“People ask what’s wrong with Christianity. Its great flaw to my mind is that it asks too much; it is sublime but it isn’t quite a working proposition. We won’t go into a tremendous argument, but there isn’t the slightest doubt that in its present form it doesn’t touch the crowd. It needs simplifying, modifying, humanizing, before it can get right home to the man in the street. A lot of old lumber and obsolete formulas will have to find their way to the scrap heap. The great truths can still be there, but the religion of the future has got to think more of this world and less of the next. And I’m by no means sure that the mind which conceived the idea of the Kingdom of the Something Else is not going to meet the deepest need of mankind at the present time.” Brandon shot a glance of triumph at Pomfret, but even in that moment of exaltation he remembered the counsel of the sage. “At the first opportunity I should like to put up that play in New York at my biggest theater. There would be an all-star cast and a special orchestra, and in every detail it would be absolutely the greatest production ever seen in the States or anywhere else.” “And you would present it exactly as it is written?” said Pomfret in a matter-of-fact tone. “Yes. Not a line would be altered. It’s not ordinary theater stuff. In this case it’s the spirit of the thing that is going to matter and that must not be tampered with on any account.” Pomfret sat, a picture of whimsical incredulity, but Brandon, burning with the zeal of the evangelist, was now unequal to the change that the prudence of this world had laid upon him. Urban Meyer had been visited by the divine wisdom, and Brandon could not withhold acknowledgment of a fact so signal and so astonishing. “The theater is my religion,” the little man went on, and his queer eyes grew suddenly fixed as if they were looking at something. “I believe in it as I believe in nothing else. When you’ve watched millions of people going crazy over stunts like ‘Baby’s Bedsocks,’ the original smile-with-a-tear-in-it, you ask yourself what could be done by a real play with a live message. As I say, the theater is the church of the future. There’s no limit to its power; it speaks to the masses, cheers them, strengthens them, makes them healthy, lifts them up; it takes them into worlds beyond their own. And they understand its language. “Now this play, as I see it, is a test case. It’s not theater stuff of the ordinary brand and it’s got to be played just as it is, in the spirit of reverence. It may fall down, and fall down badly, but I’d like to produce it as an act of faith, for the love I bear humanity.”