Out of this religious zeal finally emerged the German church cantata, which found its culminating point, as did so many other musical forms associated with German church music, in Johann Sebastian Bach. In Italy and elsewhere in connection with Roman Catholic music, the church cantata never possessed any liturgical significance, though it was freely employed for purposes of religious entertainment and instruction. But almost immediately after its introduction into Germany through the gifted German students who had studied in Italian art-centres, notably in Venice, the church cantata became a part of the regular order of the German Protestant church worship and thus became the object of solicitous attention on the part of Protestant German composers. Encouraged by the church and firmly imbedded in its liturgy, it needed only the touch of Bach’s genius to cause it to grow into full artistic stature and stand as the most precious musical gift of German Protestantism to the world. In the seventeenth century it was frequently called ‘spiritual concerto’ or ‘spiritual dialogue,’[57] and consisted of Biblical passages and church or devotional hymns. During this period its rather crude musical form usually followed this order--an instrumental introduction, a ‘spiritual aria’ (a simple strophic song for one or more voices), one or two vocal solos, and a chorale or two. While German religious music was cautiously feeling its way toward individual self-expression, there were not wanting among German musicians those who felt that the forms of Italian dramatic music, such as the recitative and aria with their obvious possibilities for the expression of impassioned human feeling, should be fully utilized in the structure of their new religious art, and who argued that the qualities of brilliance, variety, and personal utterance should be present in ecclesiastical art as well as in secular. On the other hand were those who were in favor of banishing from the church service all vocal music except that based on the austere chorale and motet (analogous to the Latin motet of the sixteenth century), and who would restrict all church music to the more abstract, objective, and liturgic conception derived from ecclesiastical traditions. Standing on middle ground between these two extreme ideals, Bach, with the insight born of genius, retained all that was best and most serviceable in each--the simple strength and sturdy devotion of the chorale, together with the contrapuntal chorus, as the collective expression of exalted religious sentiment, and the recitative and Italian aria, chastened and stripped of its histrionic shallowness and insincerity, as the individual personal utterance of the more subjective moods of meditation and introspection.