Nevertheless, Christianity absorbed from its environment the material of its ritual as inevitably as the tree draws nurture from the soil and atmosphere that underlies and surrounds it. That it absorbed those elements unconsciously, even unwillingly, goes a long way to explain our ignorance of the manner in which the liturgical music of the Church developed. It seems practically certain that among the most devout early Christians music was looked upon with suspicion, and its use, especially in connection with the worship of God, was probably discouraged as far as possible. Even as late as the fourth century we find a Syrian monk warning one of his brethren that we should approach God with sighs and tears, with reverence and humility, and not with song. When, through the inevitable pressure of environment, music had become an integral part of the Christian ritual, the Church fathers, with characteristic _naïveté_, completely ignored the source from which it was drawn, and, in what is obviously simple faith, attributed to it a divine origin. 'Our singing,’ says St. John Chrysostom, 'is only an echo, an imitation of that of the angels. Music was invented in heaven. Around and above us sing the angels. If man is musical it is by a revelation of the Holy Ghost; the singer is inspired from on high.’ St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose, Justin Martyr, St. Basil, St. Benedict, and other early fathers talk in the same strain. John de Muris, more historical and less mystical, can find no more definite origin for liturgical music than a vague tradition.[43] With those who were practically eye-witnesses to the growth of early Church music so serenely blind to the influences that determined its course, the task of the modern historian in reconstructing those influences becomes practically impossible. If, however, we understand clearly the conditions under which liturgical music took shape we can formulate a theoretical sketch of its history, which is probably not far from the truth. In this connection it will help us considerably if we remember that during the early centuries of the Christian era the Roman church was far from being the dominant and unifying factor which it later became, and that the great institution to which we are wont to refer simply as 'the church’ resulted from the confluence of many independent streams, and not from the expansion of any single one. These streams were divided, so to speak, between two main watersheds, one of which was Asia Minor and the other Italy. In Asia Minor the church was surrounded by a Semitic civilization shot through with Hellenic elements; in Italy it grew up in an environment of Græco-Roman culture.