The poets of Persia and Arabia, in like
manner, have adorned their gorgeous strains with the fables and morals
of the Koran. The relics of Jewish song which we possess, with few
exceptions, are consecrated immediately to the glory of God, by whom,
indeed, they were inspired. The first Christians were wont to edify
themselves in psalms and hymns, and spiritual songs; and though we have
no specimens of these left, except the occasional doxologies ascribed to
the redeemed in the Book of Revelation, it cannot be doubted that they
used not only the psalms of the Old Testament, literally, or
accommodated to the circumstances of a new and rising Church, but that
they had original lays of their own, in which they celebrated the
praises of Christ, as the Saviour of the world. In the middle ages, the
Roman Catholic and Greek churches statedly adopted singing as an
essential part of public worship; but this, like the reading of the
Scriptures, was too frequently in an unknown tongue, by an affectation
of wisdom, to excite the veneration of ignorance, when the learned, in
their craftiness, taught that "Ignorance is the mother of devotion;" and
Ignorance was very willing to believe it. At the era of the Reformation,
psalms and hymns, in the vernacular tongue, were revived in Germany,
England, and elsewhere, among the other means of grace, of which
Christendom had been for centuries defrauded.
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