and brought to maturity with the Reformation and with the idea of the general priesthood of believers.
The Latin Church had prepared the way, and produced some of the grandest hymns which can
never die, as the "Dies Irae," the "Stabat mater," and the "Jesu dulcis memoria." But these and other
Latin hymns and sequences of St. Hilary, St. Ambrose, Fortunatus, Notker, St. Bernard, St. Thomas
Aquinas, Thomas a Celano, Jacobus de Benedictis, Adam of St. Victor, etc., were sung by priests
and choristers, and were no more intelligible to the common people than the Latin Psalter and the
Latin mass.^632 The reign of the Latin language in public worship, while it tended to preserve the
unity of the church, and to facilitate literary intercourse, kept back the free development of a
vernacular hymnody. Nevertheless, the native love of the Germans for poetry and song produced
for private devotion a large number of sacred lyrics and versified translations of the Psalms and
Latin hymns. As there were German Bibles before Luther’s version, so there were also German
hymns before his time; but they were limited in use, and superseded by the superior products of
the evangelical church. Philip Wackernagel (the most learned German hymnologist, and an
enthusiastic admirer of Luther) gives in the second volume of his large collection no less than
fourteen hundred and forty-eight German hymns and sequences, from Otfrid to Hans Sachs
(inclusive) or from a.d. 868 to 1518. Nor was vernacular hymnody confined to Germany. St. Francis
of Assisi composed the "Cantico del Sol," and Jacopone da Todi (the author of the "Stabat Mater
") those passionate dithyrambic odes which "vibrate like tongues of fire," for private confraternities
and domestic gatherings.^633
German Hymnody before the Reformation.
In order to form a just estimate of German Protestant hymnody, we must briefly survey the
mediaeval German hymnody.
The first attempts of Teutonic church poetry are biblical epics, and the leader of the Teutonic
Christ-singers is the Anglo-Saxon monk Caedmon of Whitby (formerly a swineherd), about 680,
who reproduced in alliterative verse, as by inspiration, the biblical history of creation and redemption,
and brought it home to the imagination and heart of Old England.^634 This poem, which was probably
brought to Germany by Bonifacius and other English missionaries, inspired in the ninth century a
similar production of an unknown Saxon (Westphalian) monk, namely, a poetic gospel harmony
or life of Christ under the title "Heliand "(i.e., Heiland, Healer, Saviour).^635 About the same time
(c. 870), Otfrid of Weissenburg in the Alsace, a Benedictine monk, educated at Fulda and St. Gall,
versified the gospel history in the Alemannian dialect, in fifteen hundred verses, divided into stanzas,
each stanza consisting of four rhymed lines.^636
These three didactic epics were the first vernacular Bibles for the laity among the Western
barbarians.^637
(^632) On Greek and Latin hymnology and the literature, see Schaff, Church History, III. 575 sqq., and IV. 402 sqq. and 416 sqq.
(^633) Comp. Ozanam, Les poetes Franciscains en Italie au 13mesiècle. Paris, 1852.
(^634) Bouterweck, Caedmon’s des Angelsachsen biblische Dichtungen, Elberfeld, 1849-54. Bosanquet, The Fall of Man, or Paradise Lost
of Caedmon, translated in verse from the Anglo-Saxon, London, 1860.
(^635) E. Sievers, Der Heliand und die angelsächsische Genesis. Halle, 1875.
(^636) Flacius first edited Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch (Evangeliorum liber), Bas. 1571. Recent editions by Graff, under the title Krist,
Königsberg, 1831; and Kelle, Otfrid’s Evang.-buch, Regensb. 1856 and 1859, 2 vols. Specimens in Wackernagel’s D. Kirchenlied (the
large work), vol. ii. 3-21. A translation into modern German by G. Rapp, Gotha, 1858.
(^637) Comp. Hammerich, Aelteste christliche Epik der Angelsachsen, Deutschen und Nordländer. Translated from the Danish by Michelsen,
1874.