406 THE GERMAN PASS1ON-PLA Y 



These lines are even truer of Germany than of 

 England, and at least in Germany the religious pageants 

 and plays * instructed ' an unsurpassed school of 

 painters and engravers. 



Is the moral of this Essay, then, a Eestoration a 

 resuscitation of the guilds and a return to the religious 

 faith of the Middle Ages ? Assuredly not. The people 

 in each age must work out its own salvation. No 

 preachers nor teachers can renew the vitality of a dead 

 art, a dead religion, or a dead economic system. The 

 folk must create anew for itself, and the best that the 

 cultured men of each age can do is to lighten the throes 

 of birth. They may put the dumb folk -thought into 

 words, and give artistic expression to the new folk- 

 ideals. They may help to guide new labour organisa- 

 tions to a sense of their social responsibility ; they may 

 assist in converting trades-processions into civic pageants 

 and mass-meetings into folk-festivals. They may aid 

 the tendencies of the time to level down in wealth and 

 to level up in knowledge. But after all it is the folk 

 which must rise to self-consciousness. Then perhaps it 

 may come about that those social instincts, which are in 

 truth more intense to-day than in Athens, Jerusalem, or 

 Nurnberg of old, will cease to be so diverse and confused 

 in expression as they are now ; they will find one watch- 

 word to arouse all classes of the community ; then and 

 not till then will anything worthy of the name of a folk- 

 religion be possible, then and not till then can a great 

 religious festival be again a reality. 



