earnestness and hearty merriment. His dislike of priestly
sentimentalities is no anachronism. Even in his day, a noble lay-
religion, founded on faith in the divine and universal symbolism of
humanity and nature, was gradually arising, and venting itself, from
time to time, as I conceive, through many most unsuspected channels,
through chivalry, through the minne-singers, through the lay
inventors, or rather importers, of pointed architecture, through the
German school of painting, through the politics of the free towns,
till it attained complete freedom in Luther and his associate
reformers.

For my fantastic quotations of Scripture, if they shall be deemed
irreverent, I can only say, that they were the fashion of the time,
from prince to peasant--that there is scarcely one of them with
which I have not actually met in the writings of the period--that
those writings abound with misuse of Scripture, far more coarse,
arbitrary, and ridiculous, than any which I have dared to insert--
that I had no right to omit so radical a characteristic of the
Middle Age.

For the more coarse and homely passages with which the drama is
interspersed, I must make the same apology. I put them there
because they were there--because the Middle Age was, in the gross, a
coarse, barbarous, and profligate age--because it was necessary, in
order to bring out fairly the beauty of the central character, to
show 'the crooked and perverse generation' in which she was 'a child
of God without rebuke.' It was, in fact, the very ferocity and
foulness of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at
the same time the Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of
the Mediaeval Saints. The world was so bad that, to be Saints at