Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/504

 492 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED

The version of all the canticles is from the Great Bible of 1539. It took its name from the fact that it was the whole Bible of the largest volume in English 13^ by 7^ inches. Its translation of the Psalms passed into the Prayer-book in Edward Vl s time, and has retained its position ever since. At the revision in 1662 it was directed that the lessons were to be taken from the Authorized Version, but the Psalms were not to be altered. The phraseology of Coverdale s version had become too familiar by long use to allow of alteration, and choirs found it, or thought they did, smoother and easier to sing. Thomas Cromwell, as Vicar-General, enjoined upon every incumbent, that one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English, should be set up within some convenient place in the church. The cost was to be shared by parson and parishioners. Cromwell urges them to ex pressly provoke, stir, and exhort every person to read the same. No less than 20,000 of these great folios were issued.

983. We praise Tliee, O God.

TE DEUM LAUDAMUS. The Te Deum is the great hymn of the Christian Church. The tradition that ascribes it to St. Ambrose and St. Augustine has been traced as far back as 859, when Hincmar of Rheims refers to it as the hymn which the two saints made for the baptism of St. Augustine in the Church of St. John at Milan. Ambrose broke out, We praise Thee, O God ; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord. Augustine replied, All the earth doth worship Thee, the Father ever lasting, and thus they continued antiphonally to the end. That idea of the hymn as a sudden inspiration in honour of a great event may be classed with the ascription of the various articles of the Apostles Creed to the Apostles of Christ.

The first reference to the hymn is in the Rule of St. Caesarius of Aries, drawn up before he became bishop in 502. There it is made part of the Sunday morning service. It seems likely that it took its rise in the South of Gaul. It was not im probably based on antiphons already familiar to the Church, and assumed its present form, say, about 400 A.D.

The English Version appears to have received the form given in our Prayer-books at the hands of Cranmer. The version of Henry VIII s last Primer and Edward Vl s first Prayer-book is practically the same as that we sing. There are some

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