Christ's passion. The little supper with his companions, one of
whom has already sold him for a price; the anguish in the quiet
moon-lit garden; the false friend coming close to him so as to
betray him with a kiss; the friend who still believed in him, and
on whom as on a rock he had hoped to build a house of refuge for
Man, denying him as the bird cried to the dawn; his own utter
loneliness, his submission, his acceptance of everything; and along
with it all such scenes as the high priest of orthodoxy rending his
raiment in wrath, and the magistrate of civil justice calling for
water in the vain hope of cleansing himself of that stain of
innocent blood that makes him the scarlet figure of history; the
coronation ceremony of sorrow, one of the most wonderful things in
the whole of recorded time; the crucifixion of the Innocent One
before the eyes of his mother and of the disciple whom he loved;
the soldiers gambling and throwing dice for his clothes; the
terrible death by which he gave the world its most eternal symbol;
and his final burial in the tomb of the rich man, his body swathed
in Egyptian linen with costly spices and perfumes as though he had
been a king's son. When one contemplates all this from the point
of view of art alone one cannot but be grateful that the supreme
office of the Church should be the playing of the tragedy without
the shedding of blood: the mystical presentation, by means of
dialogue and costume and gesture even, of the Passion of her Lord;
and it is always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember
that the ultimate survival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to
art, is to be found in the servitor answering the priest at Mass.

Yet the whole life of Christ - so entirely may sorrow and beauty be
made one in their meaning and manifestation - is really an idyll,
though it ends with the veil of the temple being rent, and the