INTRODUCTORY 251 



is their foothold worth if they have neglected all the 

 experience gained by their ancestors in a thousand years 

 of toil ? This mass of human labour civic, religious, 

 scholastic, literary, artistic is not and cannot be worth- 

 less in the light of modern thought. It is the duty of 

 the mediae valist to justify the past to the present, to 

 convert what has been rejected as institution and as 

 dogma into a fruitful factor of the culture of to-day. 



If the chief task at present before the student of 

 western civilisation is to obtain a fuller recognition of its 

 earlier struggles, and a fuller appreciation of its earlier 

 achievements, a slight study of one phase of mediaeval 

 thought the passion-play may be of service, although 

 the writer sets himself no very wide and ambitious aim. 

 He has merely sought to interest the reader in mediaeval 

 ways of expression and mediaeval modes of thought ; to 

 excite in him a desire to study further. This is not a 

 history of the religious drama in Germany, it is an attempt 

 to portray one phase in the mediaeval folk-conception of 

 Christ ; and it must be read in the spirit that recognises 

 in the current religious conceptions of the great bulk of 

 the people the actual religion of the day. It is this 

 religion, and no other, which is an active social force, 

 helping to mould the spiritual and economic life of its 

 devotees. That the reader may pass on, whenever he 

 lists, into fresh fields and onto the little-trodden byways 

 of mediaeval religious literature, considerable space has 

 been given to footnote references. These references, 

 however, have no claim whatever to completeness, every 

 student will recognise how they might have been in- 

 creased a hundredfold. Like the scanty remarks on the 



