America's contribution to church music has been large and varied. As chamber music seems to serve as the practice field for German composers, so does church music apparently occupy the less aspiring or intense moments of most of our writers. Composers of all classes and leanings have offered their share to the constantly increasing list of anthems and services to be found in the catalogues of our publishers and there seems to be, moreover, a legion whose entire efforts are in this field. As a whole this music may be classified like the music of other departments: a comparatively small percentage of it is good, much is mediocre, while the vast balance is worthless. The meritorious section of this work subdivides itself into several kinds of excellence. We have among our church musicians a certain few who write the sober and so-called ecclesiastical style which the canons of the English schools have laid down as being the fitting adjunct of the church's service, while, again, particularly in America, a large amount of church music is couched in an idiom somewhat more secular in tone, in which a more popular melodic treatment lends so-called 'human interest' to the work. To the more ascetic this form of writing is the bane of church music. Gounod is perhaps the instigator of this practice of importing into the church the profane sensuousness of a more worldly art. Despite a strong note of reactionary protest, he has had many imitators both in England and America, and the 'operatic' anthem has become a standard form. Of these two classes of church music, namely, the essentially sacred and that more secularly tinged, it is the latter that is abused in American church music. Whereas in England the great respect for tradition keeps most of her church composers within the narrow paths of ecclesiastical austerity--where, it must be said, they often become contrapuntally arid or musty--the American anthem writer too often sins on the other side and has a strong tendency to become sentimentally maudlin in accepting as a working rule Voltaire's keen definition of church music as 'the pursuit of sensuous pleasure in the duties of a cult established to combat such a pursuit.' Many of the composers whose works have been the subject of the foregoing pages have written for the church, and in some cases their church music represents an important phase of their work. We have already spoken of Mr. Buck's importance as a church composer; other earlier composers whose church music was important are G. W. Marston, who wrote many anthems and sacred songs; W. W. Gilchrist, whose list of anthems and church cantatas is a long one; C. C. Converse, who, besides essaying a vast deal of serious music in a larger way, found his best success in several well-known hymns. Richard Henry Warren, Remington R. Fairlamb, and Smith N. Penfield are also names that have figured in the recent decades of ecclesiastical composition.