and his role in
the sacred play, is oblivious of all. The crowded thousands who
watched for hours yesterday the unfolding of the passion of Christ
Jesus of Galilee have disappeared, and I am alone.

But not alone. For as real and as vivid as that same crowd of
yesterday seem to me the thronging memories of other days, of the
centuries that rise between the time when Jesus really lived on earth,
and today. Nineteen hundred years have gone since all that we saw
represented yesterday was no mere mimic show but deadly tragic fact;
nineteen hundred years during which the shaping power of the world has
been that story. The old, old, story never before so vividly realized
in all its human significance and its Divine import.

Its human significance, for thank God, we have at last seen Jesus as a
man among men, a human being with no halo round his brow, no radiance
not of this world marking him off apart from the rest of his
fellow-men, but simply Jesus, the Galilean, gibbeted on the gallows of
his time, side by side with the scum of mankind.

And it was this story that transformed the world. "Thou hast
conquered, O pale Galilean!" Over how many tribes and nations and
kindreds of men?

Oh, the wonder of it all, the miracle of miracles surely is this. That
this story should have transformed the world. For after all, what was
the passion? Looked at as we looked at it yesterday, not from the
standpoint of those who see the sacred story through the vista of
centuries that have risen in splendor and set in the glory of the
cross, but from the standpoint which the actors on the stage assumed
yesterday, what was the passion? It was merely a passing episode in
the unceasing martyrdom of man. Think you that of the thirty thousand
Jews whom the humane Titus by a mere stroke of his stylus condemned to
be crucified round the walls of Jerusalem forty years after that scene
on Calvary, none suffered like this! For them, also, was reared the
horrid cross, nor were they spared the mockings and the scourgings, the
cruel thirst, and the slow-drawn agony of days of death. And among all
that unnamed multitude how few were there but had some distracted
mother to mourn for him, some agonized mother to swoon at the news of
his death? Jews they were, as was he. Hero souls, no doubt faithful
unto death, and now, let us hope, wearing a crown of life; patriots who
knew how to die in the service of the land which their fathers had
rece