The important rôle which the church singers themselves played in the development of music in this formative period is worthy of passing notice. Foremost in importance is to be noted that the choirs were in fact training-schools for composers. Almost without exception the church composers were graduated, so to speak, from the choirs into the more exalted and distinguished sphere of creative work, having first gained their practical training and experience as choristers. But the humbler singers themselves were not without a good measure of influence. In their experiments in the study-rooms, as well as in the actual singing of written compositions, they served to counteract the pedantic rules of theorists by following the dictates of the ear as against mere rule. Thus chromatic tones not indicated in the score were frequently sung by the experienced choristers who followed their natural musical feeling, and later theory sanctioned what they intuitively felt. In this way natural musical impulse (which Wagner has so beautifully symbolized in Walther in _Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg_) many times softened the austerity and harshness of musical practices dictated by mediæval theory. IV While, under the guidance of scholasticism, the stream of church song was thus gradually gaining artistic momentum and expressive beauty and power through the upbuilding of a complicated science of melodic interweaving, a second stream of song, unfettered by rule or tradition, was modestly and quietly flowing along, gushing from the hearts of the people and fed from secular emotions and experiences. Until the humanistic movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discovered points of contact and mutual interdependence, these two streams of religious and secular song seldom touched in their onward flow, for they sprang from widely divergent sources and were guided by widely differing principles of artistic utterance. In the history of Western Europe ecclesiastical music has exercised a remarkably small and disproportionate influence on the nature and development of secular music; on the contrary, it has frequently weakened and changed its own standards under the impact of secular ideals and styles. Many folk-songs doubtless imitated melodic and modal characteristics of the chant-melodies, but there has always existed a certain antipathy between these two forms. The early indifference of the popular mind to church music is easily traceable to the facts that this music was cultivated exclusively by ecclesiastics, that it was sung in Latin, a language which the people neither understood nor cared for, and that the people had no part in church song outside the few non-liturgical hymns.