All clamour assent, and in a tumult of rage make ready for the strife. The hostile ranks approach. The first attack is made by Folly (_Stultitia_) and her comrades, Sloth, Gaming, Idle Jesting, Ease and Sleep. But faithful Virtues protect the constant youth against these foes. Next Discord leads its mutinous band, but only to defeat. Onslaughts follow from Poverty, next from Ill-Repute, from Old Age and Disease. Then Grieving advances, and is overthrown by Laughter. More deadly still are the attacks of Venus and Lust; then Excess and Wantonness take up the fray; and at the end Impiety and Fraud and Avarice. But still the man conquers with the aid of his Virtues ever true. The fight is over. The Virtues triumph and receive their Kingdoms; Vice succumbs; Love reigns instead of Discord; the man is blessed; and the earth, adorned with flowers in a new spring of youth, brings forth abundance. The Poet sums up his poem’s teaching: From God must everything begin and in Him end. But our genius may not stand inert; ours is the strife as well, according to our strength and faculty. Let the mind attach itself to the things which are and do not pass, even as Plato sings, from things of sense reaching on ever to the grades Angelic and Olympus’s steeps. Then it shall behold the universal praise of God and the true ascription of all good to Him. He in himself is perfect, Part and likewise Whole, and everywhere uncircumscribed. Nothing has power in itself, but all would fall to nothing, did He close the flux of hidden power. Alanus, a good Christian Doctor, is also an eclectic in his thought. A consistent system is hardly to be drawn from his poem. It suggests Christ. But its hero is not the God-man of the Incarnation. Its figures are semi-pagan. The virtue Faith, for example, is the Fides, the Good Faith, of the antique Roman, though it is the Christian virtue Faith as well. In language the poem is antique; its verse has vigorous flow; its imagery lacks neither beauty nor sublimity. It is in fact a poem, a creation, having a scheme and unity of its own, although the author borrows continually. Martianus Capella is there and Dionysius the Areopagite; there also is the _Psychomachia_ of Prudentius and its progeny of symbolic battles between the Virtues and the Vices.[148] Yet Alanus has achieved; for he has woven his material into a real poem and has reared his own lofty allegory. His work is another grand example of mediaeval symbolism.