Miracles of the Virgin, and plays on Saints Theophilus, Dorothy, Martial, and Agnes[323]. The natural tendency of great churches to magnify their own patron saints led to further multiplication of themes. In the same way, long after the lay guilds and corporations had taken up the drama, performances continued to be given or superintended by the clergy and their scholars[324]. Priests and monks supplied texts and lent vestments for the lay plays. To the last, the church served from time to time as a theatre. All these points, as well as the traces of their liturgical origin lingering in the cycles, will be fully illustrated, so far as England is concerned, in the following chapters. The question presents itself: What was the official attitude of the high ecclesiastical authorities towards the growing religious plays? It is not precisely answered, as the history of the Feast of Fools has shown, by the fact that the chapters and inferior clergy encouraged and took part in them. The liturgical drama had its motive, as St. Ethelwold is careful to point out, in a desire for devotion and the edification of the vulgar[325]. The hope of affording a counter-attraction to the spring and winter _ludi_ of hard-dying paganism probably went for something. Herrad of Landsberg, in the twelfth century, utters a regret that the _Stella_ rightly instituted at Epiphany by the Fathers of the Church had given place to a shameless revel[326]. But a contrary opinion to Herrad’s arose almost contemporaneously amongst the reforming anti-imperial clergy of Germany. This finds expression more than once in the writings of Gerhoh of Reichersberg[327]. He scoffs at the monks of Augsburg who, when he was _magister scolae_ there about 1122, could only be induced to sup in the refectory, when a representation of Herod or the Innocents or some other quasi-theatrical spectacle made an excuse for a feast[328]. And he devotes a chapter of his _De Investigatione Antichristi_, written about 1161, to an argument that clergy who turn the churches into theatres are doing the work of that very Antichrist of whom they make a show[329]. Evidently Gerhoh has been stung by the lampooning of his party as the _Hypocritae_ in the pro-imperialist _Antichristus_ which is still extant. But he includes in his condemnation plays of a less special and polemical character, referring especially to the Nativity cycle and to a lost play of _Elisaeus_. He repeats some of the old patristic objections against _larvae_ and _spectacula_, and tells tales, such as Prynne will tell after him, of how horrors mimicked by actors have been miraculously converted into verities[330]. Literary historians occasionally commit themselves to the statement that Innocent III forbade the clergy to participate in miracle-plays[331]. It is more than doubtful whether this was so. The prohibition in question is familiar to us, and it is clear that the _ludi theatrales_ which