322 Elbert N. S. Thompson 
insatiable avarice, that, being chained by their riches as by fetters, 
he may drive them from the way of truth. He inflames others 
with the excitement of anger, that while they are rather intent upon 
inflicting injury, he may turn them aside from the contemplation 
of God. He plunges others into immoderate lusts, that, giving them- 
selves to pleasure of the body, they may be unable to look towards 
virtue. ... Moreover, those whom he has seen to be pious he involves 
in various superstitions. . .. Thus he has blocked up all the approaches 
against men, and has occupied the way, rejoicing in public errors; 
but that we might be able to dispel these errors, and to overcome 
the author of evils himself, God has enlightened us, and has armed 
us with true and heavenly virtue.} 
These three passages indicate how the Church Fathers, visualizing 
clearly the conception of St. Paul, came to understand and portray 
the soul’s resistance to temptation as a struggle between the forces 
of good and of evil. Such an idea, thus sanctioned by the New 
Testament and the immediate successors of the Apostles, could not 
be barren to an age already inclined to allegorical interpretation. 
Very readily the moral qualities that the apostle would set to oppose 
temptations, and the virtues and vices that Cyprian brought face to face, 
became living warriors engaged in hand to hand conflict with weapons 
of war. Most often the struggle was depicted as a conflict, epic 
in character, in open field. Sometimes, however, the more strictly 
religious writers, for reasons that will be explained, chose to re- 
present the virtues in the act of defending their citadel, the soul, 
against the vigorous assault of the vices. With this possibility of 
variation, the theme spread rapidly and widely through the homo- 
geneous intellectual world of the Middle Ages in Latin poems, 
sermons, and moral treatises, and more than any other one influence 
determined the character of the morality plays. 
Each branch of the theme in the fourth century received its first 
treatment at the hands of the poet-churchman, Prudentius. He 
narrated in the Psychomachia the battle between the armies of sin 
and holiness, and sketched less fully in the Hamartigenia, as Cyprian 
had done, the siege of the soul. The former, after a preface ex- 
plaining the typological significance of the history of Abraham, 
opens with words that remind one strongly of Tertullian and Cyprian: 
“ Tell us, O Christ,... our king, with what soldiery the mind may 
seek to drive the sins from the cave of the breast. When sedition 
arises to disturb our spirit, and sin wearies the mind with combat, 

1 Divine Institutes, Bk. 6, chap. 4. 
Pp 
