant selection of psalms, but they too were scattered and unidentified,64 prompting Benson’s observation that it was “Psalms and Hymns in name only.”65 By the time of the southern church’s The Presbyterian Hymnal of 1927, the Psalms had completely disappeared. 66 It, too, lacked a Scripture index by which to trace the Psalms, and even the obligatory “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” (Psalm 100) was missing. The northern church’s The Hymnal of 1933 did have Psalm 100 and Psalm 23, but little else, and also lacked a Scripture index.67 Psalm singing in the mainline had reached its lowest point. It would be left to the smaller Reformed and Presbyterian denominations to keep psalm singing alive in the twentieth century, as the United Presbyterians (UP), Associate Reformed Presbyterians (ARP), Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (RPCNA), and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (CPC) maintained their commitment to metrical psalm singing.

A similar story can be told about the Congregationalists and Baptists. The Connecticut Association commissioned Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, to revise and complete Watts’s psalms, to which was added a collection of 263 hymns, published as The Psalms of David in 1801. Dwight’s work, plus that of Samuel Worcester, Psalms and Hymns of 1819 (revised in 1823 and 1834, and frequently reprinted), familiarly known as “Watts and Select,” solidified the dominance of Watts’s psalmody and hymnody into the Civil War era.68 Thereafter the Psalms quickly fell out of congregational hymnals. Indeed, with the advent of the gospel-song tradition in the post-Civil War era, this new hymnody, says Yale’s Sydney Ahlstrom, “swept much of Isaac Watts,” and “the older Reformed ‘Psalms’ … into disuse and oblivion.”69

This eclipse of psalmody in the late nineteenth century is quite unprecedented. The Psalms, as we have seen, had been the dominant form of church song beginning with the church fathers, all through the Middle Ages, during the Reformation and Post-Reformation eras, and into the modern era. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the church had lost the voice through which it had expressed its sung praise for more than 1,800 years.

—Terry Johnson is pastor of the historic Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah, Ga. He is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. This article is an excerpt from the book Sing A New Song* (Reformation Heritage), edited by Joel R. Beeke and Anthony T. Selvaggio, and is used with permission.

Endnotes

1Some of this material appeared in T. L. Johnson, “Restoring Psalm Singing to Our Worship, in ed. Phillip G. Ryken, et al., Give Praise to God: A Vision for Reforming Worship (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Publishing, 2003), 257-86. It will also appear in a forthcoming publication: The Case for Historic Reformed Worship.

2Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Psalms: Prayer Book of the Bible (1940; Oxford: SLG Press, 1982).

3Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the Old and New Testament (Philadelphia: Tavar & Hogan, 1829), in his introduction to the Book of Psalms.

4Derek Kidner and J. G. Thomson, “Book of Psalms,” in J. D. Douglas, et. al, The New Bible Dictionary (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1962), 1059.

5Everett F. Harrison, The Apostolic Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 134.

6Hughes O. Old, Worship That Is Reformed According to Scripture (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1984), 145.

7Ibid., 37.

8According to William L. Holladay, there are 55 direct citations of the Psalms in the New Testament. R.E.O. White finds another 150 clear allusions to the Psalter and still another 200 fainter ones. See William L. Holladay, The Psalms through Three Thousand Years: Prayerbook of a Cloud of Witnesses (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 115; “Psalms,” R.E.O. White, in Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989), 373.

9Mary Berry, “Psalmody” in The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship, ed. J. G. Davies (Westminster Press, 1986), 450; Stapert, citing the work of James McKinnon, “The Question of Psalmody,” and J. A. Smith, “The Ancient Synagogue, the Early Church and Singing,” argues that the psalms were not sung in the synagogue but the home and came from there into Christian households and finally into formal worship.

10Holladay, 162-65. He notes that 1 Clement (c. AD 96) has forty-nine citations from thirty-two psalms; Epistle of Barnabas (c. AD 130) has twelve citations from ten psalms; Didache ( second century AD) has three citations from three psalms; Ignatius of Antioch (c. AD 98–117) and Polycarp (fl. c. AD 175–c.195) make virtually no reference to the Psalms, but Justin Martyr’s writings (c. AD 150) are loaded with citations from the Psalms (e.g. Dialogue with Trypho has 47 references from 24 psalms), as are those of Irenaeus (c. AD 70-155/160).

