Then came the Sermon, which was succeeded by a Prayer.
Another question now meets us, and one of some importance: Did the early Christians employ any musical instruments? In reply, it can be noted that ψάλλειν, “to make melody” (Eph.5:19), is usually taken to refer to a musical accompaniment. In Romans 15:9 it is a quotation from Psalm 18:50, where it means, “I will sing psalms.” In 1 Corinthians 15:15 (“I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also”) and in James 5:13 (“Is any merry? let him sing psalms”) we have nothing decisive except that we know that the Jewish method of “singing psalms” was to the accompaniment of musical instruments. Thus, with all these texts before us, we are not able either to affirm or deny the fact. The reference of Paul (1 Cor. 14:7) to the pipe (αυλός, flute) and harp (κιθάρα, lute) gives us no assistance. The “harp” of Revelation 5:8, 14:2, and 15:2, is the cithara or lute again; but neither does this tell us what the early Christians did or did not do. The inference is pretty strong that they avoided some things that were Jewish—and instrumental music was a marked feature in the Jew’s worship—but it is plain that (as with the Sabbath question) there was a great deal of blending at the edges between the two dispensations. We are told, moreover, that the Syriac Church has always been rich in tunes, having fully two hundred and seventy-five, while the Greek was confined to about eight.
There is another fact which comes in just here, however, to explain what we would otherwise find it hard to unriddle. It is the matter of the very language of the hymns themselves.
When we observe the places where these fragments occur, or where singing in the church is mentioned, we find that the language naturally is Greek. No one doubts that Luke and the other New Testament writers employed the tongue which was the educated and flexible medium of conveying the loftiest truth; nor that Ephesians or Corinthians chanted in Greek. “The Greek tongue,” say Conybeare and Howson (St. Paul, 1:10), “became to the Christian more than it had been to the Roman or the Jew.” It lends itself most readily to that dithyrambic shape in which highly emotional natures could best express their praise. So the irregularity of the verse; its utter lack of metrical form (as Dr. Neale found when he examined eighteen quarto volumes of it), and its simplicity of diction, all combined to put the instrumental accompaniment aside. Perhaps there was a prejudice—as Archbishop Trench affirms—against a distinctively Jewish method. Perhaps there was a disposition in this, as in other matters where art had perverted the morals of men, to oppose whatever looked toward a possible laxity. Music and banqueting, music and luxury, music and profligacy, went together so much that the early Church reacted to the extreme of Puritanism—forgetting that her Lord and Master had often worshipped in the full-choired temple itself. In the catacombs, where every manner of ordinary symbol may be found, there is neither pipe nor harp, nor any sort of musical instrument—the lyre alone excepted. But neither is there any condescension to beauty in form or color. Everything betokens a rude, uncultivated simplicity—a piety which contented itself with the barest and meagerest representations. It rose high enough to portray the face of Christ, in the ancient cemetery of Domitilla, and in one carving on a sarcophagus of the fourth century. And, remembering how repugnant anything heathenish was to the souls of those who associated pipe and tabret and harp with the bloody arena and the wild revelry of Rome, can we doubt why they mingled only their unassisted voices in these chants of praise? It can be positively added that Ambrose, Basil, and Chrysostom do not include instrumental music in their eulogies of the Church’s practice upon this theme.
We are justified, however, in going one step beyond this bald statement, that the early Christians sang together. They sang secum invicem, alternately. The quotations already given show the adaptation of their hymns to this use. In this, at least, they were following the Jewish habit of responses and part-singing, whatever other changes their poverty or prejudices or principles or persecutions might have produced.
It remains for us to speak of the ancient hymns which have come down to our day. We have some information as to Harmonius and Bardesanes, who wrote Syriac hymns in the first century, but the hymns themselves are either lost or unidentified. Ephrem Syrus (died 378) furnishes the earliest authentic hymns in that language. One of these (Daniel, Thesaurus Hymnologicus, III. 145) is on the Nativity of our Lord, and may be thus rendered, following Zingerle’s German version:
“Into his arms with tender love
Did Joseph take his holy son,
And worshipped him as God, and saw
The babe like any little one.