.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