which, after all, was but the hard shell which enclosed a rare sweetness of piety. All through Bach we feel the well-known German mysticism which seeks the truth in the instinctive convictions of the soul, the idealism which takes the mind as the measure of existence, the romanticism which colors the outer world with the hues of personal temperament. Bach’s historic position required that this spirit, in many ways so modern, should take shape in forms to which still clung the technical methods of an earlier time. His all-encompassing organ style was Gothic—if we may use such a term for illustration’s sake—not Renaissance. His style is Teutonic in the widest as well as the most literal sense. It is based on forms identified with the practice of the people in church and home. He recognized not the priestly or the aristocratic element, but the popular. His significance in the history of German Evangelical Christianity is great. Protestantism, like Catholicism, has had its supreme poet. As Dante embodied in an immortal epic the philosophic conceptions, the hopes and fears of mediaeval Catholicism, so Bach, less obviously but no less truly, in his cantatas, Passions, and choral preludes, lent the illuminating power of his art to the ideas which brought forth the Reformation. It is the central demand of Protestantism, the immediate personal access of man to God, which, constituting a new motive in German national music, gave shape and direction to Bach’s creative genius. It has been reserved for recent years to discover that the title of chief representative in art of German Protestantism is, after all, not the sum of Bach’s claims to honor. There is something in his art that touches the deepest chords of religious feeling in whatever communion that feeling has been nurtured. His music is not the music of a confession, but of humanity. What changes the spirit of religious progress is destined to undergo in the coming years it would be vain to predict; but it is safe to assume that the warrant of faith will not consist in authority committed to councils or synods, or altogether in a verbal revelation supposed to have been vouchsafed at certain epochs in the past, but in the intuition of the continued presence of the eternal creative spirit in the soul of man. This consciousness, of which creeds and liturgies are but partial and temporary symbols, can find no adequate artistic expression unless it be in the art of music. The more clearly this fact is recognized by the world, the more the fame of Sebastian Bach will increase, for no other musician has so amply embraced and so deeply penetrated the universal religious sentiment. It may well be said of Bach what a French critic says of Albrecht Dürer: “He was an intermediary between the Middle Age and our modern times. Typical of the former in that he was primarily a craftsman, laboring with all the sincerity and unconscious modesty of the good workman who delights in his labor, he yet