Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/63

51 Most of these sermons are short, and contain much excellent moral advice put simply and directly. They also make constant use of allegory, and evidently Honorius's chief care in their composition was to expound his text allegorically and point the allegory's application to the needs of his supposed audience. Neither he nor any man of his time devised many novel allegorical interpretations; but the old ones had at length become part of the mediaeval spirit and the regular means of apprehending the force and meaning of Scripture. Consequently Honorius handles his allegories more easily, and makes a more natural human application of them, than Rabanus or Walafrid had done. Sometimes the allegory seems to ignore the moral lesson of the literal facts; but while a smile may escape us in reading Honorius, the allegories in his sermons are rarely strained and shocking, likewise rarely dull. A general point from which he regards the narratives and institutions of the Old Testament is summed up in his statement, that for us Christ turned all provisions of the law into spiritual sacraments. The whole Old Testament has pre-figurative significance and spiritual meaning; and likewise every narrative in the Gospels is spiritual.

Two or three examples will illustrate Honorius's edifying way of using allegory. His sermon for the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost is typical of his manner. The text is from the thirty-first Psalm: "Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin." Opening with an exhortation to penitence and tears and almsgiving, the preacher turns to the self-righteous "whose obstinacy the Lord curbs in the Gospel for the day, telling how two went up into the temple to pray, the one a Pharisee, to wit, one of the Jewish clergy, the other a Publican." After proceeding for a while with sound and obvious comment on the situation, Honorius says:

"By the two men who went up into the temple to pray, two peoples, the Jewish and the Gentile, are meant. The Pharisee who went close to the altar is the Jewish people, who possessed the