e may destroy the
Word of God. Let every man very well note" (1523). "A Christian and
Merry Talk, that it is more pleasing to God and more wholesome for men
to come out of the monasteries and to marry, than to tarry therein
and to burn; which talk is not with human folly and the false
teachings thereof, but is founded alone in the holy, divine, biblical,
and evangelical Scripture" (1524). "A Pleasant Dialogue of a Peasant
with a Monk that he should cast his Cowl from him. Merry and fair to
read" (1525).

The above is only a selection taken haphazard from the mass of
fugitive literature which the early years of the Reformation brought
forth. In spite of a certain rough but not unattractive directness of
diction, a prolonged reading of them is very tedious, as will have
been sufficiently seen from the extracts we have given. Their humour
is of a particularly juvenile and obvious character, and consists
almost entirely in the childish device of clothing the personages with
ridiculous but non-essential attributes, or in placing them in
grotesque but pointless situations. Of the more subtle humour, which
consists in the discovery of real but hidden incongruities, and the
perception of what is innately absurd, there is no trace. The obvious
abuses of the time are satirized in this way _ad nauseam_. The
rapacity of the clergy in general, the idleness and lasciviousness of
the monks, the pomp and luxury of the prince-prelates, the
inconsistencies of Church traditions and practices with Scripture,
with which they could now be compared, since it was everywhere
circulated in the vulgar tongue, form their never-ending theme. They
reveal to the reader a state of things that strikes one none the less
in English literature of the period--the intense interest of all
classes in theological matters. It shows us how they looked at all
things through a theological lens. Although we have left this phase of
popular thought so recently behind us, we can even now scarcely
imagine ourselves back into it. The idea of ordinary men, or of the
vast majority, holding their religion as anything else than a very
pious opinion absolutely unconnected with their daily life, public or
private, has already become almost inconceivable to us. In all the
writings of the time, the theological interest is in the forefront.
The economic and social groundwork only casually reveals itself. This
it is that makes the reading of the sixteenth-century polemics so
in