r hymn in four parts, with elaborate instrumental
accompaniment, served to express the feelings of the whole congregation.
To each instrument was assigned a separate part, and the whole
accompaniment was separate from the singing.

But if Bach in the consummation of the chorale perfected Luther's work
in the realm of music, he in his Passion music finds worthy expression
of a nation's devotion. His genius, as it were, felt the spirit-life of
the past. His soul vibrated to the yearnings of the unknown millions of
his race who had passed away in the centuries preceding him, and whose
consolation in their humble toil, in the various hardships of their
lives, was the narrative of this Passion music of the Saviour Christ.
The rough, dramatic presentation accorded to this narrative gathered, as
time went on, elements of beauty and traditional treatment around it. It
was powerfully to affect the drama proper and oratorio, but in its
direct and proper functions it was to inspire the first, and in some
respects the greatest, of the great musicians of Germany to his utmost
effort, to his most lofty flight of genius, as his winged spirit soared
through the ages of the past toward the future ages yet to come.

This Passion music of St. Matthew is the noblest presentment of the
characteristics of the German mind, and is unsurpassed in the realm of
religious art. It is an unfolding of the German spirit, and evidences
qualities the possession of which makes for national greatness.

As we have said, Bach is the great lyric poet of his nation, the first
great German genius after the devastating horrors of war. Looming on the
sight, or as contemporaries, are Handel, Leibnitz, Wolf, Klopstock,
Lessing, and Winckelmann. The modern era, with its philosophy and
revolution, has arrived. The domain of thought is enwidened, and the
Middle Ages blend and fade in the historic vista of the past. But the
modern era commences with these great affirmations in art and poetry.
Bach takes the narrative of the Passion, and erects the Cross anew with
sympathetic genius of art and love. Handel, as if he had caught Isaiah's
prophetic fire, gave to Europe its most beautiful and noble epic, the
_Messiah_; and Klopstock, the first of the great line of Germany's
modern poets, devoted his genius and labor to the same subject. But with
Bach and Handel no miserable conflicting elements of theology sully the
conception of the Saviour Christ. These great artists ri