Salmi Morse, in conversation with me and my old comrade Dr. Charles Phelps, at the time of the reading in the vestibule of the Park Theatre, said that he began “The Passion Play” with the intention of writing a poem like Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” but soon discovered that the Byronic style, as evinced in “Cain,” was more consonant than the Miltonic style with his subject and his genius, and accordingly determined to write not like Milton but like Byron; and he added that his drama was really not, at first, intended for the Stage, but for publication in a book. That was a discreet judgment, from which it is a pity that he ever departed. I have not, however, been able at any time to perceive what decisive _moral_ reason there is why “The Passion Play” should not be presented on the stage. Reasons other than moral can readily be assigned: it is a matter of _Taste_, in which it is a gross injustice to employ the police power as a corrective, and a matter of _Public Policy_, in which, with due consideration, the police power can properly be invoked. Familiar treatment of things widely considered sacred is, perhaps, likely to lower them, except with very ignorant persons, in sanctity and dignity, and certainly it does lower them with many persons of fine intelligence and taste. In the end of a church in Heidelberg there is, or was, visible, through a long window, a full-length effigy of Christ on the Cross, which swings to and fro as a pendulum to the clock, and in a church at Mayence there is a life-size figure of the Virgin Mary, seated, with the body of the dead Christ, also life-size, lying across her knees. I remember looking on those objects with aversion. To _see_, in a theatre, a man, impersonating the _Christ_, washing the feet of another man will, generally, give offence. Religious bigotry is a curse to civilization, and nothing should be conceded to it, but certainly the scruples of religious persons should receive reasonable respect.
After the suppression of his “Passion Play” in California Morse brought it to New York and offered it to Henry E. Abbey, then a prominent speculative manager, who, for a time, entertained the purpose of producing it at Booth’s Theatre. A drop curtain was painted, showing a flight of angels toward Heaven on Easter morning, and the purpose of Morse was made known to remove the statue of Shakespeare from the top of the proscenium arch and to substitute a large cross in its place. Obstacles intervened,--disapproval, voiced in the newspaper press, being one of them, and the destruction of Abbey’s New Park Theatre by fire (October 30, 1882), in which conflagration all the costumes were destroyed, being another,--and that project was abandoned. Prior to that mishap Morse gave a reading of the play, December 3, 1880, at the Cooper Institute; and later, February-April, 1883, ineffectual efforts were made by the author (which brought him before Judge George C. Barrett, of the New York Supreme Court) to present it in a house which he rented and called Salmi Morse’s Temple (afterward known as Proctor’s Twenty-third Street Theatre). His endeavors were finally blocked by an injunction, and the venture was heard of no more. Belasco was in New York at the time of Morse’s attempt to have his “Passion Play” represented there, and Morse wished him to undertake the stage direction of it, but being otherwise employed, and also clearly perceiving the public antipathy to the project, he discreetly declined to participate in the enterprise. On February 22, 1884, the unfortunate Morse met death by drowning, in the Hudson River, near Harlem, and he was thought to have committed suicide.