m to be he could easily have baffled his
enemies; if he were not, well, then, he had deceived them. But the
moment Judas learns that he has really endangered his master's life,
his whole demeanor changes. He flings back the blood money at the feet
of those who had given it to him, and in the madness of despair he
hangs himself. So far from Judas being callous to Christ's fate, his
suicide was a proof that his penitence was far more agonizing than that
of Peter.

Simon Peter also comes in for a share in the general rehabilitation.
It was impossible not to feel sympathy for the hasty old man, hustled
from side to side by a pack of violent soldiery. Knowing moreover that
he had cut off one of their ears but a few hours before, and that if
they recognized him his own ears would have been cropped, even if he
didn't share the fate of the crucified, his denial is so natural under
the circumstances that you cease to marvel that even the cock crow on
the roof failed to remind him of his master's warning.

The Passion Play has at least done this--it sets us discussing the
conduct of Caiaphas and Pilate and Judas, as if they were our
contemporaries, as if they were statesmen at Westminster or at
Washington or administrators in India or Canada. And this, no doubt,
is no small service, for these men are types of human character who are
eternally re-embodied among us.

III.--THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.

The story of the Passion Play has ever been real to me in another than
a Catholic sense. It has been the perpetual re-incarnation of the
divine story in the history of our own times that has absorbed my
attention. These ancient figures on the stage of New Testament history
were but of importance in so far as they lived again in our own life.
Of their mystical theological significance I am, of course, not
speaking. This is a thing apart. But the perpetual re-incarnation of
God's Messiah in the great causes of justice, freedom and humanity, it
is that which has made the gospel story ever new to me.

Leaving Ober-Ammergau I returned by Switzerland to London. At Lucerne
while waiting for the train, I turned over the book in the waiting-room
that describes the construction of the Gotthard railway. About one
thousand tons of dynamite, it is said, had sufficed to pierce the
tunnels through the mountain barrier that separated Italy from
Switzerland. Blasting powder could never have done the work. That
helped to level the