One must have been in a Catholic community, or else lived close to an important Catholic church, in order to form an idea of the great part the Church once played in the lives and thoughts of its members--the endless provision it made for the _entertainment_ of unformed minds in the way of festivals, fasts, processions, curious observances, changes of costume, and special rites. There was always something going on or coming off. There was not a day in the year nor an hour in the day which had not its ecclesiastical name and character. In our flowery observance of Easter and in our joyous celebration of Christmas we have a faint traditional residue of festivals that once made all Christendom gay and jocund. And it was all so adapted to the limited abilities of our race! In an average thousand men, there is not more than one man capable of filling creditably the post of a Protestant minister, but there are a hundred who can be drilled into competent priests. Consider, for example, a procession, which was formerly the great event of many of the Church festivals, gratifying equally those who witnessed and those who took part in it. In other words, it gratified keenly the whole community. And yet how entirely it was within the resources of human nature! Not a child so young, not a woman so weak, not a man so old, but could assist or enjoy it. The sick could view it from their windows, the robust could carry its burdens, the skillful could contrive its devices, and all had the feeling that they were engaged in enhancing at once the glory of God, the fame of their saint, the credit of their town, and the good of their souls. It was pleasure; it was duty; it was masquerade; it was devotion. Some readers may remember the exaltation of soul with which Albert Dürer, the first of German artists in Luther's age, describes the great procession at Antwerp, in 1520, in honor of what was styled the "Assumption" of the Virgin Mary. One of the pleasing fictions adopted by the old Church was that on the 15th of August, A.D. 45, the Virgin Mary, aged seventy-five years, made a miraculous ascent into heaven. Hence the annual festival, which was celebrated throughout Europe with pomp and splendor. The passage in the diary of Dürer has a particular value, because it affords us a vivid view of the bright side of the ancient Church just before the reformers changed its gorgeous robes into the Puritan's plain black gown, and substituted the long prayer and interminable sermon for the magnificent ceremonial and the splendid procession.