y historic
faiths have lost their melody, and we must go far back in the annals of
ethnic life to find the songs they sung.

Worship appears to have been a primitive human instinct; and even when
many gods took the place of One in the blinder faith of men it was
nature worship making deities of the elements and addressing them with
supplication and praise. Ancient hymns have been found on the monumental
tablets of the cities of Nimrod; fragments of the Orphic and Homeric
hymns are preserved in Greek anthology; many of the Vedic hymns are
extant in India; and the exhumed stones of Egypt have revealed segments
of psalm-prayers and liturgies that antedate history. Dr. Wallis Budge,
the English Orientalist, notes the discovery of a priestly hymn two
thousand years older than the time of Moses, which invokes One Supreme
Being who "cannot be figured in stone."

So far as we have any real evidence, however, the Hebrew people
surpassed all others in both the custom and the spirit of devout song.
We get snatches of their inspired lyrics in the song of Moses and
Miriam, the song of Deborah and Barak, and the song of Hannah (sometimes
called "the Old Testament Magnificat"), in the hymns of David and
Solomon and all the Temple Psalms, and later where the New Testament
gives us the "Gloria" of the Christmas angels, the thanksgiving of
Elizabeth (benedictus minor), Mary's Magnificat, the song of Zacharias
(benedictus major), the "nunc dimittis" of Simeon, and the celestial
ascriptions and hallelujahs heard by St. John in his Patmos dream. For
what we know of the first _formulated_ human prayer and praise we are
mostly indebted to the Hebrew race. They seem to have been at least the
only ancient nation that had a complete psalter--and their collection is
the mother hymn-book of the world.

Probably the first form of hymn-worship was the plain-song--a
declamatory unison of assembled singers, every voice on the same pitch,
and within the compass of five notes--and so continued, from whatever
may have stood for plain-song in Tabernacle and Temple days down to the
earliest centuries of the Christian church. It was mere melodic
progression and volume of tone, and there were no instruments--after the
captivity. Possibly it was the memory of the harps hung silent by the
rivers of Babylon that banished the timbrel from the sacred march and
the ancient lyre from the post-exilic synagogues. Only the Feast trumpet
was left. But the Jews sang.