they tend to perpetuate superstition, must be acknowledged likewise to
keep alive religious sentiment. But if this be the case in the nineteenth
century, how powerfully must such exhibitions have operated on the general
mind in the dark ages! The alternative lay between total ignorance and
this mode of communicating the truth. For the general mass of the clergy
were then as ignorant as the laity; and as the wild work, which in these
sacred dramas is sometimes made of the scripture history, may be supposed
to have embodied the knowledge of a whole fraternity, we may not unfairly
conjecture the kind of instruction to be obtained from each individual.
The state of language in Europe must have greatly contributed to the
adoption of public instruction, by means of dramatic representation. The
services of the church were in Latin, now become a dead language. This
_originated_, perhaps, rather in sincere reverence, and the dread of
profaning the sacred mysteries by transferring them into the vulgar tongue,
than in any systematic design of keeping the people in the dark; for, from
the gradual extinction of the Latin, as the vernacular idiom, and the
gradual growth of the modern languages, there was no marked period in
which the change might appear to be called for, until the question became
involved with weightier matters of controversy. The confusion of tongues,
almost throughout Europe, before the great predominant languages were
formed out of the conflicting dialects, must greatly have impeded the
preaching the Gospel, for which, in other respects, only a very small part
of the clergy were qualified. Though, in these times, most extraordinary
effects are attributed to the eloquence of certain preachers, for instance,
Fra. Giovanni di Vicenza, yet many of the itinerant friars, the first, we
believe, who addressed the people with great activity in the vulgar tongue,
must have been much circumscribed by the limits of their own patois.[1]
But the spectacle of the dramatic exhibitions everywhere spoke a common
language; and the dialogue, which, in parts of the Chester mysteries, is a
kind of Anglicized French, and which, even if translated into the native