The beginning shows President Lincoln in the White House brooding over the lack of response to his last call for troops. (He is impersonated by Ralph Ince.) He and Julia Ward Howe are looking out of the window on a recruiting headquarters that is not busy. (Mrs. Howe is impersonated by Julia S. Gordon.) Another scene shows an old mother in the West refusing to let her son enlist. (This woman is impersonated by Mrs. Maurice.) The father has died in the war. The sword hangs on the wall. Later Julia Ward Howe is shown in her room asleep at midnight, then rising in a trance and writing the Battle Hymn at a table by the bed. The pictures that might possibly have passed before her mind during the trance are thrown upon the screen. The phrases they illustrate are not in the final order of the poem, but in the possible sequence in which they went on the paper in the first sketch. The dream panorama is not a literal discussion of abolitionism or states' rights. It illustrates rather the Hebraic exultation applied to all lands and times. "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord"; a gracious picture of the nativity. (Edith Storey impersonates Mary the Virgin.) "I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps" and "They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps"--for these are given symbolic pageants of the Holy Sepulchre crusaders. Then there is a visible parable, showing a marketplace in some wicked capital, neither Babylon, Tyre, nor Nineveh, but all of them in essential character. First come spectacles of rejoicing, cruelty, and waste. Then from Heaven descend flood and fire, brimstone and lightning. It is like the judgment of the Cities of the Plain. Just before the overthrow, the line is projected upon the screen: "He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword." Then the heavenly host becomes gradually visible upon the air, marching toward the audience, almost crossing the footlights, and blowing their solemn trumpets. With this picture the line is given us to read: "Our God is marching on." This host appears in the photoplay as often as the refrain sweeps into the poem. The celestial company, its imperceptible emergence, its spiritual power when in the ascendant, is a thing never to be forgotten, a tableau that proves the motion picture a great religious instrument.