cially and without exception discountenanced by the
Catholic Church, has never been encouraged, and song,
like prayer, is looked upon as essentially a liturgic
office.

In the Protestant Church the barrier of an interme-
diary priesthood between the believer and his God is
broken down. The entire membership of the Christian
body is recognized as a universal priesthood, with access
to the Father through one mediator, Jesus Christ. This
conception restores the offices of worship to the body
of believers, and they in turn delegate their admin-
istration to certain officials, who, together with certain
independent privileges attached to the office, share with
the laity in the determination of matters of faith and
polity.

It was a perfectly natural result of this principle that
congregational song should hold a place in the Prot-
estant cultus which the Catholic Church has never
sanctioned. The one has promoted and tenaciously
maintained it; the other as consistently repressed it, --
not on æsthetic grounds, nor primarily on grounds of
devotional effect, but really through a more or less dis-
tinct perception of its significance in respect to the
theoretical relationship of the individual to the Church.
The struggles over popular song in public worship
which appear throughout the early history of Protes-
tantism are thus to be explained. The emancipated lay-
man found in the general hymn a symbol as well as an
agent of the assertion of his new rights and privileges
in the Gospel. The people's song of early Protestant-
ism has therefore a militant ring. It marks its epoch

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