The reader notes the special application here, and distinguishes also between religion and the church, remembering the religious import of the Attic drama. The plot of the play is simple. Sir Tristram Sumner, a man of remarkable ability, having led an inharmonious life, has reached that period when the material powers of mind and soul begin to rebel against the over-indulged body, and are apt to declare themselves in megalomaniacal obsessions. His instinct, once infallible, misleads him, and he determines, against all advice, to produce Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida." His wife, originally a beautiful and healthy woman, has shared her husband's sensuality, and is now haggard and neurotic, her ill-used soul asserting itself discordantly in trances and telepathic visions. She is haunted by the fancy that the play will succeed if Warwick Groom, a disgraced actor of genius, takes the part of Troilus. Sir Tristram, who knows that Lady Sumner had loved Warwick in her youth, has developed a fierce jealousy of his former rival and a deadly hate for his wife; but his financial position is so perilous, and his wife's premonitions have been hitherto so reliable, that he dare not disregard her brain-sick counsel. Warwick Groom's besetting vice, drunkenness, prevents his appearance as Troilus, and the play fails. Bankruptcy and the end have come. But now the Bishop of St. James's intervenes, and finances Sir Tristram in order to produce a play of his own. St. James's has a message to deliver, and prefers the theatre to the pulpit. On the night of the production of his play he himself is to introduce it in a guarded speech: but soon--a true propagandist-- "He stands entranced, With face uplifted like a seraph, pealing Material music, from his prologue worlds Away."