The English Moral Plays 333 
But it would be blind to measure by these few direct survivals 
the influence of the Psychomachia upon the moral plays. The ac- 
tual narrative of the poem was not dramatized any more frequently 
than the Dance of Death or the debate of Mercy, Truth, Righteousness, 
and Peace. One therefore calls Prudentius the father of the morality 
not because he supplied an episode for the allegorical plays of a later 
time, though that too he did; but because he established, if he did 
not actually create, the idea upon which all those plays were based. 
The feeling that life is a spiritual combat between man’s good and 
evil impulses, on whose outcome depends his destiny—that the 
Middle Ages owed to him. Furthermore, his method of dissociating 
those qualities from the soul, and bringing them as human beings 
into a visible opposition, offered the churchmen who would carry 
their precept to the theater the readiest means of dramatization. 
The hero, Man, was brought upon the stage, and surrounded by a 
number of men and women who represented the states of his inner 
life; he was deceived and debauched by the vicious characters, 
and aided, and usually saved, by the good. The dramatic method 
took the place of the narrative, and the realism of everyday life 
was substituted for the romance of the outworn epic; but in spirit 
and in general plan the morality plays were only a retelling of the 
fourth-century allegorical epic. 
CHAPTER 1V.—THEOLOGY In THE Mora Ptays. 
Thus the whole Christian world came to think most intimately 
of man’s spiritual welfare as dependent upon the triumph of the 
cardinal virtues over the deadly sins. The story of the Psycho- 
machia was transferred without essential modification to the stages 
of England, and in an equally direct, though less open, manner in- 
fluenced the moralities at their very inception, by virtually creating 
the allegorical idea that is the distinctive mark of the type. But 
in addition to supplying the allegorical conception of life as a 
combat, the poem also determined the character of the doctrinal 
lesson that the earliest known moralities sought to teach. To ex- 

1 It is wrong to stress, as Ramsay does (Magnificence, cli), the fact that 
the Psychomachia lacks the central figure around whom the moral play 
centered. The opening lines of the poem, as they have been quoted above, 
make in plain that the combatants are the impulses that dwell in man’s 
soul, and that the story is a soul’s history. 
