Church 2 and 3 (p. 57), copied from the well-known paintings of Rogier van der Weyde at Antwerp, represent the principal rites of the Roman Catholic Church. Figures 4 and 5, from Italian min iatures of the fifteenth century, represent two scenes illustrating the ser vice for the dead, the former being a " death-watch," while prayers are recited for the deceased; the latter is a convent burial: the flat coffin has received the last blessing and has been lowered into the grave, which the spades of the monks are filling with earth.
The Protestant ritual, which furnishes the subject for Our next illus tration (fig. 6), the rite of the Lord's Supper, the communion being rep resented under both species (that is, both the bread and the wine admin istered to laymen), assumed, as we have before said, different forms in dif ferent countries. In some places, especially where the Calvinistic creed had prevailed, and even in some localities where Lutheran ideas were held, an iconoclastic fury raged against all the ancient ceremonies. In others the ancient forms were piously retained, while it was sought to invigorate them with new signification. Thus it was that in even down to the beginning of this century, the mass was said, not, however, in Latin, but in German. In the Protestant churches of that city the relics of the saints still remain untouched, even if no longer venerated, and in one of them a lamp burns perpetually in honor of its founders. The cus tom of spreading a cloth under the host in communion (A/. 57, fig. 6) has been abolished probably everywhere. Figure 7 represents the rite of baptism in the Reformed Church. It is devoid of all appeal to the imag ination, but the large number of witnesses gives it the solemnity of a judicial proceeding. The main points of difference between the Reformed and the ancient religion were founded upon the difference of creed, and this can least of all be pictorially represented.
Quite opposed to the simple forms of Protestantism stands the elab orate ceremonial of the Greek Church, from the ritual of which Figures 8 and 9 are taken. Although not inclined to admit that the Greek Church best represents the spirit of Christianity, we cannot deny that it has pre served many remains of the primitive Church. Among them we may mention, first of all, the original, fraternal relationship of the members of the congregation, and the " kiss of love" which is used in Russia on the occasion of religions celebrations. In our illustration of the baptism
( fig. 9) the child, after being lifted from the font, is, in accordance with an old Byzantine custom, presented with the picture of the saint who will be his protector through life. The rite of consecrating water (fig. 8) is of medif.eval origin, and is also found in Western Europe.
It has been justly remarked that the organization of the Church was the only possible system for inaugurating the work of Christianity. In a condition of society when half the race was utterly degenerate and the other half very slightly developed, the soft pleadings proper to the essen tial nature of religion could not have controlled the unstable character of the Southern people intent upon momentary pleasures, or moulded the rough, unbending character of the Northern nations. From the very beginning the Church judiciously combined severity and clemency, espe cially with the Teutonic peoples, who were entering upon the field of history.
Yet because there was a fundamental lack of accord between it and both the above-mentioned divisions of the race, the Church could not prevent the growth of hostile elements which threatened its progress and its very existence. It sternly required the pagan Germans " to renounce Wodan, Thor, and Saxnote as devils, together with all the fiends of their company." In converting these pagan gods into devils it laid the founda tions of that powerful infernal kingdom which has puzzled and frightened the human mind since the Middle Ages, and which produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries such sad phenomena as the trials for witchcraft. But, being lenient to other pagan traditions and contenting itself with giving them a Christian interpretation, the Church created a popular belief which often found poetic expression in sagas and legends, but which also, by admitting the existence of numberless unseen powers, laid the foundations of that superstition which led to the belief in eccle siastical miracles.
A ghastly scene of witchcraft and diabolism is presented on Plate (fig. 1o), which is copied from an allegorical painting by Michael Herr of Nuremberg in the seventeenth century, the age in which such notions were most prevalent.