Having traced the development of piano music, chamber music, and the symphony, from the time at which these began to be separate branches of art up to the present, it now becomes necessary to return to the point of departure and follow a new line of progress. It is the task of the reader now to accompany me in an examination into the origin of oratorio. Difficult as it may be to realize it now, the oratorio was in its infancy a dramatic performance, and it took its origin from the ancient religious drama, which, indeed, is the source of all modern drama. Greek plays, as imitated very badly by the Romans, most directly affected oratorio. The Greek drama began at the altar of Bacchus, where the priestesses sang about the sacrificial goat, the goat song, the "tragos ode," the tragedy. At Delphi grew up representations of the slaying of a serpent by Apollo, and at Eleusis the "Eleusinian mysteries" portrayed in dramatic action the rape of Persephone and the wanderings of Demeter. So originated the Greek drama, which until the death of Æschylus was chiefly an embodiment of the religious beliefs and hopes of the Greeks. When Christianity was introduced in Greece and Rome the people clung to the play form and continued to use the old mythological personages. The fathers of the Church speedily perceived that such plays were distinctly hostile to the progress of the true faith, so they set about writing religious dramas which should present to the people the facts of Christianity quite as attractively as the older plays presented those of Paganism. This work began in the second century (if not earlier), but the old ideas clung firmly. A curious drama called "Christ's Passion," long supposed to have been written by St. Gregory Nazianzen, Patriarch of Constantinople near the end of the fourth century, contains a curious mixture of Biblical personages, church hymns and extracts from Greek plays. About one-third of the verse, for instance, is taken from Euripides. Dr. Brambs, of Leipsic, has proved that this "Christ's Passion" dates from the tenth, not the fourth century. It is not difficult to see how the early Christian dramas could have developed from the elaborate liturgical presentations of such events as the nativity, the annunciation, and the crucifixion. Indeed there are extant some twenty-seven or twenty-eight liturgical arrangements which are purely dramatic in form and style. Their musical part was provided by the old Latin hymns. In one of these dramas, "The Shepherds," occur passages used in Handel's oratorios, such as "Glory to God in the highest," and "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son."