the bride was
claimed and the guests invited to the wedding by fixed forms of speech;
it was considered of importance which foot was placed first on the
ground in the morning, which shoe was first put on, and what stranger
was first met on going out; also, how the bread was laid on the table
at each meal, and where the salt-cellar was placed. All that concerned
the body, the cutting of the hair, baths, and bleeding, had their
appointed time and appropriate regulations. When the agriculturist
turned up the first clod, when he brought in the last sheaf, leaving a
truss of corn in the field, in short, all the incidents of labour had
their peculiar usages; there were customs for every important day of
the year, and they abounded at every festival. Many relics of these
remain to our day; we maintain some for our amusement, but most of them
appear to us useless, senseless, and superstitious.

Many of these practices had been derived in Germany from the heathen
faith and ancient laws and customs. The Church of the middle ages
followed in the same track, idealizing life. The services became more
frequent, the ceremonials more artificial. In the same way that it had
sanctified the great epochs of life by the mystery of its sacraments,
it tried, rivalling the heathen traditions, to influence even the
trifling actions of every-day life. It consecrated fountains and
animals, and professed that it could stop the effusion of blood and
turn away the enemy's shot by its blessing. Its endeavours to make the
spiritual perceptible to the senses of the multitude, produced many
proverbs and symbolical actings, which gave rise to the dramas of the
middle ages. But whilst it thus met the imaginative tendencies of the
people, its own spiritual and moral character was injured by all these
outward observances; and when Luther accused the Church of thirty-seven
errors, from the sale of indulgences, to the consecrated salt, and the
baptism of bells with their two hundred godfathers, he was not in a
position to perceive that the old Church had given growth to these
excrescences, by having yielded too much to the imaginative disposition
of the German popular mind.

The artisans liked to reproduce the formulas of their religion and
guilds for their amusement: dialogue and gesture were interchanged, and
thus dramatic representations arose. The initiated and best informed of
every class became known by this; they had an opportunity of showing
their n