The English Moral Plays 337 
tations of the youth, only the general allegory of sin and conversion 
that is found in the first part of The Castle of Perseverance, without 
the combat or the judgment, is presented. Thus the action of the 
play was made shorter and more direct, without essentially changing 
its didactic method; for the same direct relation between the play 
and the teachings emphasized in the Constitutions is apparent. 
World is represented as giving his seven servants, the Deadly 
Sins, to be the companions of Man. But Conscience, after thought- 
fully introducing himself to the spectators, undertakes to expose these 
vices in their true light. His doctrine is sound, but a trifle weari- 
some, and on his exit poor Man exclaims: 
yea, come wind and rain, (477). 
God let him never come here again. 
Such feelings render him an easy prey to Folly’s enticements, and 
he straightway experiences the carnal pleasures that the heroes 
of these plays so often crave. But since Conscience is not so 
straight-laced a moralist as to condemn rightly moderated pleasure, 
he and Perseverance are able to convert the rapidly aging sinner. 
Perseverance tells him how Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene, and Thomas, 
after sinning grievously, repented and became saints. He declares, 
too, that for attaining salvation it is necessary to have rightly 
ordered both the five bodily and the five spiritual senses, as well 
as to accept the twelve Articles of Faith, which he enumerates, and 
to observe the Ten Commandments, which Conscience has already 
explained.!. With this well-meant advice, the good counselors leave 
the hero with a prayer for Christ’s mercy upon the audience. The 
World and the Child, in short, is a late morality, more dramatic, 
presumably, than the ancient Creed and Pater Noster plays of York, 
but written for the same end of enforcing the doctrinal teaching 
that Grosseteste and his fellow bishops considered. so imperatively 
necessary for all men. 
In a field of dramatic literature so completely dominated by the 
church, it is obvious that no one phase of its ecclesiastical spirit 
would appear to the exclusion of another. Hence, although the 
purpose of the Pater Noster play was primarily doctrinal, the in- 
clusion of the seven vices gave opportunity for ethical instruction. 
This would be but natural; for one of the distinctive features of 
medieval religious thought was its twofold character. It embraced, 
on the one hand, a great body of doctrinal philosophy, whose end, 

1 Manly, 383. 
