Ex-Mayor Grace, of New York, deserves much credit and honor for his refusal to grant Mr. Salmi Morse a license to produce his Passion Play. With all the world’s past and present progress, we are not without here and there signs of degeneracy. The Passion Play, which began in motives of religious devotion with the ignorant villagers of Ober Ammergau two hundred and fifty years ago, is now sought to be produced in the metropolis of the foremost Christian nation, for the degraded motive of money-making. Surely some things progress downwards. The superstitious population of Ober Ammergau made a vow that if they were allowed to escape the then prevalent plague they would every ten years perform a play representing the passion and death of the Savior. Accordingly, during twelve consecutive Sundays of the summer season, continuing from 8 a. m. to 4 p. m., with three hundred and fifty actors and an orchestra and chorus of eighty members, the play has been produced. It has attracted the attention of the Christian world because it is the only one of the miracle plays once so common which continues to be performed. But this and all the miracle plays enacted by monks and friars in the middle ages differ radically from the proposed enterprise of Mr. Morse. The passion and events of the life of our Lord were represented by them to make them real to ignorant and illiterate people, but Mr. Morse proposes to cater to the low and morbid class, in order to make money. There is no reason to believe that the effect of such representations, even when performed with a view to religious instruction and impression, has ever been of a salutary character. The only effect to-day is to shock and outrage the refinement, intelligence, and reverence of the average class of American society. The human heart has human loves and affections too sacred to be placarded before the public eye, or even to be given utterance by human lips. It has feelings and sentiments associated with the divine tragedy of Calvary which make it revolt at the scene of coarse and vulgar persons attempting to re-enact the tragedy which revealed the infinite depths of heaven’s love for the race.
Another death has caused a profound, world-wide sensation. The life of Leon Gambetta, the great French orator and statesman, went out in the last moments of the old year. At five minutes before twelve o’clock on New Year’s eve he breathed his last. His death, like that of our late lamented President, was due to pyæmia. In November last he received a gun-shot wound, in regard to which there are conflicting stories. Though the case is not clear, it is very generally understood that the disease had its origin in this wound. His suffering in his last days was intense, and drew from his lips, shortly before his death, the exclamation which will be long remembered: “I am lost—it is useless to dissimulate,—but I have suffered so much it will be a deliverance.”