Hallel_ series in the Psaltery, consisting of Psalms
113 to 118 inclusive. It was a practice among the Jews to chant these
holy songs at the paschal table. Fraught as they were with Messianic
hope, it was fitting that such a hymn should ascend to the skies in the
hour when God's Paschal Lamb was about to be offered.

The Christian Church followed the example of Jesus and His disciples by
singing from the Psaltery at its worship. Paul admonished his converts
not to neglect the gift of song. To the Ephesians he wrote: "Be filled
with the Spirit; speaking one to another in psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord."
And his exhortation to the Colossians rings like an echo: "Let the word
of Christ dwell in you richly; in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one
another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in
your hearts unto God."

The praying and singing of Paul and Silas in the midnight gloom of the
Philippian dungeon, their feet being made "fast in the stocks," also is a
revelation of the large place occupied by song in the lives of the early
Christians.

The double reference of the Apostle to "psalms, hymns and spiritual
songs" would indicate that the Christian Church very early began to use
chants and hymns other than those taken from the Psaltery. The younger
Pliny, in 112 A.D., wrote to Emperor Trajan from Bithynia that the
Christians came together before daylight and sang hymns alternately
(_invicem_) "to Christ as God."

These distinctively Christian chants were the _Gloria in Excelsis_, or
the "Angelic Hymn," so called because its opening lines are taken from
the song of the angels at Jesus' birth; the _Magnificat_, Mary's song of
praise; the _Benedictus_, the song of Zacharias, father of John the
Baptist; and the _Nunc Dimittis_, the prayer of the aged Simeon when he
held the Christ-child in his arms. Other chants that were used very early
in the Christian Church included the _Ter Sanctus_, based on the "thrice
holy" of Isaiah 6:3 and Revelation 4:8; the _Gloria Patri_, or "Lesser
Doxology;" the _Benedicite_, the "Song of the Three Hebrew Children,"
from the Apocrypha; and the _Te Deum Laudamus_, which is sometimes
regarded as a later Latin chant, but which undoubtedly was derived from a
very ancient hymn of praise.

Eminent Biblical scholars believe that fragments of other primitive
Christian hymns have been preserved in the Epistles