The English Moral Plays 314 
ment-seat, whither man has been brought to answer the accusations 
of his adversary, Satan. The charges that man has. been guilty 
of infidelity to the sacraments, of treason, and of theft, the accuser 
supports with a fulness: of evidence and a force that would char- 
acterize a trained advocate. The prisoner can respond but feebly 
when called upon for his defense, and since Conscience, in spite of 
the prisoner’s questioning the legality of a woman’s testimony, con- 
firms the charges, the case for him seems lost. But, opportunely, 
the three daughters of the judge, Faith, Hope, and Charity, inter- 
cede for him under the leadership of Faith, whom the preacher 
introduces in the words of Prudentius, “Prima petit campum sub 
sorte duelli Pugnatura fides.”1. The controversy, though, that she 
enters, is not the open conflict of the Psychomachia. Satan asks Faith 
why she is soiling her purity by defending the sinner, and offers the 
specious argument that, since faith without works is dead, and 
since a man who sins in expectation of pardon is accursed, the 
prisoner deserves none of her sympathy. But Faith, who is too 
thoroughly cognizant of his wiles to trust his plea, can justify her 
actions. Their part as intercessors, she shows, is in strict accord 
with justice and divine will, while his efforts to thwart their pur- 
pose is both a usurpation and perversion of divine law. Turning 
then to the sinner, she depicts the punishment that awaits him if he 
dies unrepentent, and thus leads him to profess his belief in the 
Trinity and the doctrines of the church as expounded by the 
Fathers and the preachers, and to promise amendment. Such 
doctrinal instruction as a prelude to forgiveness was common in the 
moralities, and this sermon seems in this respect full of significance. 
The Virgin and the court then join the sisters in their prayers for 
mercy, and God grants the accused full pardon. 
Is it assuming too much to regard these sermons in dialogue on 
allegorical themes as the forerunners of the morality plays? If 
ministers in the pulpits were accustomed to present such dramatic 
situations, the next step would be to enact them professedly as 
dramas. Already dramatically conceived incidents from sacred story 
were being presented by churchmen at the altar; it was therefore 
no great innovation for churchmen to act, or encourage others to 
act, the deeds that these allegorical sermons in the pulpit outlined. 
Of course, these themes, not being based on the sacred text itself, 
would find no place in the mass. But if a churchman like Stephen 
of Bourbon could justify a telling story in the pulpit as a “sermo 

1 Psychomachia, 11, 21-22. 
