At length the dramatic profession, forsaking courts and inns, secured a separate home of its own, and became a guild by itself, independently established in the distinct theatre and appealing directly to the general public for support. In the secret theatre of the priests the substance of the drama, based on such legends as those of the Hindoo Krishna, the Egyptian Osiris, and the Greek Dionysus, was fiction exhibited as fact or poetry disguised as revelation. In the open theatre of the state the substance of the drama, in such examples as the Prometheus of Æschylus, was mythology, moral philosophy, or poetry represented as history. In the plays foisted on the mediæval Christian church the dramatic substance was tradition, ceremonial, and dogma taught as religion. But now, with the rise of the educated histrionic profession, all this passed away, and in the freed theatre of the people the substance of the drama became coincident with the realities of human life, a living reflex of the experience of society. In Portugal and Spain, Lope de Vega and Calderon developed the highest flower and finish of the Mysteries and Miracle-Plays in their transition from the ecclesiastical to the social type of the drama, while in England, France, Italy, and Germany the stage became a rounded mirror of the world, reflecting human nature and conduct in their actual form, color, and motion. Then the theatrical art was rapidly developed in all its varieties,—the drama of character and fate, or tragedy; the drama of plot and intrigue, or romance; and the drama of manners, or comedy and farce. Then the theatre instinctively assumed for its whole business what its comprehensive function now is and must ever remain, yet what it has never grasped and wielded with distinct consciousness, but only blindly groped after and fumbled about,—namely, the exhibition of the entire range of the types of human character and behavior so set off with the contrasts of their foils and in the light of their standards as to make the spectators feel what is admirable and lovely and what is contemptible and odious, as the operation of the laws of destiny is made visible before them. But all who penetrate beneath mere appearances must perceive that just in the degree in which the theatre does this work it is trenching on the immediate province of the church, and the players fulfilling a function identical in moral substance with that of the priests.