SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 401 



of theological dogmas. For the student of comparative 

 religion there is more useful material in the ZeitglocJdin, 

 or in Geiler von Kaisersberg's sermons, than in all 

 the protocols and confessions of Worms, Speyer, and 

 Augsburg taken together. The main problems which 

 need investigation are : What was the view of religion 

 held at any time by the great masses of the people ? 

 and : How did the religious conceptions of the people 

 influence their social and civic life ? The Christianity of 

 the ninth-century Saxon, as represented in the Heliand, 

 is wholly different in spirit from the Christianity of the 

 mediseval burgher, as represented in a great folk passion- 

 play, and their religions influenced their lives in a wholly 

 different way. The passage from the one to the other 

 marks the spiritual growth of the Germanic race, and 

 no small light is thrown on the history of that growth 

 by the genesis and evolution of the religious drama. 



The missionaries brought their religion and sought 

 to force it on the German people ; they branded as 

 devilish all the old heathen festivals, the religious dances 

 and the ancient marriage rites, thus unwittingly creat- 

 ing all the deep mediaeval feeling as to witchcraft. But 

 the folk-spirit was not to be thus repressed ; it danced 

 into the churches ; it took Christianity out of the hands 

 of the priests ; it moulded it to its own ideas, and 

 shaped it to that wonderful artistic polytheism of which 

 the nominal founder never dreamed, and which would 

 have been sternly repudiated by the early Christian 

 teachers. 1 The passion-plays would be singularly 



1 Some few Buddhist ascetics in Ceylon may still hold the faith of their great 

 teacher, but Gautama would not recognise his own child in the folk-religions of 

 Siam and Burmah. 



VOL. II 2 D 



