The 150 psalms with the Genevan melodies

A psalter may seem out of place on a site devoted to a confession of faith and its catechisms, but for the Reformation, and in particular for the Westminster Assembly, the singing of psalms was inseparable from the reformation of the Church. The Confession counts among the ordinary parts of worship "singing of psalms with grace in the heart" (WCF 21.5), and the Directory for the Publick Worship of God devotes a chapter to this duty: "It is the duty of Christians to praise God publickly, by singing of psalms together in the congregation, and also privately in the family". The Assembly did not confine itself to commanding it: at the request of Parliament it revised a metrical version of the psalms in English, that of Francis Rous, which the Church of Scotland corrected and adopted in 1650. That Scottish psalter was sung for centuries together with the Confession and the Catechisms.

For generations, the churches that received these documents sang only the psalms in worship, and not out of custom, but out of conviction. It is the consequence of the same principle that regulates all worship: God is to be worshipped only as he himself has commanded, and not according to the inventions of men. In worship we do not sing to express what we wish to say to God, but to praise him with the words he himself has given us. And God has given us a whole book of praises, inspired by his Spirit and appointed to be sung by his people. When Hezekiah restored the worship of the temple, he commanded that they sing praise unto the LORD "with the words of David, and of Asaph" (2 Chron. 29:30), and the Lord Jesus himself, the night in which he was betrayed, sang with his disciples the hymn of the Passover, which consisted of the psalms (Matt. 26:30).

When the apostle commands singing "in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16), he does not open the door to human compositions. Those three names are the ones that the Greek Bible the apostles used gives to the psalms themselves in their titles, and the epithet "spiritual" marks them out as the work of the Spirit. No human hymn, however beautiful and orthodox it may be, can claim for itself what the psalms alone possess: to be the Word of God.

Singing the psalms does not impoverish the praise of the Church, but enlarges it. In them is the whole experience of the believer, from despair to exultation, and in them is Christ: his sufferings, his resurrection and his kingdom, foretold centuries before his coming. Whoever sings the psalms learns to pray with the words of Christ and to see the whole of history in the light of his kingdom.

This psalter gathers up that heritage. Its tunes are those of the Genevan Psalter, which Calvin promoted and which was completed in 1562 with the texts of Clément Marot and Theodore Beza: the first great psalter of the Reformation, from which all the Reformed churches drank, those of Scotland and England too. Its words are the Spanish metrical versions by Jorge Ruiz Ortiz, from his book Los salmos en rima española, published here with his permission. Each psalm can be read, listened to and sung, together with the text of the psalm in the Bible. May they serve so that the praises God himself put in the mouth of his people may once more be heard in our churches and in our homes, as in the days of the Reformation.