Deep in his heart lay the faith that through blood and tears the whole race of men would be born again. And month by month that faith grew, even amid the final stupendous phase when the specter of famine stalked through the land. Moreover, he had a sense of personal election. A promise had been made to him, and through him, to his fellows. “One unconverted believer” was now the living witness that all the old prophecies were true.
Every living thing in the world around him, of which a supernal Being was the center, had a new meaning, a new force, a new divinity. Unsuspected powers were now his; latent faculties allowed him to live more abundantly. He looked up where once a skeptic’s eye had looked down, and the difference was that between a life in the full glory of light and sorry groping in darkness.
The news always reaching him of the growth of the miracle was now the motive power of a great belief, yet to one able to trace it from the germ it hardly seemed credible or at the best too good to be true. From many sources there came tidings of the new force at work in the world. The play was making history; wherever it appeared, reverberations followed. From one end of North America to the other, it had gone like fire. Irenic in tone and intention it might be, but also within it was that which raised it above party and above creed.
The people who saw and heard “A Play Without a Name” were able to fulfill Urban Meyer’s prediction. A great world religion had found a miraculous birth in the theater. By the wave of an enchanter’s wand, the stage had become an inspired teacher who received the sanction of the few, and met the need of the many. The message it had to deliver was simple as truth itself, yet the divine charm of its setting forth haunted even the smallest soul with a magic glimpse of the Kingdom of the Something Else. The play’s appeal was so remarkable that many who saw it simply lived for the time when they could see it again. It was a draught from the waters of Helicon; and, for them who drank of the Pierian spring, arose enchanted vistas of what the world might be if love and fellowship, works and faith, were allowed to remake it.
Urban Meyer had said that the world might be born again through the power of a great play. And in the first months of its production the signs were many that he was a true prophet. Through the wedding of insight with beauty, sympathy with truth, it reconciled factions, harmonized creeds.
Those who asked too much of life rejoiced as greatly in its sovereign humanity as those who asked too little. A divine simplicity spoke to all sorts of men. The pillar of the Church and the despiser of all religions, the over-good and the average person received from the well of a pure and infinite love, a new evidence, a new portent of the risen Christ.
It was said of those who saw it, that they were never quite the same afterward. An enchantment was laid upon the heart of man. Feeling, humor, imaginative truth, formed the basis of its triumph. A desire to do good was evoked, not because it was a sound spiritual investment or because others might be induced to do good to oneself, but it made of well-doing a natural act, like the eating of food or the drawing of breath.
Among the evidences of the new magic now at work in the world was a remarkable letter which Brandon received at the beginning of February. It said:
Independence Theater,
New York,