Church service on festival occasions. All would be simple: a number of
the junior clergy grouped around a table would represent the 'Marriage
at Cana'; a more carefully postured group, again, would serve to portray
the 'Wise Men presenting gifts to the Infant Saviour'. But the reality
was greater than that of a painted picture; novelty was there, and,
shall we say, curiosity, to see how well-known young clerics, members of
local families, would demean themselves in this new duty. The
congregations increased, and earnest or ambitious churchmen were
incited to add fresh details to surpass previous tableaux.

But the Church is conservative. It required the lapse of hundreds of
years to make plain the possibility of action and its advantages over
motionless figures. Just before this next step was taken, or it may have
been just after, two of the scholarly few mentioned as having not quite
forgotten the Classical Drama, made an effort to revive its methods
while bitting and bridling it carefully for holy purposes. Some one
worthy brother (who was certainly not Gregory Nazianzene of the fourth
century), living probably in the tenth century, wrote a play called
_Christ's Passion_, in close imitation of Greek tragedy, even to the
extent of quoting extensively from Euripides. In the same century a good
and zealous nun of Saxony, Hroswitha by name, set herself to outrival
Terence in his own realm and so supplant him in the studies of those who
still read him to their souls' harm. She wrote, accordingly, six plays
on the model of Terence's Comedies, supplying, for his profane themes,
the histories of suffering martyrs and saintly maidens. It was a noble
ambition (not the less noble because she failed); but it was not along
the lines of her plays or of _Christ's Passion_ that the New Drama was
to develop. It is doubtful whether they were known outside a few
convents.