E.J.H.

    [By way of an appropriate pendent to our Correspondent’s
    paper, we quote the following excellent passage on Psalmody,
    by the Rev. W.S.  Gilly, in his Memoir of Felix Neff.]

The effect produced by the words, or by the music, or by the combination of the two, is such, that the cultivation of psalmody has ever been earnestly recommended by those who are anxious to excite true piety.  Tradition, history, revelation, and experience, bear witness to the truth, that there is nothing to which the natural feelings of man respond more readily.  Every nation, whose literary remains have come down to us, appears to have consecrated the first efforts of its muse to religion, or rather all the first compositions in verse seem to have grown out of devotional effusions.  We know that the book of Job, and others, the most ancient of the Old Testament, contain rhythmical addresses to the Supreme Being.  Many of the psalms were composed centuries before the time of king David, and it is not extravagant to imagine, that some of them may have been sung even to Jubal’s lyre, and were handed down from patriarch to patriarch by oral tradition.  Nor did the fancy of Milton take too bold a flight when it pleased itself with the idea that our first parents, taught by the carols of the birds in the garden of Eden, raised their voices in tuneful notes of praise to the Creator of all, when they walked forth in the cool of the day to meet their God before the fall.  But this is certain, that one of our Lord’s last acts of social worship on earth was to sing a hymn with his disciples.  Few, therefore, can be slow to understand, that if Christ and his disciples broke forth in holy song, immediately after the solemnities of the Last Supper, and just before the Shepherd was smitten, and the sheep were scattered; and if Paul and Silas sung praises unto God in their prison-house, congregational worship may always be the better for such helps.  Add to these examples, the apostolical exhortation to the merry hearted to sing psalms, and the apostolical descriptions of the choral strains which resound in the courts of heaven, and we cannot but feel certain, that the services of the Christian church were cheered from the earliest times by hymns and psalms.  “Those Nazarenes sing hymns to Christ,” said Pliny, in contempt.  We thank him for recording the fact.  The words of the Te Deum were composed by a native of Gaul, (for the use probably of one of the churches on the Rhone, or of the Alps) about the third century; and at the same period, men, women, youths of both sexes, and even children joined in the psalmody of the sanctuaries, in such cordial and harmonious unison, that a father of the church has well compared the sound to the loud, but not discordant, noise of many waves beating against the sea shore.