VII.

A PERSIAN PASSION PLAY.

EVERYBODY has this last autumn1 been either seeing the Ammergau Passion Play or hearing about it; and to find any one who has seen it and not been deeply interested and moved by it, is very rare. The peasants of the neighbouring country, the great and fashionable world, the ordinary tourist, were all at Ammergau, and were all delighted; but what is said to have been especially remarkable was the affluence there of ministers of religion of all kinds. That Catholic peasants, whose religion has accustomed them to show and spectacle, should be attracted by an admirable scenic representation of the great moments in the history of their religion, was natural; that tourists and the fashionable world should be attracted by what was at once the fashion and a new sensation of a powerful sort, was natural; that many of the ecclesiastics present should be attracted there, was natural too. Roman Catholic priests mustered strong, of course.

The Protestantism of a great number of

1 1871.

the Anglican clergy is supposed to be but languid, and Anglican ministers at Ammergau were sympa thisers to be expected. But Protestant ministers of the most unimpeachable sort, Protestant Dissenting ministers, were there, too, and showing favour and sympathy; and this, to any one who remembers the almost universal feeling of Protestant Dissenters in this country, not many years ago, towards Rome and her religion, the sheer abhorrence of Papists and all their practices,-could not but be striking. It agrees with what is seen also in literature, in the writings of Dissenters of the younger and more progressive sort, who show a disposition for regarding the Church of Rome historically rather than polemically, a wish to do justice to the undoubted grandeur of certain institutions and men produced by that Church, quite novel, and quite alien to the simple belief of earlier times, that between Protestants and Rome there was a measureless gulf fixed. Something of this may, no doubt, be due to that keen eye for Nonconformist business in which our great bodies of Protestant Dissenters, to do them justice, are never wanting; to a perception that the case against the Church of England may be yet further improved by contrasting her with the genuine article in her own. ecclesiastical line, by pointing out that she is neither one thing nor the other to much purpose, by dilating on the magnitude, reach, and impressiveness, on the great place in history, of her rival, as compared with anything she can herself pretend to. Something of this there is, no doubt, in some of the modern Pro

testant sympathy for things Catholic. But in general that sympathy springs, in Churchmen and Dissenters alike, from another and a better cause,-from the spread of larger conceptions of religion, of man, and of history, than were current formerly. We have seen lately in the newspapers, that a clergyman, who in a popular lecture gave an account of the Passion Play at Ammergau, and enlarged on its impressiveness, was admonished by certain remonstrants, who told him it was his business, instead of occupying himself with these sensuous shows, to learn to walk by faith, not by sight, and to teach his fellow-men to do the same. But this severity seems to have excited wonder rather than praise; so far had those wider notions about religion and about the range of our interest in religion, of which I have just spoken, conducted us. To this interest I propose to appeal in what I am going to relate. The Passion Play at Ammergau, with its immense audiences, the seriousness of its actors, the passionate emotion of its spectators, brought to my mind something of which I had read an account lately; something produced, not in Bavaria nor in Christendom at all, but far away in that wonderful East, from which, whatever airs of superiority Europe may justly give itself, all our religion has come, and where religion, of some sort or other, has still an empire over men's feelings such as it has nowhere else. This product of the remote East I wish to exhibit while the remembrance of what has been seen at Ammergau is still fresh; and we will see whether that bringing together of strangers

VOL. I.

and enemies who once seemed to be as far as the poles asunder, which Ammergau in such a remarkable way effected, does not hold good and find a parallel even in Persia.

Count Gobineau, formerly Minister of France at Teheran and at Athens, published, a few years ago, an interesting book on the present state of religion and philosophy in Central Asia. He is favourably known also by his studies in ethnology. His accomplishments and intelligence deserve all respect, and in his book on religion and philosophy in Central Asia he has the great advantage of writing about things which he has followed with his own observation and inquiry in the countries where they happened. The chief purpose of his book is to give a history of the career of Mirza Ali Mahommed, a Persian religious reformer, the original Báb, and the founder of Babism, of which most people in England have at least heard the name. Bâb means gate, the door or gate of life;

and in the ferment which now works in the Mahometan East, Mirza Ali Mahommed,-who seems to have been made acquainted by Protestant missionaries with our Scriptures and by the Jews of Shiraz with Jewish traditions, to have studied, besides, the religion of the Ghebers, the old national religion of Persia, and to have made a sort of amalgam of the whole with Mahometanism,-presented himself, about five-and-twenty years ago, as the door, the gate of life; found disciples, sent forth writings, and finally became the cause of disturbances which led to his being executed on the 19th of July 1849, in the

citadel of Tabriz. The Bâb and his doctrines are a theme on which much might be said; but I pass them by, except for one incident in the Bâb's life, which I will notice. Like all religious Mahometans, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca; and his meditations at that centre of his religion first suggested his mission to him. But soon after his return to Bagdad he made another pilgrimage; and it was in this pil grimage that his mission became clear to him, and that his life was fixed. "He desired "-I will give an abridgment of Count Gobineau's own words—" to complete his impressions by going to Kufa, that he might visit the ruined mosque where Ali was assassinated, and where the place of his murder is still shown. He passed several days there in meditation. The place appears to have made a great impression on him; he was entering on a course which might and must lead to some such catastrophe as had happened on the very spot where he stood, and where his mind's eye showed him the Imam Ali lying at his feet, with his body pierced and bleeding. His followers say that he then passed through a sort of moral agony which put an end to all the hesitations of the natural man within him. It is certain that when he arrived at Shiraz, on his return, he was a changed No doubts troubled him any more: he was penetrated and persuaded; his part was taken."

man.

This Ali also, at whose tomb the Bâb went through the spiritual crisis here recorded, is a familiar name to most of us. In general our knowledge of the East goes but a very little way; yet almost every one has