The Decline of Exclusive Canonical Psalmody in Geneva
The following quote from Louis Benson will help reset the topic in this series of posts on the classical Reformed and Presbyterian commitment to exclusive canonical psalmody in worship, and help establish a baseline to measure the departure from this standard by the Reformed Church in the Enlightenment era:
There is no more difficulty in assigning the leadership to him (Calvin) than in assigning to Luther the leadership in establishing hymn singing in Germany and its spread from there into Lutheran countries. From this point indeed, the two figures stand as independent sources, from which flow two parallel streams of Protestant church song--- the Lutheran Hymnody on the one hand and the Reformed Metrical Psalmody on the other. And the streams were not fully united till after two centuries had passed. They are not in fact merged into unity even today, when the Calvinistic precedent of Psalm singing still furnishes the ground for maintaining denominational integrity among exclusive Psalm singers (p.75).