When Bach had passed away, it seemed as if the mighty force he exerted had been dissipated. He had not checked the decline of church music. The art of organ playing degenerated. The choirs, never really adequate, became more and more unable to do justice to the great works that had been bequeathed to them. The public taste relaxed, and the demand for a more florid and fetching kind of song naturalized in the Church the theatrical style already predominant in France and Italy. The people lost their perception of the real merit of their old chorals and permitted them to be altered to suit the requirements of contemporary fashion, or else slighted them altogether in favor of the new “art song.” No composers appeared who were able or cared to perpetuate the old traditions. This tendency was inevitable; its causes are perfectly apparent to any one who knows the conditions prevailing in religion and art in Germany in the last half of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries. Pietism, with all its merits, had thrown a sort of puritanic wet blanket over art in its protest against the external and formal in worship. In the orthodox church circles the enthusiasm necessary to nourish a wholesome spiritual life and a living church art at the same time had sadly abated. The inculcation of a dry utilitarian morality and the cultivation of a dogmatic pedantry had taken the place of the joyous freedom of the Gospel. Other more direct causes also entered to turn public interest away from the music of the Church. The Italian opera, with its equipment of sensuous fascinations, devoid of serious aims, was at the high tide of its popularity, patronized by the ruling classes, and giving the tone to all the musical culture of the time. A still more obvious impediment to the revival of popular interest in church music was the rapid formation throughout Germany of choral societies devoted to the performance of oratorios. Following the example of England, these societies took up the works of Händel, and the enthusiasm excited by Haydn’s “Creation” in 1798 gave a still more powerful stimulus to the movement. These choral unions had no connection with the church choirs of the eighteenth century, but grew out of private musical associations. The great German music festivals date from about 1810, and they absorbed the interest of those composers whose talent turned towards works of religious content. The church choirs were already in decline when the choral societies began to raise their heads. Cantatas and Passions were no longer heard in church worship. Their place in public regard was taken by the concert oratorio. The current of instrumental music, one of the chief glories of German art in the nineteenth century, was absorbing more and more of the contributions of German genius. The whole trend of the age was toward secular music. It would appear that a truly great art of church music cannot maintain