The Old Order of Psalms Left Unchanged

But this too we ought to know: our elders who decided that this morning office should be added made no change in the ancient arrangement of Psalms. That office was always celebrated in their night assemblies in the same order as before. For the hymns that in this country they used at the morning office at the close of the night vigils, which they usually finish after cockcrow and before dawn, they still sing in the same way: Psalm 148, which begins “Praise the Lord from the heavens,” and the rest that follow it. But the fiftieth Psalm, the sixty-second and the eighty-ninth, we know, have been assigned to this new service. Finally, throughout Italy today, when the morning hymns are ended, the fiftieth Psalm is sung in all the churches, and I have no doubt that this can only have come from this source. [a]