Note on the Scottish Psalter, 1650
The origin of the Scottish Psalter, 1650, which is the source of nearly all the metrical psalms in Book Five of the Hymnary, may be briefly summarized as follows:
The church in Scotland, at the time of the Reformation, modeled its service after Calvin’s in Geneva. No hymns were permitted to be sung; only the Words of inspired Scripture were allowed for use in worship. For two hundred years after Luther had inspired a rich treasury of “man-made” poems for use in congregational singing, the Calvinistic churches were still using only psalms and paraphrases of Scripture.
In compiling a Psalter, the Scottish reformers adopted the entire Anglo-Genevan Psalter used by John Knox, to which they added selections from the English Old Version by Sternhold and Hopkins, and 21 more by Scottish writers. Tunes, over 100 in all, were adopted from the Anglo-Genevan, French, and English Psalters, in each case the melody only being printed. In 1635 an edition was published with the tunes in harmony, the work of Edmund Millar.
In 1643, the House of Commons and the Westminster Assembly, interested in establishing uniformity of worship between the churches of England and Scotland, voted to adopt Francis Rous’ version of the psalms for use throughout the kingdom, after extensive revisions of the work. The Scottish church, not satisfied with the Rous’ version, appointed a commission of four men to revise it still farther, largely to satisfy the Puritan demand for more literalness to the Hebrew original. The result of this revision was the classic Scottish Psalter of 1650, still in use in Scottish Presbyterianism and in American Covenanter Churches. The renderings are quaint and rude in spots but their faithfulness and vigor cannot be denied. It is in this form that millions of people have learned to love the psalms and all attempts to improve or modernize them have so far failed.
Unfortunately, no tunes were provided with the Scottish Psalter of 1650. This limited the singing to such tunes as precentor and people knew by heart, resulting in a long period of decline in church music in the Church of Scotland. Later editions corrected this defect. In 1929, the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church of Scotland, then entered into union, published a new edition of the Scottish Psalter, with 192 tunes.