sion and love. We get near enough to Christ to hear the blows
that fall upon his face, to appreciate the superior respectability of
the high priests, and to understand the contempt of Herod for the "king
of fools." Not until we start low enough do we understand the heights
to which the crucified has risen. It is only after realizing the
depths of his humiliation we can even begin to understand the miracle
of the transformation that he has wrought.

Nor is that all. It is the greatest thing, but it does not stand
alone. For besides enabling us to realize the story which transformed
the world, it enables us to understand the agency by which that story
effected its beneficent revolution.

I learned more of the inner secret of the Catholic church in
Ober-Ammergau than ever I learnt in Rome. Yet there is nothing
distinctively Roman about the Passion Play. With the exception of the
legend of St. Veronica with which Gabriel Maxs' picture has
familiarized every Protestant who looks into a photograph shop and sees
the strange face on the handkerchief, whose eyes reveal themselves
beneath your gaze, there is nothing from first to last to which the
Protestant Alliance could take exception. And yet it is all there.
There, condensed into eight hours or less, is the whole stock-in-trade
of the Christian church. It was in its effort to impress that story
upon the heart of man that there came into being all that is
distinctively Roman. To teach truth by symbols, to speak through the
eye as much as the ear, to leave no gate of approach unsummoned by the
bearer of the glad tidings of great joy, and above all in so doing to
use every human element of pathos, of tragedy, and of awe that can
touch the heart or impress the imagination--that was the mission of the
church; and as it got further and further afield and had to deal with
rude and ruder barbarians the tendency grew to print in still larger
capitals. The Catholic church, in short, did for religion what the new
journalism has done for the press. It has sensationalized in order to
get a hearing among the masses.

Protestantism that confines its gaze solely to the sublime central
figure of the gospel story walks with averted face past the beautiful
group of the holy women. Because others have ignorantly worshiped,
therefore we must not even contemplate. But plant a competent
Protestant dramatic critic in the theater of Ober-Ammergau, let him
look with dry eyes if he ca