The English Moral Plays 341 
Council ventures the opinion, without any reference to an edifice, 
“we shall have a sermon or night.” The inference is that this 
simple religious play was used as a substitute for the sermons so 
often preached in the open air on Sunday afternoons. 
The substance of this chapter may now be briefly summarized. 
As the ecclesiastical playwrights drew from the Psychomachia the 
allegorical conception of spiritual life that prevailed in every play, 
so from it they derived also the understanding of the Lord’s Prayer 
that they sought to expound in the earliest known play. Other 
similar lessons, especially those emphasized by Robert Grosseteste, 
were dramatized in exactly the same spirit. To the doctrine thus 
introduced to form the bone and sinew of the Pater Noster plays, 
Wisdom and other early moralities, as well as later plays like John 
the Evangelist, remained true. In thus holding close to the text- 
book of the church, the morality plays reflect truly and adequately 
the spirit of medieval theological thought. 
CuHapteR V.—Conrtrisutory ALLEGORIES. 
Although the Psychomachia established the conception of spiritual 
life as an open conflict between the externalized and allegorized 
traits of man’s soul, and determined, too, the special teaching of 
the earliest Pater Noster plays, that poem was not the only influence 
upon the allegory of the rising religious drama. The taste for 
allegory was so literally part of the web and woof of medieval 
thought that other themes were adapted in the same way for 
dramatic presentation. But where the Psychomachia must rank as 
a creative force, these others should be regarded as secondary or 
contributory. The medieval debates—debats—gave only an indirect 
stimulus to the revival of dramatic literature, and certain allegorical 
themes drawn from the religious thought of the age to furnish 
episodes for the drama seem distinctly dependent upon the theme 
of conflict. Ramsay believes that these themes, the Dance of Death, 
the Debate of the Body and the Soul, and the dispute between 
Mercy and Truth, Peace and Righteousness, at first occupied a 
position equal in importance to that of the Psychomachia.1 But 
they serve, in substance, as sequels to the theme of conflict, and 
do not stand naturally alone. Those few plays, like Everyman, not 
actually grounded upon the conflict, are at least dependent upon it. 


1 Magnificence, cxlviii. 
