And that was even more pronouncedly the case in days still earlier when in Europe a universal and all-powerful church dictated the morals of gentle and simple alike. Indeed, whatever may or may not be said of Catholicism in the way of praise or blame, it cannot be alleged that when she was all-powerful she was ever afraid of the Arts or afraid to employ them for her own purposes. The Moralities of the Nun Hrotswitha, the mystery plays and mummings of every town-guild in the Middle Ages, are alone overwhelming evidence that the church, representing the professional moralists of five or six centuries, was only too glad to avail itself of forms of art as an indispensable means of spreading her teachings. Nor indeed until the Puritan Divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries turned upon the art of fiction as presented on the stage did that form of art do anything other than bend itself willingly to the services of morality. For you might say that the drama of Wycherley and Killigrew was as much a protest against the oppression of the then professional moralist as any spontaneous movement for the supply of lecherous fiction to the public. The greater part of the plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists--by far the greater part--consisted of works of profound--and quite conventional--moral purpose; the earlier drama, and even the pace-egging and mumming of country shows, were nothing but pietistic pronouncements put as picturesquely--and as alluringly spiced with alliterations in the prosody and low comedy in the plots--as the fiction-writers of the day could contrive. Hell always yawned before the audience beneath the high trestle-boards and stages of these shows; in the flies Heaven and its denizens were always visible, whilst in what would to-day be called the wings there waited perpetually visible, on the one hand the Devil ready to pitchfork the wicked into the lower story of the stage--and Man’s Good Angel to conduct him to the Better Place. And clowns and characters called Vices were always ready to endure the drubbings that, enlivening the public, were the portion of the mildly wicked and foolish. No, decidedly the mediaeval and early renaissance art of fiction, quite as much as Matthew Arnold, was on the side of the angels.