Many of these practices had been derived in Germany from the heathen faith and ancient laws and customs. The Church of the middle ages followed in the same track, idealizing life. The services became more frequent, the ceremonials more artificial. In the same way that it had sanctified the great epochs of life by the mystery of its sacraments, it tried, rivalling the heathen traditions, to influence even the trifling actions of every-day life. It consecrated fountains and animals, and professed that it could stop the effusion of blood and turn away the enemy's shot by its blessing. Its endeavours to make the spiritual perceptible to the senses of the multitude, produced many proverbs and symbolical actings, which gave rise to the dramas of the middle ages. But whilst it thus met the imaginative tendencies of the people, its own spiritual and moral character was injured by all these outward observances; and when Luther accused the Church of thirty-seven errors, from the sale of indulgences, to the consecrated salt, and the baptism of bells with their two hundred godfathers, he was not in a position to perceive that the old Church had given growth to these excrescences, by having yielded too much to the imaginative disposition of the German popular mind. The artisans liked to reproduce the formulas of their religion and guilds for their amusement: dialogue and gesture were interchanged, and thus dramatic representations arose. The initiated and best informed of every class became known by this; they had an opportunity of showing their nature under the traditional form. In such a way every young nation tries to represent life, and among the Germans, this inclination, together with the love of mystery, worked most powerfully in the same direction. It gave much opportunity for dramatic acting, though it was a peculiarly undramatic period in the life of the people, for words and characteristic gestures do not flow from the inward man; they come with imposing power from external circumstances, leading, forming, and restraining the individual. Such union of order and discipline belongs to the epic time of the people. How the German mind outgrew these bonds we shall learn from the following stories of the olden time. In the course of four centuries the great change was accomplished--a powerful action of the mind brought freedom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a fearful political catastrophe brought destruction in the seventeenth.[3] After a long deathlike sleep the modern spirit of the people awoke in the eighteenth century. PICTURES OF GERMAN LIFE. CHAPTER I. SCENES FROM THE HUSSITE WAR. (about 1425.)