336 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLA Y 



character by a more or less subtle combination of gesture, 

 speech, and motion ; the playwright of the Middle Ages 

 entrusted little but speech to his actors. He endeavoured 

 by means of symbolism to arouse the appropriate feel- 

 ings in his audience. To appreciate the extent to which 

 symbolism was a factor of both social and religious life 

 in the Middle Ages is one of the hardest tasks to the 

 modern mind harder, perhaps, to the cultured than to 

 the uncultured. Yet a comparative study of civilisa- 

 tion shows a stage in which symbolism is widely current 

 in the majority of highly developed religions. To the 

 student of Buddhism nothing is more repellent at the 

 outset of his studies than the lists of truths, paths, 

 fetters, sins, and suchlike ; it is only as he strives to 

 penetrate beneath the numerical form that he reaches 

 the ideas symbolised, and finds each catalogue pregnant 

 with meaning. Precisely the same phase of symbolism 

 meets us in our study of medievalism. 1 The Hours, the 

 Stations, the Seven Words on the Cross, the Ghostly and 

 Bodily Works of Mercy, the Deadly Sins, these and many 

 other categories, which hardly reach the heart of the 

 modern reader, were yet symbols very close in both life 

 and death to the heart of mediaeval man. So close, 

 indeed, that they could not be omitted from the great 

 Christian drama. It did not weary him to hear the 

 whole catalogue of the Acts of Mercy recited during the 



1 I have collected upwards of twenty such numerical lists from fifteenth - 

 century confessional books. They range from the Seven Works of Ghostly Mercy 

 to the Four Sins which cry out to Heaven for Vengeance. A very fair appreciation 

 of this spirit of enumeration may be obtained from the Penitentionarius de Oonfes- 

 sione (Hain, 13156-13166), or indeed from Wyclif's sermons. The special folk- 

 need which gave rise to this common feature of mediaeval Buddhism and 

 mediaeval Christianity is of singular interest. 



