only the gospels and epistles, afterwards also the Service of the Mass, for all Sundays and festivals and saints’ days, with explanations and directions. § 115.5. =Catechisms and Prayer Books.=--Next to preaching, the chief opportunity for imparting religious instruction was confession. Later catechisms drew largely upon the baptismal and confessional services. In the 13th and 14th centuries the decalogue was added, and afterwards the seven deadly sins and the seven principal virtues. Pictures were used to impress the main points on the minds of the people and the youth. The catechetical literature of this period, both in guides for priests and manuals for the people, was written in the vernacular.--During the 15th century there were also numerous so-called _Artes moriendi_, showing how to die well, in which often earnest piety appeared side by side with the grossest superstition. There were also many prayer books, _Hortuli animæ_, published, in which the worship of Mary and the saints often overshadowed that of God and Christ, and an extravagant belief in indulgences led to a mechanical view of prayer that was thoroughly pagan. § 115.6. =The Dance of Death.=--The fantastic humour of the Middle Ages found dramatic and spectacular expression in the Dance of Death, in which all classes, from the pope and princes to the beggars, in turn converse with death. It was introduced into Germany and France in the beginning of the 14th century, with the view of raising men out of the pleasures and troubles of life. It was called in France the Dance of the Maccabees, because first introduced at that festival. Pictures and verbal descriptions of the Dance of Death were made on walls and doors of churches, around MSS. and woodcuts, where death was generally represented as a skeleton. Hans Holbein the Younger gave the finishing touch to these representations in his _Imagines Mortis_, the originals of which are in St. Petersburg. In this masterpiece, the idea of a dancing pair is set aside, and in its place forty pictures, afterwards increased to fifty-eight, full of humour and moral earnestness, pourtray the power of death in the earthly life.[341]