and hymnody into the Civil War era.81 Thereafter the Psalms quickly fell out of congregational hymnals. Indeed, with the advent of the gospel-song tradition in the post-Civil War era, this new hymnody, says Yale’s Sydney Ahlstrom, “swept much of Isaac Watts,” and “the older Reformed ‘Psalms’ … into disuse and oblivion.”82 This eclipse of psalmody in the late nineteenth century is quite unprecedented. The Psalms, as we have seen, had been the dominant form of church song beginning with the church