11Calvin R. Stapert, A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church, The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 150.

12Cited by Paul Bradshaw, “From Word to Action: The Changing Role of Psalmody in Early Christianity.” in ed. Martin Dudley, Like a Two-Edged Sword: The Word of God in Liturgy and History (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1995), 25.

13John McNaughter, The Psalms in Christian Worship (1907; Edmonton: Still Water Revival Books, 1992); John D. Witvliet, The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship: A Brief Introduction and Guide to Resources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 3–10.

14McNaughter, The Psalms in Christian Worship, 550.

15Berry, “Psalmody;’ 451.

16Ibid.

17McNaughter, The Psalms in Christian Worship, 550.

18Ibid., 504.

19Ibid., 166, 504.

20Ibid., 550; cf. Mary Berry, “Hymns,” in The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1986), 262.

21Ibid., 167; cf. Stapert, A New Song, 159.

22Berry, “Psalmody,” 451.

23Old, Worship, 40; Westemeyet; Te Deum, 106–110.

24Stapert, A New Song for an Old World, 161; Berry, “Psalmody;’ 451.

25Ibid.

26Old, Worship, 42.

27Old, Patristic Roots, 253–69.

28Ibid., 258.

29Bartlett R. Butler, “Hymns,” in ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2: 290. .

30Westermeyer, 25.

31C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1958), 2. “The Psalms were written to be sung, not just read. To sing them is to honor God’s intention in giving them to us” (Lawrence C. Rolf, Let Us Sing, [Atlanta: Great Commission Publications, 1991], 65).

32Calvin, Preface to the Psalter, 1543.

33John D. Witvliet, “The Spirituality of the Psalter: Metrical Psalms in Liturgy and Life in Calvin’s Geneva,” Calvin Theological Journal, 32 (1997): 296; also available in John D. Witvliet, Worship Seeking Understanding: Windows into Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 203-229. See 228.

34Hughes O. Old, “The Psalms as Christian Prayer: A Preface to the Liturgical Use of the Psalter,” unpublished manuscript, 1978, 18.

35Old, Worship, 44.

36Louis F. Benson, “John Calvin and the Psalmody of the Reformed Churches,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society, 5, 1 (March 1909): 1–21; 5, 2 (June 1909): 55–87; 5, 3 (September 1909), 107–118.

37Ibid., 57.

38Ibid., 67.

39Ibid., 69.

40Ibid., 71.

41Frank A. James, III, “Calvin the Evangelist” in RTS: Reformed Quarterly, fall 2001, 8; ed. W. Sanford Reid, John Calvin: His Influence in the Western World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1982), 77.

42Benson, “John Calvin and Psalmody,” 77, 78.

43Ibid., 73.

44Ibid.

45Ibid.

46Ibid.

47Ibid.

48Ibid.

49Millar Patrick, Four Centuries of Scottish Psalmody (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 115.

50Ibid.

51Ibid.

52Ibid.

53Ibid.

54Ibid., 116.

55Butler, “Hymns” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 2: 294.

56The Bay Psalm Book: Being a Facsimile Reprint of the First Edition in 1640, with an introduction by Wilberforce Eames (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1903), ix.

57Ibid. New England’s churches began to vote to change to Watts in the 1750s.

58Louis F. Benson tells this story in The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Worship (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), 161–218.

59Church Psalmist; or Psalms and Hymns for the Public, Social and Private Use of Evangelical Christians, 5th ed. (New York: Mark H. Newman, 1845); Psalms and Hymns Adapted to Social, Private, and Public Worship in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1843).

60Benson, English Hymns, 386, n.69.

61Hymnal of the Presbyterian Church Ordered by the General Assembly (Philadelphia: Board of Education, 1866).

62The Presbyterian Hymnal (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath-School Work, 1874).

63The Hymnal (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian Board of Publications & Sabbath-School Work, 1911).

64The New Psalms and Hymns (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publications, 1901).

65Benson, English Hymns, 256.

66The Presbyterian Hymnal (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publications, 1927).

67The Hymnal (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Education, 1933).

68See Benson, English Hymns, 16-68; 373-75; 388-89.

69Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), 846.