hristian religion was not wise: He was divine. To believe in Him is to
imitate Him and to seek union with Him.... In consequence of His atoning
death, everything which lives and breathes may know itself redeemed....
Only love rooted in sympathy and expressed in action to the point of a
complete destruction of self-will, is Christian love." (Wagner's
Letters, 1880, pages 270, 365, 339.)

The criticism has sometimes been made that the basic religious idea of
Parsifal is Buddhistic rather than Christian; that it is taken directly
from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who was perhaps as nearly a
Buddhist as was possible for an Occidental mind to be; that the
dominating idea in Parsifal is compassion as the essence of sanctity,
and that Wagner has merely clothed this fundamental Buddhistic idea with
the externals of Christian form and symbolism. This criticism is
ingenious. It may also suggest that all great religions in their essence
have much which is akin. But no one who reads carefully Wagner's own
letters during the time that he was brooding over his Parsifal can doubt
that he was trying in this drama to express in broadest and deepest way
the essentials of Christian truth. Christianity has no need to go to
Buddhism to find such a fundamental conception as that of an infinite
compassion as a revelation of God.

The legend of the Grail, as Wagner uses it, has in it the usual
accompaniments of mediaeval tradition,--something of paganism and magic.
But these pagan elements are only contrasts to the purity and splendor
of the simple Christian truth portrayed. The drama suggests the early
miracle and mystery plays of the Christian Church; but more nearly,
perhaps, it reminds one of those great religious dramas, scenic and
musical, which were given at night at Eleusis, near Athens, in the
temple of the Mysteries, before the initiated ones among the Greeks in
the days of Pericles and Plato. Here at Bayreuth the mystic drama is
given before its thousands of devout pilgrims and music-lovers who
gather to the little town as to a sacred spot from all parts of the
world,--from Russia, Italy, France, England, and America,--and who enter
into the spirit of this noble drama and feast of music as if it were a
religious festival in a temple of divine mysteries.

The sources of Wagner's story deserve a few words. The legend of the
Holy Grail took many forms during the Middle Ages. It was told in
slightly varying way in the twelfth centu