In St. Mary’s, Beverley, are two foxes dressed as ecclesiastics, each holding a pastoral staff, while a goose’s head is peeping out of his hood.  At Boston Church we find a fox in a cope and episcopal vestments, seated on a throne, and holding a pastoral staff, while on the right is an ass holding a book for the bishop to read.  The fact was that no means were left untried by the Church to make converts and to obtain a hold on the people.  They wished to render religion as attractive as possible, and perhaps to direct and control tendencies which they could not destroy.  It was then a favourite doctrine that the end justified the means—­the Roman Church instituted persecutions, adopted heathen rites, and ordained fasts and festivals to impress the mind.  It is recorded that Theophylact of Constantinople introduced into the Church, in the tenth century, the licentious “Feast of Fools,” to wean the people from the revels of their old religion, and have we not until late years celebrated the Nativity of our Lord, not only by games and frolics, but gluttony and drunkenness, and riotous proceedings, under pagan misletoe!  I believe that among the masses of the people the Roman saturnalia still survive.  We need not then be surprised that the early Christians tried to recommend religion by unsuitable ornamentation.  They adopted all kinds of floral designs, they represented fables and romances.  In the old church of Budleigh, in Devonshire—­which Sir Walter Raleigh attended, and where his head is buried—­all kinds of devices are represented on the pews, from a pair of scissors to a man-of-war, including a cook holding a sheep by the tail.  It was only a step from this to introduce humour, and as men’s feelings had not then been chastened or brought into order by reflection, they probably overlooked the lowering tendencies of levity.  Those who came to laugh, might remain to pray, and so a strange crop of incongruities germinated upon the sacred soil.  Thus, in Beverley Minster, we have a monkey riding upon a hare—­a bedridden goat, with a monkey acting as doctor; and at Winchester a boar is playing on the fiddle, while a young pig is dancing.[47] Even scenes of drunkenness and immorality are not always excluded.  But the principal representations attributed human actions to birds and beasts—­people who could laugh at stories of this kind, could also at depictions of them.  It may be maintained that men were then highly emotional, and demanded but little complexity or truth in humour, so that they could see something amusing in a boar playing upon the bagpipes, or in such a device as a monster composed of two birds, with the head of a lion, or another with a human head on a lion’s body!  But there must have been something more than this—­some peculiar estimation of animals to account for such numerous representations.  They were common in the secular ornamentation of the day, for instance, in a MS. copy of Froissart of the fifteenth century, there is a drawing of a pig walking upon stilts, playing the harp, and wearing one of the tall head-dresses then in fashion.