Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/207

Rh is a wild animal with two powerful horns, with which it saws trees asunder and fells them. . . . The two horns are the books of the Old and New Testaments, with which the believer can resist the adversary and push him to the ground, and can cut down all growing sins and vices." Mingled with this statement are a number of subordinate lessons.

Very curious among these developments of the pious mediæval imagination are the barnacle geese, as described in the Bestiaries. It is declared that "they grow on trees by the seaside, and hang from the boughs by their beaks until they are covered with feathers and fall like ripe fruit. If they reach the water, they swim and live; but if they remain on the dry ground, they perish." Naturally, this illustration was used with great force to prove the efficacy of baptism in saving the soul, and Gerard of Wales made a curious use of it to prove the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

Very justly and aptly does Prof. Evans call attention to the fact that some of the dogmas which have long obscured and even supplanted Christianity, and which are still insisted upon as substitutes for the Christianity taught by Christ himself, were devised and handed down to us by the very thinkers who developed these legends and made this pious use of them.

But another very interesting field is opened by the use of mediæval sculpture for satirical purposes. The growth of it in this direction begins to be especially evident in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it culminated about the time of the Reformation. Monkeys appear as choristers, swine as monks, asses as priests, sirens as nuns, wolves as the father confessors of lambs. In one painted window a fox is represented preaching to a flock of geese from the text, "God is my witness how I long for you in my bowels." In Ely Cathedral a fox is represented arrayed as a bishop. Here comes in what has so astounded many travelers—the apparent obscenity of some of these representations. Gentlemen who have visited some of the greater cathedrals are hardly likely to forget the leer with which the sacristan sometimes raises the wooden seats of the choir, or points to a bit of carving in a corbel, which seems the result of the grossest license. It was really the outgrowth of the same bitter feeling against the growing corruptions in the Church, which led such pious preachers as Geyler of Kaisersberg to speak in the plainest terms against the same evils.

Various writers in these days have found fault with Luther for the grossness of some of his utterances, but as we note these earlier representations in art and Christian literature we see that his diatribes were but a natural evolution out of an earlier Catholic phase of thought.