When the religious drama passed into the hands of the crafts, it carried with it such individual plays, of both scriptural and legendary kinds, as were suitable to the collective character which it was assuming. The Corpus Christi, Whitsuntide, Easter, or Christmas cycle, though it aimed to illustrate sacred history and so justify God's ways to man, drew its materials, not only from the scriptures of the canon, but from the Apocrypha, the pseudo-Gospels, and mediæval legends of scriptural and sometimes non-scriptural saints. There was no real ground for distinction, and there is none now, dramatic or didactic, between the non-scriptural stories of scriptural characters, St. Joseph, and St. Thomas, stories of the Death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin, stories of St. Paul and St. Mary Magdalene, which happened to be absorbed into this or the other miracle cycle, and the non-scriptural stories of extra-biblical saints in plays which have retained their independence: that of Nicholas, for instance, or of Katharine or Laurence or Christina, except that these and their heroes are concerned with events later than those which conclude the earthly career of our Lord and of the Virgin Mary. All religious historical plays, biblical or legendary, cyclic or independent, of events contemporaneous with, or subsequent to, the scriptural, were miracles, properly so called by our forefathers; and as the didactic intent of the species waned, one was as likely as another to develop material for amusement. Indeed, the authors of the _Manuel des Pechiez_ and _The Handlynge Synne_,--the preacher of that fourteenth-century attack upon miracle plays which has been preserved in the _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_,--these, and Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif make no distinction between miracles of the central mystery from the Old and New Testaments and miracles worked and suffered by saints, whether legendary or biblical. The distinction, if any, made by them, is between miracles acted to further belief by priests and clerks in orders in the church, and those acted for amusement by these or by laymen in the streets and on the greens. And it is safe to say that as soon as a play became more amusing than edifying, it fell under the censure of the church. This happened as early as 1210, when a decretal of Innocent III. forbade the acting of _ludi theatrales_ in churches. Indeed much earlier, for Tertullian and St. Augustine and the Councils had consistently condemned the performances of _histriones_, _mimi_, _lusores_, and others who perpetuated the traditions of the pagan Roman stage. In 1227 the Council of Treves took such action. Gregory IX. attempted to put a stop to the growing participation of the clergy, "lest the honour of the church should be defiled by these shameful practices."[8] And during the succeeding decades more than one Synod issued orders of the same tenor. Now, even though it is practically certain that these