The material for his purpose was already within his reach. The religious folk-song, freighted with a precious store of memories, was still an essential factor in public and private worship. The art of organ playing had developed a vigorous and pregnant national style in the choral prelude, the fugue, and a host of freer forms. The Passion music and the cantata had recently shown signs of brilliant promise. The Italian solo song was rejoicing in its first flush of conquest on German soil. No one, however, could foresee what might be done with these materials until Bach arose. He gathered them all in his hand, remoulded, blended, enlarged them, touched them with the fire of his genius and his religious passion, and thus produced works of art which, intended for German evangelicalism, are now being adopted by the world as the most comprehensive symbols in music of the essential Christian faith.[73] Bach was one of those supreme artists who concentrate in themselves the spirit and the experiments of an epoch. In order, therefore, to know how the persistent religious consciousness of Germany strove to attain self-recognition through those art agencies which finally became fully operative in the eighteenth century, we need only study the works of this great representative musician, passing by the productions of the organists and cantors who shared, although in feebler measure, his illumination. For Bach was no isolated phenomenon of his time. He created no new styles; he gave art no new direction. He was one out of many poorly paid and overworked church musicians, performing the duties that were traditionally attached to his office, improvising fugues and preludes, and accompanying choir and congregation at certain moments in the service, composing motets, cantatas, and occasionally a larger work for the regular order of the day, providing special music for a church festival, a public funeral, the inauguration of a town council, or the installation of a pastor. What distinguished Bach was simply the superiority of his work on these time-honored lines, the amazing variety of sentiment which he extracted from these conventional forms, the scientific learning which puts him among the greatest technicians in the whole range of art, the prodigality of ideas, depth of feeling, and a sort of introspective mystical quality which he was able to impart to the involved and severe diction of his age.