Excerpt from The Hymn-Book of the Church or the Growth of the Psalter This book, it should be clearly understood, is not to be looked upon as a commentary on the Psalms. Its claim is a far humbler one - namely, that it is an attempt to place the average reader of the Psalms in a better position for the profitable study and understanding of existing oommen taries, written by scholars and past-masters of the subject. The need for some such preparatory book was brought home to the writer some years ago through the experiences gained in a Study Circle on the Book of Psalms. The members of it were educated women, all of them thoroughly familiar with the prayer-book Text of the Psalter, but the majority of them had no knowledge at all of the history of the Book, or of the results of present-day scholarship. The experiment was suggested of tracing out the analogy between the work of compiling an English Hymnal, intended for both public and private use, and the gradual growth of the Jewish hymn-book, the one true standard Hymn Book of the Church. This method threw light on the literary history of the Psalms. It helped to explain altera tions and additions in the text, and raised various points of discussion concerning authorship. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.