Earliest Hymn-Books

This latter class of mixed hymns has been commonly, but erroneously, attributed to Peter Dresdensis, who died in 1440, as rector of Zwickau. His real work with regard to hymnology lay in the strenuous efforts he made to introduce hymns in the vernacular more freely into public worship, especially into the service of the mass. No doubt he had been led to this by his acquaintance with Huss, whose assistant he had been at Prague. It was in 1467 that the followers of Huss formed themselves into a separate and organized Church, known as that of the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren, one of the distinctive peculiarities of which was the free use of hymns and prayers in their mother tongue. Many such hymns were already in existence, and others were soon written, and in 1504 they were collected and published by their archbishop, Lucas--the first example of a hymn-book composed of original compositions in the vernacular to be found in any Western nation which had once owned the supremacy of Rome. Somewhat earlier than this book, however, towards the end of the fifteenth century, we find two or three collections of German versions of the Latin hymns and sequences. For the most part they are of such inferior merit that they quite lose the 96 grandeur of the original, and so we need not linger over them.