Such abuses were, of course, not universal, perhaps not general,—as to that we cannot tell; but they illustrate the chaotic condition of church music in the three or four centuries following the first adoption of part singing. The struggle for light was persistent, and music, however crude and halting, received abundant measure of the reverence which, in the age that saw the building of the Gothic cathedrals, was accorded to everything that was identified with the Catholic religion. There were no forms of music that could rival the song of the Church,—secular music at the best was a plaything, not an art. The whole endeavor of the learned musicians was addressed to the enrichment of the church service, and the wealthy and powerful princes of France, Italy, Austria, Spain, and England turned the patronage of music at their courts in the same channel with the patronage of the Church. It was in the princely chapels of Northern France and the schools attached to them that the new art of counterpoint was first cultivated. So far as the line of progress can be traced, the art originated in Paris or its vicinity, and slowly spread over the adjacent country. The home of Gothic architecture was the home of mediaeval chorus music, and the date of the appearance of these two products is the same. The princes of France and Flanders (the term France at that period meaning the dominions of the Capetian dynasty) faithfully guarded the interests of religious music, and the theorists and composers of this time were officers of the secular government as well as of the Church. We should naturally suppose that church music would be actively supported by a king so pious as Robert of France (eleventh century), who discarded his well-beloved wife at the command of Pope Gregory V. because she was his second cousin, who held himself pure and magnanimous in the midst of a fierce and corrupt age, and who composed many beautiful hymns, including (as is generally agreed) the exquisite Sequence, Veni Sancte Spiritus. He was accustomed to lead the choir in his chapel by voice and gesture. He carried on all his journeys a little prayer chamber in the form of a tent, in which he sang at the stated daily hours to the praise of God. Louis IX. also, worthily canonized for the holiness of his life, made the cultivation of church song one of the most urgent of his duties. Every day he heard two Masses, sometimes three or four. At the canonical hours hymns and prayers were chanted by his chapel choir, and even on his crusades his choristers went before him on the march, singing the office for the day, and the king, a priest by his side, sang in a low voice after them. Rulers of a precisely opposite character, the craftiest and most violent in a guileful and brutal age, were zealous patrons of church music. Even during that era of slaughter and misery when the French kingship was striding to supremacy over the bodies of the great vassals,