Philippi

Christian song was one of the manifestations of the gift of tongues (1 Corinthians 14:15-17). Paul distinguishes hymns and spiritual songs from psalms (Ephesians 5:19 Colossians 3:16); and it was hymns that he and Silas sang at midnight in the prison of Philippi (Acts 16:25 the Revised Version (British and American)). But from hymns and songs that were the spontaneous utterance of individual feeling the development was natural, in New Testament as in Old Testament times, to hymns that were sung…