32 THE CHURCH
If we could imagine with any clarity the narrow warped minds of
the mass of the medieval English peasantry, we should easily
* realise how much such men must have been influenced by the
carvings and paintings they saw about them in the church, and
by the legends of Saints and the Fathers, the main incidents of
the Gospel story and by the insistence on death and the life to
come. Even though it is probable that many men and women
were not eager and convinced believers, yet even these were more
prepared to believe than to disbelieve. They lacked an active
conviction, but yet had nothing strong enough to hearten them
in a denial of the accepted faith. So the insistence of the Church
was too strong for them: Timor mortis conturbat me had been so
often repeated that it beat its way into even the dullest brain in
time. And as with this, so with other of the doctrines of the
Church.
It is necessary to emphasise the part played by seeing and
hearing, for they were the peasants' only means of communica-
tion. Few indeed could have read the Mass Book and Prymer,
even had they been easily available, and the Church was, per-
force, the Poor Man's Bible, though it was a meagre substitute
for the book we know. Modern scholars have shown how little
of the Bible was ever depicted on the walls of the church, and in
how travestied a form it was often displayed. At the same time
large parts of what is religiously richest and best in it were
unsuitable and neglected nas pictorial material. Symbolism (so
far as it was to be found in the village church) no doubt tried to
meet the needs of the illiterate, but symbolism was a very vague
and unsettled method of communication, and gave rise to in-
numerable errors and rash speculations.
Since these things helped him so little, the peasant could only
watch with dim comprehension "the blessed mutter of the
Mass". The Church had done her best, and had turned her
central service into a great mimetic rite. She had given this a
ceremonial elaboration that made it immediately popular, but its
very elaboration had excluded the simple from more than a dis-
tant participation. The author of the Lay Folks' Mass Book does
explain the meaning of the symbolical acts of the Mass to those
who can read, but all he can advise the unlettered to do is to say
the Pater and the Ave over and over again during the course of