In the opening scene Mary was introduced as the Spirit of Form, receiving the Annunciation from the Angel Gabriel as the representative of Creative Genius. The dialogue, which was fortunately unintelligible to nine-tenths of the audience, turned on the sterility of the Jewish nation in the department of the plastic arts. Mary was informed that her Son would remove the prohibition contained in the Second Commandment, thereby opening the way for the Christian school of statuary and painting. The whole of the sacred narrative was dealt with from the same standpoint. The Wise Men were presented as the exponents of the three arts of Poetry, Music, and Painting, whose respective merits were discussed at some length. The dispute of the child Christ in the Temple was made to turn on Keats’s famous identification of Truth with Beauty. Satan, in the scene of the Temptation, appeared as the genius of Utilitarianism and the middle classes, urging the Christ to abandon the principle of Art for Art’s sake. Towards the end of the drama Byron’s jest about Barabbas was almost literally incorporated, Barabbas being designed as a type of commercial success in literature--a Jewish Tennyson or Ruskin. Every allusion to the Jews as a people was barbed with the bitterest malignity. The Semitic spirit was branded, with some historical confusion, as that of Philistinism _par excellence_; and Isaiah and other prophets were ingeniously represented as having fallen martyrs to their literary excellence rather than to their reforming energy. The allegory was so vague and the dialogue so obscure that most of those present entirely failed to grasp the enormity of the author’s transgression. But it was otherwise with Dr. Coles. The Armenian proselyte was a learned and thorough-going medievalist, and he had taken it for granted that medieval traditions would be strictly adhered to. He had left the work of superintending the rehearsals to his curate, never deeming that Mr. Grimes was capable of betraying the trust. Nor was he, had he been sufficiently intelligent to perceive that he was being made a cat’s-paw by his pagan librettist. The actors in the piece, being the choir-boys, were even less capable of judging of the drift of the performance. The deeply mortified Vicar restrained his wrath till the moment when the High-Priest Caiaphas came upon the scene in the thinly-disguised character of the proprietor of a morning paper with an enormous circulation, when it became impossible to mistake the dramatist’s intentions. Rising from his seat in the front row of the audience, Dr. Coles gave a peremptory order for the curtain to be let down, and the thoroughly mystified spectators seized the opportunity to escape. CHAPTER IX MOLLY FINUCANE AT HOME