The English Moral Plays 297 
warned the speaker that he should neither gesticulate as though 
he were throwing his words at the congregation, nor stand with 
closed or averted eyes; rather he should speak, as the rhetoricians 
teach, with moderate gestures, and in a carefully studied manner.' 
Owing, however, to the current opinion that less difficulty was ex- 
perienced in the composition and delivery of sermons than in the 
gathering of material,? homiletic treatises were more often designed 
to furnish the busy or unfruitful priest with matter suitable for 
discourse. At the close of his famous collection of sermons, the 
Speculum Ecclesiae, Honorius of Autun expressed the belief that all 
preachers filled with ardor for heavenly things would find its many 
homilies on the gospels and on the lives of saints and martyrs an 
aid in pastoral labor. He had been induced to undertake the work, 
his preface explains, by his fellow clergymen, who had found the 
incomparable sacred writings of the Fathers, either because of their 
antiquity or because of their elevation of thought, ill suited in 
certain respects to the audiences of their own time. Hence he 
had gathered in this series of sermons the most vital teaching of 
Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory, and many other noted 
preachers, adapting the material, by a convenient arrangement ac- 
cording to the order of church festivals, and by a clear and simple 
style of composition, to the needs of the day. The Speculum Ec- 
clesiae was one of the earliest compilations that sought thus to 
preserve in practical working shape the best thought of the past. 
For the student of the allegorical drama, however, the most sug- 
gestive example of this type of literature is Alain de Lille’s Summa 
de Arte Praedicatoria. The greater part of the work is devoted to 
expositions in praise of virtues like patience and obedience, and in 
condemnation of vices such as envy and pride, and to exhortations 
to prayer, penance, and other religious duties that the church 
wished to stress. Exactly these same lessons appeared later in the 
morality plays in dramatic guise, as though the authors had studied 
to good purpose the pages of the treatise. Alain de Lille’s method, 
though, is still purely expository. After citing at the beginning of 
each chapter verses from the Bible applicable to the ethical trait 
under consideration, he enters upon a discussion of its distinctive 
qualities and effects that is marked by the orderly, systematic 

1 A story of Demosthenes’ eloquence in the A/phadet of Tales (No. 639), 
concludes, ‘‘a grete parte of Demostenes wantys when it is red, mor 
pan when it is hard.” 
2 Humbert de Romanis, 456. 
5 1085. 
