The English Moral Plays 303 
when kept in close subjection to “sacra verba,” and argued that 
in the Scriptures, the sole repository of absolute truth, must be 
found the preacher’s best help.1. Hence he gathered many Bible 
stories, outlining them very briefly and grouping them under such 
topical headings as “Concerning Idolatry,” “ Concerning Blasphemy 
against God,” and “Concerning Good Angels.” This treatise, and 
others like it, were prepared to check the resort to objectionable 
narrative in the pulpit. They plainly testify to two facts: that the 
exempla had found universal favor with the masses, and that the 
preachers regarded them as too useful to be wisely discarded. 
The determination to carry the teachings of the church directly 
to all classes of men and women in the most effective and even 
most interesting way, a determination that forced the clergy to 
make the sermon, both in matter and form, something other than 
a religious treatise, led directly to the recognition of the drama as 
a legitimate and useful aid. Already the church had grown ac- 
customed to compose and enact at the altar for the instruction of 
the people the most important incidents of sacred history, very 
simply at first, but soon with ever increasing elaboration and dis- 
play. Certain uncompromising theologians condemned the miracle- 
plays, and tried to suppress them; but their efforts at reform availed 
little. The people were fond of sacred representations, and we may 
well believe that the preacher whose aim was really evangelistic 
appreciated too thoroughly their didactic value to abandon them 
willingly. Moreover, even those who felt the sacrilege of the 
miracle-plays could not offer that objection against the dramatic 
portrayal of virtue and vice; they might even regard this as a 
safe check upon the other. There was ample precedent, therefore, 
for utilizing the drama as a subsidiary means of moral instruction. 
Of course, had ecclesiastical affairs been under the guidance of 
merely philosophical theologians, the idea of placing upon the 
stage personifications of moral qualities to illustrate the wages of 
sin and the power of holiness, would have seemed both artistically 
and psychologically incongruous. But churchmen had dramatic im- 
pulses that ruled their manner of expression and their modes of 
thought. The employment, therefore, of the moral play to enforce 
the teachings of the pulpit was in strict accordance with the spirit 
of the age. 
Instinctively medieval churchmen, especially the monks, felt them- 
selves so near to God that they conceived of sacred things in a 

1 Pracfatio, 244—45. 
