with all the fervour of a newly quickened first-love. “It is marvellous” - says the Spanish Carmelite Thomas à Jesu, - “How greatly the hymns of Luther helped forward the Lutheran cause. Not only the churches and schools echo with them, but even the private houses, the workshops, the markets, streets, and fields.” For converted into imperishable hymns (by Luther, Albinus, Franck, Gerhardt, Jonas, Musculus, Poliander, Ringwaldt, and many more) the ancient Psalms were transferred anew into the psalmody of the German as of the Scandinavian[1]
Lutheran church. In the French church Clément Marot translated into verse 30 Ps., then 19 more (1541-43) and Theodore Beza added the rest (1562).[2]
Calvin introduced the Psalms in Marot's version as early as 1542 into the service of the Geneva church, and the Psalms have since continued to be the favorite hymns of the Reformed church. Goudimel, the martyr of St. Bartholemew's night and teacher of Palestrina, composed the melodies and chorales. The English Established church adopted the Psalms direct as they are, as a portion of its liturgy, the Congregational church followed the example of the sister-churches of the Continent. And how industriously the Psalter was moulded into Greek verse, as by Olympia Morata (d. 1555)[3] and under the influence of Melanthon[4] into Latin! The paraphrases of Helius Eoban Hesse (of whom Martin Herz, 1860, has given a biographical sketch),[5]
Joh. Major, Jacob Micyllus (whose life Classen has written, 1859), Joh. Stigel (whose memory has been revived by Paulus Cassel 1860), Gre. Bersmann (d. 1611), and also that begun by Geo. Buchanan during his sojourn in a Portuguese monastery, are not only learned performances, but productions of an inward
- ↑ The Swedish hymns taken from the Psalms have been recently remodelled for congregational use and augmented by Runeberg (Oerebro 1858).
- ↑ Vid., Félix Bovet, Les Psaumes de Marot et de Bèze, in the Lausanne magazine, Le Chrétien Evangélique, 1866, No. 4.
- ↑ Vid., examples in Bonnet's life of Olympia Morata. Germ. transl. by Merschmann 1860 S. 131-135.
- ↑ Vid., Wilhelm Thilo, Melanchthon im Dienste an heil. Schrift (Berlin, 1859), S. 28.
- ↑ His Psalms (to which Veit Dietrich wrote notes) passed through forty editions in seventy years.
