The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

CHAPTER XI

[1]As an indication of how prevalent this singing of religious hymns was, we note the fact that in 1512, twelve years before Luther’s first hymnbook appeared, a collection of Roman Catholic hymns, set to profane tunes, was issued in Venice, Italy.

[2]“To Luther belongs the extraordinary merit of having given to the German people in their own tongue the Bible, the Catechism, and the Hymnbook, so that God might speak directly to them in his Word, and that they might directly answer him in their songs.” Dr. Philip Schaff adds elsewhere that Luther “is the father of the modern High German language and literature,” and that these are the common possession of the Germanic tribes with their diversified dialects from the Adriatic to the Baltic Sea. Erasmus Alber, a contemporary who wrote twenty excellent hymns, calls Luther “the German Cicero, who not only reformed religion, but also the German language.” Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler of Nuremberg, who, besides a great deal of general poetry, also wrote a number of hymns, styled Luther “the nightingale of Wittenberg.”