In this way an obscure synagogue was expanded into the catholic church.

Gathering, from a richer and more varied field of sound than had remained for him, those old Roman harmonies, some notes of which Gregory the Great, centuries later, and after generations of interrupted development, formed into the Gregorian music, she was already, as we have heard, the house of song--of a wonderful new music and poesy.

As if in anticipation of the sixteenth century, the church was becoming "humanistic," in an earlier, and unimpeachable Renaissance.

Singing there had been in abundance from the first; though often it dared only be "of the heart." And it burst forth, when it might, into the beginnings of a true ecclesiastical music; the Jewish psalter, inherited from the synagogue, turning now, gradually, from Greek into Latin--broken Latin, into Italian, as the ritual use of the rich, fresh, expressive vernacular superseded the earlier authorised language of the Church.

Through certain surviving remnants of Greek in the later Latin liturgies, we may still discern a highly interesting intermediate phase of ritual development, when the Greek [126] and the Latin were in combination; the poor, surely!--the poor and the children of that liberal Roman church--responding already in their own "vulgar tongue," to an office said in the original, liturgical Greek.