These phrases were borrowed from either plain-song or secular melodies. Like the mass, the early motet was not an original composition, but the combination of existing chants or secular songs. Frequently it was frankly secular; more frequently all the texts were sacred, but sometimes, as in the mass, secular texts and melodies were mingled with the sacred. When the texts in the motet were various, they always bore some kind of mental relation to each other,[26] a condition which was by no means always present in the mass when different texts were used. The practice of providing each voice-part with a separate text, while it tended to confuse the listener, served, on the other hand, to emphasize the musical independence of the parts and so threw stress on a quality of utmost benefit to the advancement of contrapuntal methods. A few motets by Philip of Vitry,[27] written about 1300, are the most ancient purely church motets of which we have authentic record. We are informed by Morley that this composer’s motets ‘were for some time of all others best esteemed and most used in the church.’ Beginning probably in France and cultivated with marked success by the great Netherlanders, the motet reached its highest point of perfection under Palestrina in Rome. It was adopted, with important modifications, into the services of the two great branches of the Protestant Church from their very beginning. In England, until the ‘full’ anthem finally superseded it, and in Germany from Luther until after Bach’s time, it held a high place in ecclesiastical music, but the words were almost invariably in the vernacular, while in the Roman service they were always in Latin. In the period represented by Okeghem there may be noticed the beginning of a distinctive style for motet-music differing quite materially from that of the mass. It has been already stated that the disfiguring extravagances and learned complexities which composers felt in duty bound to lavish on the music of the mass, were more and more avoided in the motet. A solemnity, dignity, and breadth of style, of which one finds but few examples in the masses of the period, were encouraged in the motet. This different viewpoint led composers to focus their interest and attention on the portrayal of the meaning of the words rather than on the working of contrapuntal miracles and the church composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries left a rich legacy of compositions in this form appropriate to their appointed use and permeated with the spirit of devotion and reverence. After the compelling genius of Des Prés had once revealed the expressive capabilities of music, this new power was evoked with so much enthusiasm by all his great contemporaries and successors among the Netherlanders that the richest period of motet writing is to be found between the years 1500 and 1600.