It was by appeals like this _Kindelwiegen_ to the natural, homely instincts of the folk that the Church gained a real hold over the masses, making Christianity during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries a genuinely popular religion in Germany. Dr. Alexander Tille, the best historian of the German Christmas, has an interesting passage on the subject: "In the dancing and jubilation around the cradle," he writes, "the religion of the Cross, however much it might in its inmost character be opposed to the nature of the German people and their essential healthiness, was felt no longer as something alien. It had become naturalized, but had lost in the process its very core. The preparation for a life after death, which was its Alpha and Omega, had passed into the background. It was not joy at the promised 'Redemption' that expressed itself in the dance around the cradle; for the German has never learnt to feel himself utterly vile and sinful: it was joy at the simple fact that a human being, a particular human being in peculiar circumstances, was born into the world.... The Middle Ages showed in the cradle-rocking 'a true German and most lovable childlikeness.' The Christ Child was the 'universal little brother of all children of earth,' and they acted accordingly, they lulled Him to sleep, they fondled and rocked Him, they danced before Him and leapt around Him _in dulci jubilo_."{51} There is much here that is true of the cult of the Christ Child in other countries than Germany, though perhaps Dr. Tille underestimates the religious feeling that is often joined to the human sentiment. The fifteenth century was the great period for the _Kindelwiegen_, the time when it appears to have been practised in all the churches of Germany; in the sixteenth it began to seem |111| irreverent to the stricter members of the clergy, and the figure of the infant Jesus was in many places no longer rocked in the cradle but enthroned on the altar.{52} This usage is described by Naogeorgus (1553):-- "A woodden childe in clowtes is on the aultar set, About the which both boyes and gyrles do daunce and trymly jet, And Carrols sing in prayse of Christ, and, for to helpe them heare, The organs aunswere every verse with sweete and solemne cheare. The priestes do rore aloude; and round about the parentes stande To see the sport, and with their voyce do helpe them and their hande."{53} The placing of a "Holy Child" above the altar at Christmas is still customary in many Roman Catholic churches. Protestantism opposed the _Kindelwiegen_, on the grounds both of superstition and of the disorderly proceedings that accompanied it, but it was long before it was utterly extinguished even in the Lutheran churches. In Catholic churches the custom did not altogether die out, though the unseemly behaviour which often attended it--and the growth of a pseudo-classical taste--caused its abolition in most places.{54}