s who presided over the guilds; and finally the further
enlargement of theme due to the writing of drama of which the personages
were abstract moral qualities, giving the name of Morality to this kind
of play. Such, described with utter simplicity and brevity, was the
interesting evolution.

Aside from all technicalities, and stripped of much of moment to the
specialist, we have in this origin and early development a blend of
amusement and instruction; a religious purpose linked with a frank
recognition of the fact that if you make worship attractive you
strengthen its hold upon mankind--a truth sadly lost sight of by the
later Puritans. The church was wise, indeed, to unite these elements of
life, to seize upon the psychology of the show and to use it for the
purpose of saving souls. It was not until the sixteenth century and the
immediate predecessors of Shakespeare that the play, under the influence
of renaissance culture and the inevitable secularization of the theater
in antagonism to the Puritan view of amusement, waxed worldly, and
little by little lost the ear-marks of its holy birth and upbringing.

The day when the priests, still the actors of the play, walked down the
nave and issued from the great western door of the cathedral, to
continue the dramatic representations under the open sky, was truly a
memorable one in dramatic history. The first instinct was not that of
secularization, but rather the desire for freer opportunity to enact the
sacred stories; a larger stage, more scope for dramatic action. Yet,
although for generations the play remained religious in subject-matter
and intent, it was inevitable that in time it should come to realize
that its function was to body forth human life, unbounded by Bible
themes: all that can happen to human beings on earth and between heaven
and hell and beyond them, being fit material for treatment, since all
the world's a stage, and flesh and blood of more vital interest to
humanity at large than aught else. The rapid humanization of the
religious material can be easily traced in the coarse satire and broad
humor introduced into the Bible narratives: a free and easy handling of
sacred scene and character natural to a more naive time and by no means
implying irreverence. Thus, in the Noah story, Mrs. Noah becomes a stout
shrew whose unwillingness to come in out of the wet and bestow herself
in dry quarters in the Ark must have been hugely enjoyed by the
fifteenth cen