298 Elbert N. S. Thompson 
method of the age. He, too, drew freely from the writings of the 
Fathers. The scope of this extensive treatise on the virtues and 
vices, the author’s keen analysis of man’s varied psychic motives 
and the sensible, forceful doctrine that concludes the chapters, must. 
have done much to vitalize and quicken in the thirteenth century the 
objective study of the conflicting impulses of the inner life, and thus. 
to prepare the way for the morality plays. 
The leaders of the church, however, felt that it was not enough 
to collect in such treatises the doctrines that preachers were re- 
quired to expound; they believed that full directions should also. 
be given for the most effective employment of the material. 
Honorius, accordingly, gave numerous suggestions for those who 
were to use the sermons of the Speculum Ecclesiae. “Let this be 
the end, if you wish,” he notes at one point, “but time remaining,. 
this may be added.”! Later he marks a possible end for a dis- 
course in case the preacher found that excessive heat or cold, or 
any other inconvenience, was interfering with the audience’s atten- 
tion. Of other sermons he designates certain portions as useful 
only on certain specified occasions, or in churches consecrated to: 
particular saints. These hints remain always quite incidental; for 
the sermons have an independent value that would render them 
frequently appropriate. Quite different, though, are the sermons in 
one whole section of the De Eruditione Praedicatorum, which were 
prepared by Humbert expressly to illustrate the mode of adapting 
discourse to special places and occasions—‘ad omne genus nego- 
tiorum.”’* One address he frames for a meeting of the higher clergy ; 
another he intends for a service consecrating a graveyard; a third 
is to welcome returning pilgrims. For every conceivable occasion 
a formal model suggests precisely the most appropriate theme and 
its most effective treatment. 
Similar specimen discourses in these treatises were intended to 
help the priests more directly in applying their words to the partic- 
ular audiences before them. In the latter part of his treatise,* 
for example, Alain states specifically the needs of soldiers, judges, 
widows, and other types of people, and shows how the preacher 
should accomodate his thought to them. With the same end in 
view, Jacques de Vitry prepared seventy-four sermons supposedly 
directed® to specially designated audiences of prelates, secular 

1 819. 2 830. 8 Lib. 2, sect. 2: 
4 Chap. 39. 
5 Sermones Vulgares, or, Sermones ad Status. 
