The oratorio was the Phœnix that arose from the ashes of the “mystery,” the masses of Palestrina, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, and Hummel were responses to the calls of the church. The Reformation made no effort to sever music from the services of religion; Luther was an enthusiastic lover of harmony, and himself a composer of psalmody. The annihilations of the works of art, that banished painting and defaced sculpture, could not blot out music from the worship of the church. The “Te Deum” and “Jubilate” outlived the persecution of bishops and clergy, and the nasal whine of the Puritan conventicle was in itself a recognition of the true power and place of that noblest of nature’s gifts and sciences. The quiet “Friends” nominally banish it from their form of worship; can any that have heard the flowing melodies that clothe their exhortations and prayers, say that it is so? Can any one that ever heard the voice of Elizabeth Fry doubt that poetry and music are innate gifts, that, once possessed, no human laws can sever from the utterances of a devotional spirit? No marvel is it, therefore, that a Cathedral city at all times is more or less the cradle of musical genius, or that scarce a record of a great master-spirit of harmony exists, but the office of “Kapellmeister,” or “Organist,” is attached to his name. The Organ, that almost inseparable associate of ecclesiastical music, seems to have been an instrument of great antiquity; that one of the Constantines presented one to King Pepin in 757, appears to be an established fact, and that during the tenth century the use of the organ became general in Germany, Italy, and England. In Mason’s “Essay on Church Music” is a homely translation of some lines written by Wolstan, a monk of that period, descriptive of the instrument then known under that name. “Twelve pair of bellows ranged in stately row Are joined above, and fourteen more below; These the full force of seventy men require, Who ceaseless toil, and plenteously perspire: Each aiding each, till all the winds be prest In the close confines of the incumbent chest, On which four hundred pipes in order rise, To bellow forth the blast that chest supplies.” It is presumed that the seventy men did not continue to blow throughout the performance on this monster engine, but laid in a stock of wind, which was gradually expended as the organist played; the keys were five or six inches broad, and must have been played upon by blows of the fist; the compass did not then exceed more than two octaves; half notes were not introduced until the beginning of the twelfth century, stops, not until the sixteenth; from which we may infer, that a real genuine organ, deserving the name, could not have been manufactured many years prior to the Reformation; but from the date of its first introduction may be ascribed the first attempts at the invention of harmony.