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The annual Passion-play to commemorate the murder and martyrdom of the progeny of Ali, and the solemn fast-days when their assassins are cursed and reviled, which are observed all over Persia, serve to keep alive their patriotism and pride of independence, for with the Persians, religion and patriotism are synonymous terms.
Among his chief disciples were that gallant knight called the 'Gate's Gate, Ḳuddus, and his kind uncle. Like most religious leaders he attached great worth to pilgrimages. He began by journeying to the Shi'ite holy places, consecrated by the events of the Persian Passion-play. The winds, however, were contrary, and he was glad to rest a few days at Mascat.
Although it came about that Drona was, as a matter of fact, defeated by treachery, the sin of lying, even in time of war, and to an enemy, is clearly brought out as a recognized principle of both theory and action among the ancient Hindoos. There is a famous passion-play popular in Southern India and Ceylon, which illustrates the Hindoo ideal of truthfulness at every risk or cost.
The feast of Noël is full of importance to all of the Romish faith, and Poussette knew of great things in preparation for the stone church on the hill of St. Jean Baptiste in the way of candles, extra music and a kind of Passion-play in miniature representing the manger, with cows and horses, wagons and lanterns, the Mother and Child, all complete.
A passion-play was enacted amid the most impressive surroundings, and we need not doubt that the moral effect was beneficial and sometimes profound. When the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris were fused with the Hellenic, a type of worship was evolved which was startlingly like Christianity. But it is not necessary to ascribe all the higher teaching to Greece and the lower to Egypt.
The typical novelist to-day prefers to leave the beaten highway and go into the by-ways for his characters; his interest is with the humble of the earth, the outcast and alien, the under dog in the social struggle. It has become well-nigh a fashion, a fad, to deal with these picturesque and once unexploited elements of the human passion-play.
Intellect, deny it how it will, is baffled by the complex problem. The solution is of love through trouble and anguish. The Passion music of Bach rises to the sublime understanding of this grand mystery, and again the evolution of the old mystery and Passion-play consummates in a kindred mind. Again the triumph of faith is with the German. Luther frees the understanding from tyranny.
While the Successor of Caesar, while the Pontifex Maximus of our "Spiritual Rome," still represents the Infallible Element in the world's nobler religious Taste, there is yet, perhaps, a remote chance that this vulgarizing of "the mountain summits" this degrading of our Planet's Passion-Play, may be cauterized and eliminated. And yet it is not likely!
All the inhabitants, except the very small children, are chess-players of more or less skill, and the game is to them what the world-renowned Passion-play is to the Oberammergauers. A great many notable men have visited Ströbeck at various times on account of its reputation as a chess-playing community.
The baker was too late, however, for the very next day the Notary was brought home with a nasty gunshot wound in his leg. He had been lured into duck-hunting on a lake twenty miles away, in the hills, and had been accidentally shot on an Indian reservation, called Four Mountains, where the Church sometimes held a mission and presented a primitive sort of passion-play.
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