In simplest definition church music, as Spitta has concisely said, is music ‘that has grown up within the bosom of the church’[59] and, he might have added, that best expresses the essence and spirit of its distinctive creedal beliefs. It took centuries for Roman Catholicism to produce a Palestrina. But, when he did appear, he acted as genius has always acted; while the learned theologians of the Council of Trent were speculating on the true character of church music and fulminating against abuses, he was quietly creating those wonderful masses and motets that have ever since been regarded as the loftiest musical embodiment of the spirit of the Roman Catholic liturgy and which, therefore, needed no edict of council or pontiff to establish their supremacy. And so, while lesser musicians were busily engaged in defending the new ideas, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), with all the quiet confidence of genius, was steadily producing works for the church service that stand in the same relation to the Lutheran liturgy and to the spirit of the Lutheran Church of his period that Palestrina’s music stands to the Roman liturgy. The whole creative energy of Bach’s genius seemed to centre around his deeply religious nature. The great majority of his works were written either expressly for the Lutheran Church service or in forms appropriate to the spirit of this service. He consciously set himself the task not only to regenerate church music, which even in his time had fallen into melancholy ways, but especially to take the forms which he found already technically developed and to apply them to the utterance of the exalted ideas of religious life and experience as interpreted through the German Protestant faith. Bach was the only one of the eighteenth-century German composers who was completely equipped for so worthy a task. Springing from sturdy peasant stock, bred and educated entirely in his own beloved Thuringia and wholly in accordance with German traditions and Protestant ideals, and never deeming it necessary to go abroad for those superficial refinements which his nation lacked, Bach was essentially and peculiarly the product of a culture that was purely German Protestant. He was endowed with an intellectual force of truly gigantic proportions and with a catholicity wide and wise enough to assimilate whatever was vital and vigorous in the various musical forms and styles with which the air was filled. He was absolute master of organ music, which throughout the seventeenth century was the only branch of art to develop real splendor as an indigenous product of the Lutheran Church. Although in thought and feeling a thoroughgoing churchman, he had the wit to discern that even the opera, the worldly antipode of the churchly ideal, contained elements that could be rendered valuable in reverent service to purely religious purposes. In Bach’s hands these operatic elements lost their emotional sensuality, washed clean in the pure impersonal flow of his