with the sweetness of "Have mercy upon me," which follows it in the
"Matthew," to gain a fair notion of the spirit in which the one work,
and also the spirit in which the other, is written. The next point to
note is, that while the "Matthew" begins with lamentation and ends
with resignation, "John" begins and ends with hope and praise. In the
former there is no chorus like the opening "Herr, unser, Herrscher,"
no chorale so triumphant as "Ach grosser König," and certainly no
single passage so rapturous as "Alsdann vom Tod erwecke mich, Dass
meine Augen sehen dich, In aller Freud, O Gottes Sohn" (with the bass
mounting to the high E flat and rolling magnificently down again). So
in the "John" Passion Bach has given us, first, a vivid picture of the
turbulent crowd and of the suffering and death of Christ; second, an
expression of man's bitterest remorse; and, last and above all, an
expression of man's hope for the future and his thankfulness to Christ
who redeemed him. These are what one remembers after hearing the work
sung; and these, it may be remarked, are the things that the
seventeenth and eighteenth century mind chiefly saw in the sorrow and
death of Jesus of Nazareth.


III.

The "Matthew" Passion arouses a very different mood from that aroused
by the "John." One does not remember the turbulent people's choruses,
nor the piercing note of anguish, nor any rapturous song or chorus;
for all else is drowned in the recollection of an overwhelming
utterance of love and human sorrow and infinite tenderness. Much else
there is in the "Matthew" Passion, just as there is love and
tenderness in the "John"; but just as these are subordinated in the
"John" to the more striking features I have mentioned, so in the