True praise of God, as distinguished from false praise (
Isa 29:13;
Mt 15:8), is first of all an inward emotion-a gladness and rejoicing of the heart (
Ps 4:7;
33:21), a music of the soul and spirit (
Ps 103:1;
Lu 1:46 f) which no language can adequately express (
Ps 106:2;
2Co 9:15). But utterance is natural to strong emotion, and the mouth instinctively strives to express the praises of the heart (
Ps 51:15 and passim). Many of the most moving passages in Scripture come from the inspiration of the spirit of praise
awakened by the contemplation of the divine majesty or power or wisdom or kindness, but above all by the revelation of redeeming love. Again, the spirit of praise is a social spirit calling for social utterance. The man who praises God desires to praise Him in the hearing of other men (
Ps 40:10), and desires also that their praises should be joined with his own (
Ps 34:3). Further, the spirit of praise is a spirit of song. It may find expression in other ways-in sacrifice (
Le 7:13), or testimony (
Ps 66:16), or prayer (
Col 1:3); but it finds its most natural and its fullest utterance in lyrical and musical forms. When God fills the heart with praise He puts a new song into the mouth (
Ps
40:3). The Book of Psalms is the proof of this for the Old Testament. And when we pass to the New Testament we find that, alike for angels and men, for the church on earth and the church in heaven, the higher moods of praise express themselves in bursts of song (
Lu 2:14;
Eph 5:19;
Col 3:16;
Re 5:9;
14:3;
15:3). Finally, both in the Old Testament and New Testament, the spirit of song gives birth to ordered modes of public praise. In their earlier expressions the praises of Israel were joyful outbursts in which song was mingled with shouting and dancing to a rude accompaniment of timbrels and trumpets (
Ex 15:20 ff;
2Sa 6:5,
14 ). In later times Israel had its sacred Psalter, its guilds of trained singers (
Ezr 2:41;
Ne 7:44), its skilled musicians (
Pss 42; 49, etc.); and the praise that waited for God in Zion was full of the solemn beauty of holiness (
Ps 29:2;
96:9). In the New Testament the Psalter is still a manual of social praise. The "hymn" which Jesus sang with His disciples after the Last Supper (
Mt 26:30) would be a Hebrew psalm, probably from the Hallel (
Pss 113-118) which was used at the Passover service, and
various references in the Epistles point to the continued employment of the ancient psalms in Christian worship (
1Co 14:26;
Eph 5:19;
Col 3:16;
Jas 5:13). But the Psalter of the Jewish church could not suffice to express the distinctive moods of Christian feeling. Original utterance of the spirit of Christian song was one of the manifestations of the gift of tongues (
1Co 14:15-17). Paul distinguishes hymns and spiritual songs from psalms (
Eph 5:19;
Col 3:16); and it was hymns that he and Silas sang at midnight in the prison of Philippi (
Ac 16:25 the Revised Version
(British and American)). But from hymns and songs that were the spontaneous utterance of individual feeling the development was natural, in New Testament as in Old Testament times, to hymns that were sung in unison by a whole congregation; and in rhythmic passages like
1Ti 3:16;
Re 15:3 f, we seem to have fragments of a primitive Christian hymnology, such as Pliny bears witness to for the early years of the 2nd century, when he informs Trajan that the Christians of Bithynia at their morning meetings sang a hymn in alternate strains to Christ as God (Ep. x.97).