They heard her low sob as she turned
away, leaning on Mary Magdalen. They saw him nailed upon the cross
between the thieves. They saw the blood start from his side. They
heard his last cry to his God. They saw him rise victorious over
death.
"Few believing Christians among the vast audience but must have
passed out from that strange playhouse with their belief and love
strengthened. The God of the Christian, for his sake, became a man,
and lived and suffered and died as a man; and, as a man, living,
suffering, dying among other men, he had that day seen him.
"The man of powerful imagination needs no aid from mimicry, however
excellent, however reverent, to unroll before him in its simple
grandeur the great tragedy on which the curtain fell at Calvary some
eighteen and a half centuries ago.
"A cultivated mind needs no story of human suffering to win or hold
it to a faith.
"But the imaginative and cultured are few and far between, and the
peasants of Ober-Ammergau can plead, as their Master himself once
pleaded, that they seek not to help the learned but the lowly.
"The unbeliever, also, passes out into the village street full of
food for thought.
