The English Moral Plays 377 
Messenger in delivering the Prologue acknowledges, with apparent 
reference to the strictly religious play, that 
It is a common good act to bring 
People from vice. (5) 
But religious precept alone he regards insufficient to raise the 
ignorant man to a knowledge of God’s laws: 
Man to know God is a difficulty, 
Except by a mean he himself inure, 
Which is to know God’s creatures that be: 
At first them that be of the grossest nature, 
And then to know them that be more pure; 
And so, by little and little ascending, 
To know God’s creatures and marvellous working. 
And this wise man at the last shall come to 
The knowledge of God and His high majesty, 
And so to learn to do his duty, and also 
To deserve of His goodness partner to be. (6) 
Or, to put it in prose, the exhibition of scientific truth is a direct 
furtherance of religion. 
For this view of the relation between knowledge and godliness 
the author might have cited volume and page from many an old 
theological treatise. Prudentius taught that with Adam’s sin Satan 
gained control over man and nature, and wrought in both a sad 
transformation.! Honorius of Autun develops the idea that ignorance 
is a spiritual darkness comparable to the exile in Babylon, and that 
wisdom is a light attained by science.? In other words, ignorance 
and sin have a common parentage. Vincent of Beauvais, who 
gathered in his enormous encyclopedia all the learning of the 
doctors, declared that, as bodily labor relieves man of the physical 
necessities that have burdened him since the expulsion from Eden, 
so knowledge can relieve him of the ignorance that since then has 
darkened his mind? Alain de Lille fancied the union of body and 
soul through Arithmetic, Harmony, and Music, and the rise of Na- 
ture, Prudence, and Reason to heaven in a car built of the seven 
liberal arts.4 If, then, the weakness of man’s mind is but another 
indication of Satan’s domination, the clearing away of ignorance 
must be a step toward God. The author of the Four Elements, 
therefore, is thoroughly orthodox in claiming for his play a place 
among more strictly religious productions. 

1 Hamartigenia, 216 ff. 2 Speculum Ecclesiae, c. 1243. ? 
3 Male, 83-84. 4 Anticlaudianus. 
