Comb

In the 'good old days,' combs were often made from bone. They were fragile enough that the teeth of the combs broke easily, so that soon they were mostly gone, and you'd have to get a new one. But for my parents, replacing a comb was impossibly expensive during the war years, so that eventually mom had no comb left, and she did without for quite sometime. Hard to imagine, really, eve for an old guy with little hair, what it must have been like for a young woman to have no comb.

One day, dad came home with a new comb. "How did you manage that," mom asked. "Wife," said my dad, "don't ask too many questions."

"A New Song."

For some centuries before the Protestant Reformation, those attending worship were there to listen and observe, but they did not participate actively. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin felt that part of the reform should change this state of affairs. But what should they ask people to do? Before too long, congregational song became part of the answer. Here's how it started:

"The persecution of Protestants began at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Charles V. issued from that city the first of a series of cruel enactments, or "placards," for the extermination of the Lutheran heresy in his hereditary dominion of the Netherlands. In 1523 two Augustinian monks, Henry Voes and John Esch, were publicly burnt, as adherents of Luther, at the, stake in Brussels. After the fires were kindled, they repeated the Apostles’ Creed, sang the "Te Deum laudamus," and prayed in the flames, "Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy upon us." The heroic death of these Protestant proto-martyrs inspired Luther’s first poem, which begins, —

"Ein neues Lied wir heben an."

When Luther discovered that people readily sang this song, it became clear to him that congregational singing might be part of the answer to the quandary of involving people in services of worship. And this was the beginning of Luther's career as a hymn writer.