n upon the leave-taking at Bethany, and then
as the universal sob rises from thousands of gazers, he will realize
perhaps for the first time how intense is the passion of sympathy which
they have sealed up, how powerful the emotion to which they are
forbidden to appeal. The most pathetic figure in the Passion Play is
not Christ, but his mother. There is in him also sublimity. She is
purely pathetic. And after Mary the mother comes Mary Magdalene.
Protestantism will have much leeway to make up before it can find any
influence so potent for softening the hearts and inspiring the
imagination of men. Even in spite of all the obloquy of centuries of
superstition, and of the consequent centuries of angry reaction against
this abuse, these two women stand out against the gloom of the past
radiant as the angels of God, and yet the true ideals of the womanhood
of the world.

Yes, this was the story that transformed the world! This and no other.
This it was which to make visible, men carved it in stone and built it
in the cathedral, and then, lest even the light of heaven should come
to the eye of man without bearing with it the story of the cross, they
filled their church windows with stained glass, so that the sun should
not shine without throwing into brighter relief the leading features of
the wonder-working epoch of his life and death. Wherever you go in
Christendom you come upon endless reproductions of the scenes which
yesterday we saw presented with all the vividness of the drama. The
cross, the nails, the lance, have been built into the architecture of
the world, often by the descendants of the men who crucified their
Redeemer--not knowing what they did. For centuries art was but an
endless repetition in color or in stone of the scenes we witnessed
yesterday, or of incidents in lives which had been transformed by these
scenes. The more utterly we strip the story of the Passion of all
supernatural significance the more irresistibly comes back upon the
mind the overwhelming significance of the transformation which it has
affected in the world.

Why?--I keep asking why? If there were no divine and therefore natural
law behind all that, why should that trivial incident, the crucifixion
of one among the unnumbered host of vagabonds executed every year in
the reign of Tiberius and the Caesars that followed him, how comes it
that we are here today? Why are railways built and special trains
organized and six thousa