The nature of the change of motive in modern church music, which broke the exclusive domination of the chorus by the introduction of solo singing, has been set forth in the chapter on the later mass. The most obvious fact in the history of this modification of church music in Germany is that the neglect in many quarters of the strong old music of choral and motet in favor of a showy concert style seemed to coincide with that melancholy lapse into formalism and dogmatic intolerance which, in the German Church of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, succeeded to the enthusiasms of the Reformation era. But it does not follow, as often assumed, that we have here a case of cause and effect. It is worth frequent reiteration that no style of music is in itself religious. There is no sacredness, says Ruskin, in round arches or in pointed, in pinnacles or buttresses; and we may say with equal pertinence that there is nothing sacred _per se_ in sixteenth-century counterpoint, Lutheran choral, or Calvinist psalm-tune. The adoption of the new style by so many German congregations was certainly not due to a spirit of levity, but to the belief that the novel sensation which their aesthetic instincts craved was also an element in moral edification. From the point of view of our more mature experience, however, there was doubtless a deprivation of something very precious when the German people began to lose their love for the solemn patriotic hymns of their faith, and when choirs neglected those celestial harmonies with which men like Eccard and Hasler lent these melodies the added charm of artistic decoration. There would seem to be no real compensation in those buoyant songs, with their thin accompaniment, which Italy offered as a substitute for a style grown cold and obsolete. But out of this decadence, if we call it such, came the cantatas and Passions of J. S. Bach, in which a reflective age like ours, trained to settle points of fitness in matters of art, finds the most heart-searching and heart-revealing strains that devotional feeling has ever inspired. These glorious works could never have existed if the Church had not sanctioned the new methods in music which Germany was so gladly receiving from Italy. Constructed to a large extent out of secular material, these works grew to full stature under liturgic auspices, and at last, transcending the boundaries of ritual, they became a connecting bond between the organized life of the Church and the larger religious intuitions which no ecclesiastical system has ever been able to monopolize.