O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day! 
   From your wrath is the world released, redeem’d from your chains,
       men say. 
   New Gods are crown’d in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;
   They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods. 
   But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
   Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were... 
   Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
   The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in
       the brake;
   Thou hast conquer’d, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from
       thy breath;
   We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

‘Thou hast conquer’d, O pale Galilean!’ However the struggle might sway in this or that other part of the field, Literature had to be beaten to her knees, and still beaten flat until the breath left her body.  You will not be surprised that the heavy hand of these Christian fathers fell first upon the Theatre:  for the actor in Rome was by legal definition an ‘infamous’ man, even as in England until the other day he was by legal definition a vagabond and liable to whipping.  The policy of religious reformers has ever been to close the theatres, as our Puritans did in 1642; and a recent pronouncement by the Bishop of Kensington would seem to show that the instinct survives to this day.  Queen Elizabeth—­like her brother, King Edward VI—­signalized the opening of a new reign by inhibiting stage-plays; and I invite you to share with me the pensive speculation, ’How much of English Literature, had she not relented, would exist to-day for a King Edward VII Professor to talk about?’ Certainly the works of Shakespeare would not; and that seems to me a thought so impressive as to deserve the attention of Bishops as well as of Kings.

Apart from this instinct the Christian Fathers, it would appear, had plenty of provocation.  For the actors, who had jested with the Old Religion on a ground of accepted understanding—­much as a good husband (if you will permit the simile) may gently tease his wife, not loving her one whit the less, taught by affection to play without offending—­had mocked at the New Religion in a very different way:  savagely, as enemies, holding up to ridicule the Church’s most sacred mysteries.  Tertullian, in an uncompromising treatise “De Spectaculis,” denounces stage-plays root and branch; tells of a demon who entered into a woman in a theatre and on being exorcised pleaded that the mistake might well be excused, since he had found her in his own demesne.  Christians should avoid these shows and await the greatest spectaculum of all—­the Last Judgment.  ‘Then,’ he promises genially, ’will be the time to listen to the tragedians, whose lamentations will be more poignant, for their proper pain.  Then will the comedians turn and twist in capers rendered nimbler