Two great characteristics mark the difference between Bach's work in the development of oratorio and Handel's. In the first place Bach was essentially German in thought and practice, and in the second place he cared comparatively little about producing beautiful melody and attractive musical effects, but devoted his energies to the most accurate, detailed, and subtle expression. The Teutonism of Bach's music is to be seen not only in the intense earnestness and high intellectuality of it, but in its wide and significant employment of the German chorale and of a musical style developed therefrom. As Dr. Parry has noted, Bach's early life was given up to the study of organ playing, and hence the voice parts in his choruses follow the method of organ counterpoint. His choruses are, therefore, not so broad and massive as Handel's, but present a more scholarly and varied polyphony. "Where Handel aimed at beauty of melodic form, Bach strove for characteristic expression." Handel's counterpoint is the smooth, mellifluous, facile counterpoint of the Italians; Bach's, seeking always to fit the musical phrase to the immediate context, is severe, intricate, and evasive. Its demands on the hearer present themselves as a series of numberless details, demanding of him unusual closeness of attention and delicacy of perception. Handel's melodic form and mass effects are easily appreciable by the masses; Bach requires more attention than the masses ever give, but he repays study with a revelation of great riches. To sum up this part of the matter, Handel was Italian in his knowledge of how to please, while Bach was German in his conscientiousness and thoroughness. The employment of the German chorale in Bach's Passion music was not only the result of his adherence to established custom, but the outcome of his life-long devotion to this characteristic embodiment of the spirit of Protestant Germany. Bach treated the chorale melodies in many of his works, such as his organ chorales and his motets, as the medieval composers treated the _cantus firmus_, the liturgical chant. He used it as the subject of a contrapuntal work, weaving around it a rich, yet austere polyphony, which voiced the plain methods of the Protestant Church as fully as the medieval counterpoint reflected in music the artistic method pictorially embodied in Gothic architecture. It was altogether natural and fitting that when he came to set the Passion he should have used the chorale as the most complete and satisfying exponent of the Protestant faith, for that was what it had come to be in Germany. To this day the Lutheran hymn "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" is the battle-hymn of the German Protestant.