THE SPIRIT OF THE PASSION-PLA Y 271 



nor humorous. Yet polytheism, festival, and humour 

 had to be brought into it, before it was fully acclimatised 

 among the Teutonic races, before it could become the folk- 

 religion of the Middle Ages. Little by little the ecclesias- 

 tics gave way, and Christianity was moulded to the needs 

 of the robuster Western nations. The Christianity of 

 the Middle Ages was not that of Christ, still less that of 

 Paul ; it was these plus Teutonic heathenism, plus an in- 

 definite amount of mediaeval folk-humour and folk-feeling. 

 It is in this spirit that we must endeavour to 

 interpret the grotesque inside and outside the churches, 

 the weird humour, sometimes verging on the indecent, of 

 occasional miniatures in monkish manuscripts, and, above 

 all, the combination of sacred and jocular in the passion- 

 plays. There was a widespread reverence for the papal 

 hierarchy in the Middle Ages, yet a pope or two in hell l 

 and an imp of a devil teasing a cardinal are traditional 

 in mediaeval art. There was a true religious earnestness in 

 the folk of the fifteenth century, but, like the Greeks, they 

 could laugh at their gods ; the belief in the Devil had a 

 very real influence over conduct in the Middle Ages, 

 but a mediaeval audience thoroughly appreciated his 

 humorous side on the stage. As in other matters, the 

 spirit of the passion-play here mirrors the general spirit 

 of its day, and I may illustrate it from the drama, 

 leaving the reader to find its analogies in other forms of 

 literature and in pictorial art. 



1 I once showed a popular preacher some fifteenth-century representations 

 of the day of judgment, with all types of ecclesiastics descending into hell. A 

 few Sundays later he preached on evidences of the Protestant spirit before the 

 Reformation, and cited these pictures as an example of the popular feeling to- 

 wards the Catholic hierarchy ! This was a marked case of the need of the 

 mediaeval factor in culture. 



