tations of Christian art were services in churches: in
the administration of the sacraments and the ordinary liturgy. When, in
course of time, the forms of art as used in worship became insufficient,
there appeared the Mysteries, describing those events which were
regarded as the most important in the Christian religious view of life.
When, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the center of gravity
of Christian teaching was more and more transferred, the worship of
Christ as God, and the interpretation and following of His teaching, the
form of Mysteries describing external Christian events became
insufficient, and new forms were demanded. As the expression of the
aspirations which gave rise to these changes, there appeared the
Moralities, dramatic representations in which the characters were
personifications of Christian virtues and their opposite vices.

But allegories, owing to the very fact of their being works of art of a
lower order, could not replace the former religious dramas, and yet no
new forms of dramatic art corresponding to the conception now
entertained of Christianity, according to which it was regarded as a
teaching of life, had yet been found. Hence, dramatic art, having no
foundation, came in all Christian countries to swerve farther and
farther from its proper use and object, and, instead of serving God, it
took to serving the crowd (by crowd, I mean, not simply the masses of
common people, but the majority of immoral or unmoral men, indifferent
to the higher problems of human life). This deviation was, moreover,
encouraged by the circumstance that, at this very time, the Greek
thinkers, poets, and dramatists, hitherto unknown in the Christian
world, were discovered and brought back into favor. From all this it
followed that, not having yet had time to work out their own form of
dramatic art corresponding to the new conception entertained of
Christianity as being a teaching of life, and, at the same time,
recognizing the previous form of Mysteries and Moralities as
insufficient, the writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in
their search for a new form, began to imitate the newly discovered Greek
models, attracted by their elegance and novelty.

Since those who could principally avail themselves of dramatic
representations were the powerful of this world: kings, princes,
courtiers, the least religious people, not only utterly indifferent to
the questions of religion, but in most ca