The Story of the Hymns and Tunes Author:Hezekiah Butterworth, Theron Brown Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. HYMNS OF PRAISE AND WORSHIP. "TE DEUM LAUDAMUS." This famous church confession in song was composed A. D. 387 by Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, pr... more »obably both words and music. Te Deum laudamus, Te Dominum confitemur Te aeternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur Tibi omnes angeli, tibi coeli et universae potestates, Tibi cherubim et seraphim inaccessibili voce proclamant Sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth. In the whole hymn there are thirty lines. The saying that the early Roman hymns were echoes of Christian Greece, as the Greek hymns were echoes of Jerusalem, is probably true, but they were only echoes. In A. D. 252, St. Cyprian, writing his consolatory epistle during the plague in Carthage, when hundreds were dying every day, says, "Ah, perfect and perpetual bliss! [in heaven.] There is the glorious company of the apostles;there is the fellowship of the prophets rejoicing; there is the innumerable multitude of martyrs crowned." Which would suggest that lines or fragments of what afterwards crystalized into the formula of the "Te Deum" were already familiar in the Christian church. But it is generally believed that the tongue of Ambrose gave the anthem its final form. 'l:/.''; mu 6vi]ToO, "On the Mortality." i Ambrose was born in Gaul about the middle of the fourth century and raised to his bishopric in A. D. 374. Very early he saw and appreciated the popular effect of musical sounds, and what an evangelical instrument a chorus of chanting voices could be in preaching the Christian faith; and he introduced the responsive singing of psalms and sacred cantos in the worship of the church. "A grand thing is that singing, and nothing can stand before it," he said, when the critics of his time complained that his innovation was sensational. That such...« less