There is nothing in Morse’s play that could exert an immoral influence. There is no irreverence in either its spirit or its incidents. It is merely a goody-goody, tiresome composition, full of moral twaddle, and consisting in about equal degree of platitude and bombast. It purports to be written in blank verse, but it is, in fact, written in nondescript lines of unequal length, halting, irregular, formless, weak, and diffuse. Choruses of rhymed doggerel occur in it, at intervals, sometimes uttered by women, sometimes,—on the contrary,—by angels. Stress is laid on the efforts of Pontius Pilate to save Jesus from the fury of the mob. There is a succession of pictures. In the Temple of Jerusalem many females appear, carrying babes, and a ferocious Jew, essaying to kill the infant Jesus, falls back astounded and overwhelmed by the aspect of the sacred infant. Later, Joseph, Mary, and the Holy Child are shown environed and protected by a branching sycamore tree, while, in the mountains all around them, many shrieking women and children are slaughtered by ruffianly soldiers. In a sequent picture King Herod, uttering a multiplicity of aphorisms, wrangles with his wife, Herodias, and the seductive SalomÉ dances before them and wins for her mother the head of her enemy, John the Baptist, which pleasing trophy, wrapped in a napkin, is brought in on a tray. Jesus and his disciples are then shown at the brook of Kedron. The agony of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane is depicted and the betrayal by Judas, the latter scene being double, to show, on one side, a lighted room in which is reproduced a semblance of “The Last Supper” according to the admired picture by Leonardo da Vinci, and on the other a gloomy range of plains and hills dimly lighted by the stars. In this scene passages from the New Testament are incorporated into Morse’s play, in the part of Jesus. The arraignment of Jesus before Pilate follows, including the wrangle between the furious people and that clement magistrate, and ending with the investiture of Jesus with the Crown of Thorns. The final picture shows Golgotha, under a midnight sky, and the removal of the dead body from the Cross.