ived from God, and of the temple in which was preserved his holy
law. But their self-sacrifice availed not even to save their names
from oblivion. Their martyrdom was as powerless to avert the doom of
the chosen people as the bursting of the foam-flakes on the sand is to
arrest the rush of the returning tide.

Why, then, should the death of one Jew have transformed the world,
while the death of these uncounted thousands failed even to save the
synagogue?

Why? That is the question that the Passion Play forces home--a
question which never even comes to the mind of those who are accustomed
from childhood to regard this Jew as mysteriously Divine, not so much
man as God, cut off from us and our daily littleness by the
immeasurable abyss that yawns between the finite and the infinite.
This greatest of all the miracles, the coming of Christendom into
being, has become so much a matter of course that we marvel as little
at it as we do at the sunrise--which also in its way is a wonder worthy
enough. Think for a moment of the many myriads of fierce heathen,
worshipping all manner of proud ancestral gods, that have gone down
before the might of that pale form. Civilizations and empires have
gone down into the void; darkness covers them over and oblivion is fast
erasing the very inscriptions which history has traced on their tombs.
But the kingdom which this man founded knoweth no end. The voice that
echoed from the hills of Galilee is echoing today from hills the Romans
never trod, and the story of that life is rendered in tongues unknown
at Pentecost. The more you look at it from the standpoint of the
contemporaries of the carpenter of Nazareth the more incredibly
marvelous it appears.

And this is the great gain of the Passion Play. It takes us clear back
across the ages to the standpoint of those who saw Jesus, the Galilean,
as merely a man among men. It compels us to see him without the
aureole of Divinity, as he appeared to those who knew him from his
boyhood, and who said, "Are not his brethren still with us?" It is
true that it is still not real enough. The dresses are too
beautiful--everything is conventional. We have here not the real
Christ, the Jew, the outcast and the vagabond. For him we must wait
till Vereschagin or some other realist painter may bring us reality.
But even behind all the despisers of conventional Christian art, we
have at least a sufficiently human figure to elicit sympathy,
compas