rden of his
cross. They saw the woman wipe the bloody sweat from off his face. They
saw the last, long, silent look between the mother and the son, as,
journeying upward to his death, he passed her in the narrow way through
which he once had ridden in brief-lived triumph. They heard her low sob
as she turned away, leaning on Mary Magdalen. They saw him nailed upon
the cross between the thieves. They saw the blood start from his side.
They heard his last cry to his God. They saw him rise victorious over
death.

"Few believing Christians among the vast audience but must have passed
out from that strange playhouse with their belief and love strengthened.
The God of the Christian, for his sake, became a man, and lived and
suffered and died as a man; and, as a man, living, suffering, dying among
other men, he had that day seen him.

"The man of powerful imagination needs no aid from mimicry, however
excellent, however reverent, to unroll before him in its simple grandeur
the great tragedy on which the curtain fell at Calvary some eighteen and
a half centuries ago.

"A cultivated mind needs no story of human suffering to win or hold it to
a faith.

"But the imaginative and cultured are few and far between, and the
peasants of Ober-Ammergau can plead, as their Master himself once
pleaded, that they seek not to help the learned but the lowly.

"The unbeliever, also, passes out into the village street full of food
for thought. The rude sermon preached in this hillside temple has shown
to him, clearer than he could have seen before, the secret wherein lies
the strength of Christianity; the reason why, of all the faiths that
Nature has taught to her children to help them in their need, to satisfy
the hunger of their souls, this faith, born by the Sea of Galilee, has
spread the farthest over the world, and struck its note the deepest into
human life. Not by his doctrines, not even by his promises, has Christ
laid hold upon the hearts of men, but by the story of his life."

TUESDAY, THE 27TH--CONTINUED

We Discuss the Performance.--A Marvellous Piece of Workmanship.--The Adam
Family.--Some Living Groups.--The Chief Performers.--A Good Man, but a
Bad Judas.--Where the Histrionic Artist Grows Wild.--An Alarm!

"And what do you think of the performance _as_ a performance?" asks B.

"Oh, as to that," I reply, "I think what everyone who has seen the play
must think, that it is a marvellous piece of workmanship.