Note 5 — Chapter I

The ecclesiastical chant took its first great development at Alexandria, and appears to have been brought thither from Rome by St. Mark. Philo the Jew, a native of Alexandria, who lived in the time of the Evangelist, describes the Christians passing their days in psalmody and prayer, and singing in alternate choirs (Euseb. lib. ii. c. 17). On the martyrdom of the Evangelist we read how certain just men buried him “singing prayers and psalms.” (Vita S. Marci, Sim. Met.) The nature of the chant established at Alexandria in the time of St. Athanasius, is very precisely indicated by St. Augustine, in that passage of his Confessions (lib. x. c. 33) where, speaking of the voluptates aurium, he says that he sometimes desires even to banish from his ears the sweet tones to which the Psalms of David were generally sung in church; “and then that method seems to me more safe which I remember often to have heard of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who caused the lector to intone the Psalms with so slight an inflection of the voice, that it was more like reading than singing.” Hippolytus, in his Book on Antichrist, declares that one effect of His coming at the end of the world will be the abolition of the Psalmody of the Church.