The Church and the Stage - 1886 Author:William Henry Hudson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tinued until the old mysteries began to fall into decay. Of the many subtle influences before which the religious drama gradually declined, it is no place here t... more »o speak. Suffice it to say that when, a century before the Eeformation, men began to awake as from a long dream, the mysteries jarred with the new sentiments and aspirations which were beginning to take shape. The religious drama became an anachronism. It was the outgrowth and the expression of a phase of religious life which men were fast outgrowing ; the moral and intellectual conditions from which it had drawn sustenance were passing silently away; the stream of civilisation was sweeping on where it could not follow. The Drama was touched by the secular spirit which began to permeate the whole of life. From the time when, long ago, the clergy had begun to relinquish their positions to actors and authors not connected with the Church, the force of circumstances, both within the Church and without it, had tended ever to widen the breach between the Drama and its parent institution. When the mysteries passed gradually away, leaving as their successors the moral plays and the first crude efforts towards a purely worldly drama to which these in their turn had given birth, when, in a word, the Drama yielded to the resistless influences of the time, and became secularised, that breach was made complete. Church and Stage had once and for all severed connection. Henceforth the course of time would only serve to efface every recollection of a common past which could still in anyway tend to bind them together. It was with the decay of the religious and the rise of a secular drama that ecclesiastical hostility to the Stage began to come prominently to the front. But it is not to this period that we have to look for the commencem...« less