Scottish Psalter (1650)

The Scottish Psalter's road to its 1650 authorization ran through a contest most worshipers who have sung it never hear about. In the 1640s the Westminster Assembly of Divines, meeting in London to hammer out a common confession and worship for the British churches, had two rival metrical psalters put before it, one by William Barton and one by Francis Rous. The Assembly picked Rous's version, judging it the more accurate rendering of the Hebrew text, and set about revising it further to bring it closer still to the original. When Scottish commissioners carried that Assembly approved text home in 1647, the Church of Scotland's own General Assembly was not satisfied to simply adopt it. It spent two more years revising the psalter again, checking it line by line against scripture, before a Church commission formally authorized the finished text on 23 November 1649, ordering that it become the only psalter sung in Scottish congregations starting 1 May 1650.

That two stage process, an English Assembly's accuracy standard followed by a further Scottish revision on top of it, produced a text more thoroughly vetted than almost any other psalter of its era, and the discipline behind that vetting says something about the seriousness with which Reformed worship treated the words a congregation was permitted to put in God's mouth. A single mistranslated line was not treated as a stylistic quibble but as a defect worth two years of committee work to correct.

Presbyterian worship after 1650 was built around a rule most other Protestant traditions eventually abandoned: sing only the biblical psalms, set to meter so a congregation could carry them, and sing nothing else. The Scottish Psalter was the concrete form that rule took, and the reasoning behind it was the same conviction John Calvin had built the earlier Genevan Psalter on the previous century, that corporate worship belonged in the church's own inspired words rather than in verse composed by any individual, however gifted or pious. A hymn, on that reasoning, put a human author's theology into the congregation's mouth; a psalm put only scripture there. Exclusive psalmody, as the practice came to be called, held across Scottish Presbyterian worship for roughly two centuries after 1650, sung almost without exception, and it traveled wherever Scottish and Irish Presbyterians settled, carried to America, Canada and Australia by emigrants who brought little else from home that mattered more.

The discipline did not survive everywhere. Mainstream Presbyterian denominations gradually admitted hymns alongside psalms over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but a minority never did. Reformed Presbyterian and Covenanter congregations, descendants of the Scottish Covenanters who had fought and died over the shape of their own worship, still sing the psalter exclusively and without instrumental accompaniment today, treating a three and a half century old translation committee's work as still binding on how they are permitted to address God in song.