The three main kinds of poetry are the epic, the drama, and the lyric. Epic and drama are not extensively used in the Lutheran Church. Works exist which show that the graphic and plastic style of epic poetry has been employed in the Christian Church when stories from sacred history were paraphrased in metrical form. The Gospel lessons have often been read or chanted in metrical form, as hymns. This poetical work may be classified as didactic hymnody with an epic touch. The epic, strictly speaking, requires an imaginative adornment of the historical material to be treated, and this cannot very well be applied to Biblical history without a certain amount of injury. Besides, it would be difficult to excel the beauty of the Biblical presentation, with its pre-eminent epic vividness and simplicity. The mediaeval Church employed the dramatic form in the mysteries and miracles, religious plays, which were used especially at great festival occasions to present to the laity in a dramatic and effective way the historical facts pertaining to the festival. More closely related to the Christian cultus was the Passion play, performed by the clergy in the churches during Lent. The Passion play, and a number of dramatic-liturgical ceremonies, especially at Christmas and Easter, were quite freely employed in the early Lutheran Church. But this dramatic activity did not remain permanently in the Lutheran Church. Perhaps the Church felt that the dramatic reproduction of Biblical history did not harmonize very well with that element of personal truth which must exist throughout the cultus and which may suffer injury as the dramatic illusion becomes greater. While epic and dramatic poetry have little or no place in the Evangelical Lutheran cultus, and so can not very well be employed in the hymnody of the Church, the third kind of poetry, the lyric, is very extensively used. A noteworthy characteristic of lyrical poetry is that the object of the song is most closely united with the singing subject; they are as one; the object lives within the subject and is the real content of the subject. If the cultus is a meeting between God and the Church, in which God imparts his gifts to the congregation and the latter faithfully receives, enjoys, and acknowledges the divine gifts of grace; a meeting, in other words, in which the divine objects join the worshipping subject, in which the latter is permeated by the former, then it seems only very natural that religious lyrical poetry should here find its proper use; when the worshipping congregation gives expression to its life of faith and love through sacred song, through the hymns of the Church, these hymns are lyrical poetry.