God

While God appears as a character in only eight of the sixteen pageants in the collection, he is a powerful presence in all of them. The reason for this is the pageants' essentially religious purpose—to bring religious instruction to the masses through the medium of entertainment. The primary purpose of that instruction is similar to that of the instruction offered by the churches—to indoctrinate said masses in the proper way to live a God-inspired life and join him, at the time of death, in heaven.

(For further consideration of the non-church aspects of the pageants, and in particular of their instructive aspect, see "Themes - The Blending of Secular and Liturgical").

That primary purpose (to instruct) is at the core of how God is portrayed throughout the pageants, both those in which He appears and those in which He is only referred to; in...