divinities. The frank coarseness of the plays is often merely disgusting,
and suggests how superficial, in most cases, was the medieval religious
sense. With no thought of incongruity, too, these writers brought God the
Father onto the stage in bodily form, and then, attempting in all sincerity
to show him reverence, gilded his face and put into his mouth long speeches
of exceedingly tedious declamation. The whole emphasis, as generally in the
religion of the times, was on the fear of hell rather than on the love of
righteousness. Yet in spite of everything grotesque and inconsistent, the
plays no doubt largely fulfilled their religious purpose and exercised on
the whole an elevating influence. The humble submission of the boy Isaac to
the will of God and of his earthly father, the yearning devotion of Mary
the mother of Jesus, and the infinite love and pity of the tortured Christ
himself, must have struck into even callous hearts for at least a little
time some genuine consciousness of the beauty and power of the finer and
higher life. A literary form which supplied much of the religious and
artistic nourishment of half a continent for half a thousand years cannot
be lightly regarded or dismissed.

THE MORALITY PLAYS. The Mystery Plays seem to have reached their greatest
popularity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the dawning light
of the Renaissance and the modern spirit they gradually waned, though in
exceptional places and in special revivals they did not altogether cease to
be given until the seventeenth century. On the Continent of Europe, indeed,
they still survive, after a fashion, in a single somewhat modernized form,
the celebrated Passion Play of Oberammergau. In England by the end of the
fifteenth century they had been for the most part replaced by a kindred
species which had long been growing up beside them, namely the Morality
Plays.

The Morality Play probably arose in part from the desire of religious