Today, the Psalms—God’s manual of praise for his
church—are rejected by many professed Protestants for uninspired
hymns. It once was very different! All the Reformed churches sang the
Psalms. J. A Wylie in his famous History of Protestantism (book
2, pp. 137-138) describes "the rage for the Psalter" in France
in the days of the Reformation in the lengthy but engaging quotation
below:
At an early stage of the Reformation in France, the
New Testament … was translated in the vernacular of that country.
This was followed by a version of the Psalms of David in 1525 …
Later, Clement Marot, the lyrical poet, undertook—at the request of
Calvin, it is believed—the task of versifying the Psalms, and
accordingly thirty of them were rendered into metre and published in
Paris in 1541, dedicated to Francis I. Three years afterwards (1543),
he added twenty others, and dedicated the collection "to the
ladies of France." In the epistle dedicatory the following verses
occur:
"Happy
the man whose favour’d ear
In
golden days to come shall hear
The
ploughman, as he tills the ground,
The
carter, as he drives his round,
The
shopman, as his task he plies,
With
psalms or sacred melodies
Whiling
the hours of toil away!
Oh!
happy he who hears the lay
Of
shepherd or of shepherdess,
As
in the woods they sing and bless
And
make the rocks and pools proclaim
With
them their great Creator’s name!
Oh!
can ye brook that God invite
Them
before you to such delight?
Begin,
ladies, begin! ..."
The prophecy of the poet was fulfilled. The
combined majesty and sweetness of the old Hebrew Psalter took captive
the taste and genius of the French people. In a little while all
France, we may say, fell to singing the Psalms. They displaced all
other songs, being sung in the first instance to the common ballad
music. "This holy ordinance," says Quick, "charmed the
ears, heart, and affections of court and city, town and country. They
were sung in the Louvre, as well as in the Prés des Clercs, by the
ladies, princes, yea, by Henry II himself. This one ordinance alone
contributed mightily to the downfall of Popery and the propagation of
the Gospel. It took so much with the genius of the nation that all
ranks and degrees of men practised it, in the temples and in their
families. No gentleman professing the Reformed religion would sit down
at his table without praising God by singing. It was an especial part
of their morning and evening worship in their several houses to sing
God’s praises."
This chorus of holy song was distasteful to the
adherents of the ancient worship. Wherever they turned, the odes of
the Hebrew monarch, pealed forth in the tongue of France, saluted
their ears, in the streets and the highways, in the vineyards and the
workshops, at the family hearth and in the churches. "The
reception these Psalms met with," says Bayle, "was such as
the world had never seen." To strange uses were they put on
occasion. The king, fond of hunting, adopted as his favourite Psalm,
"As pants the hart for water-brooks," &c. The
priests, who seemed to hear in this outburst the knell of their
approaching downfall, had recourse to the expedient of translating the
odes of Horace and setting them to music, in the hope that the pagan
poet would supplant the Hebrew one. [Today, the Arminian hymns of
the Wesleys etc. are used to supplant the God-breathed Psalms.] The
rage for the Psalter nevertheless continued unabated, and a storm of
Romish wrath breaking out against Marot, he fled to Geneva, where, as
we have said above, he added twenty other Psalms to the thirty
previously published at Paris, making fifty in all. This enlarged
Psalter was first published at Geneva, with a commendatory preface by
Calvin, in 1543. Editions were published in Holland, Belgium, France,
and Switzerland, and so great was the demand that the printing-presses
could not meet it. Rome forbade the book, but the people were only the
more eager on that account to possess it.
Calvin, alive to the mighty power of music to
advance the Reformation, felt nevertheless the incongruity and
indelicacy of singing such words to profane airs, and used every means
in his power to rectify the abuse. He applied to the most eminent
musicians in Europe to furnish music worthy of the sentiments. William
Franc, of Strasburg, responding to this call, furnished melodies for
Marot’s Psalter; and the Protestants of France and Holland, dropping
the ballad airs, began now to sing the Psalms to the noble music just
composed. Now, for the first time, was heard the "Old
Hundredth," and some of the finest tunes still in use in our
Psalmody. After the death of Marot (1544) Calvin applied to his
distinguished coadjutor, Theodore Beza, to complete the versification
of the Psalms. Beza, copying the style and spirit of Marot, did so,
and thus Geneva had the honour of giving to Christendom the first
whole book of Psalms ever rendered into the metre of any living
language.
Jesuit theologian, Famiano Strada (1572-1649)
expresses the Roman Catholic opposition to Reformed Psalm singing:
Many today, who consider themselves heirs of the
Reformation, are more akin to those French Roman Catholics, whom Strada
speaks of, who "abandoned" the Psalter. But by God’s grace,
there are still some who possess that "peculiar characteristic of
the Heretics" (as judged by the false church), the public singing
of the God-breathed Psalms. May they flourish as a tree planted by a
river. As Psalm 1 promises (in the Scottish Metrical Version),
