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
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grandeur of the original, and so we need not linger over them.
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