As a composer of church music, Bach occupies a position in the evangelical ranks analogous to that of Palestrina among the Catholics. The difference in time, nationality and artistic gifts naturally presupposes an equal degree of difference in musical forms and resources, but aside from this, emphasis must be placed upon the infinitely greater versatility of Bach, who was at home in every domain of art, with the exception of the opera and the oratorio, and in each one created works that have never been surpassed, while Palestrina confined himself almost wholly within fixed ecclesiastical limits. The different varieties of evangelical church music possible to be considered by Bach were the hymn, the motet, the church cantata, the evangelical histories, the mass and the magnificat. The hymn, or Protestant choral, received no increment from him; he composed very beautiful religious songs, but nothing in the style of the Volkslied. As regards the motet, that old ecclesiastical form of song without accompaniment and composed of many parts, Bach certainly paid some attention to it in his capacity as director of the vocal choir at St. Thomas's. Four works of this class with double chorus and one in five parts (Jesu, meine Freude) are ripe fruits of his genius, but however beautiful and powerful as compositions, they are not properly continuations of the motet in the form given it in the seventeenth century by Schütz, Johann Christoph Bach and others. These composers adhered closely to the severe style of the church motet of the sixteenth century, into which, however, a certain secular element had been introduced, while Bach's motets are rather to be regarded as a subsidiary form of his church cantatas. We find in them the same resemblance to organ music which characterizes his vocal compositions with instrumental accompaniment, and among the latter are many pieces precisely after the manner of the motet. It is now a tolerably well established fact that Bach's motets were never performed without the aid of the organ or other instruments; in fact remarkably well trained choruses would have been necessary in order to dispense with such support. That they must have been intended to serve as an occasional substitute for a cantata, is shown by their unusual length, which would prevent them from filling the regularly appointed place in the church liturgy.