Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916 Drama, History) D.W. Griffith – Cult Movie

The story of a poor young woman, separated by prejudice from her husband and baby, is interwoven with tales of intolerance from throughout history.

Original title /Also Known As: Intolerance: “A Sun-Play of the Ages”, “Intolerance”, “The Mother and the Law”.

Director: D.W. Griffith
Writers: Hettie Grey Baker, Tod Browning, D.W. Griffith
Stars: Lillian Gish, Robert Harron, Mae Marsh
Genres: Drama, History

@CultCinemaClassics

Intolerance Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages A drama of Comparisons ACT I Our play is made up of four separate stories, laid in different periods of history, each with its own set of characters. Each story shows how hatred and intolerance, through all the ages, have battled against love and charity.

Therefore, you will find our play turning from one of the four stories to another, as the common theme unfolds in each. Out of the cradle endlessly rocking. Today as yesterday, endlessly rocking, ever bringing the same human passions, the same joys and sorrows. Intolerance Our first story…out of the cradle of the present.

In a western city we find certain ambitious ladies banded together for the “uplift” of humanity. Even reform movements must be financed. “If we can only interest Miss Jenkins… with her money…” A little affair is being given by Mary T. Jenkins, unmarried sister of the autocratic industrial overlord…

Seeing youth drawn to youth, Miss Jenkins realizes the bitter fact that she is no longer a part of the younger world. The girl of our story keeps house for her father who works in a Jenkins mill. With a wage of $2.75 a day,

A little garden, four hens, ditto geese, and a fair measure of happiness and contentment. The little Dear One. The Boy, unacquainted with the little Dear One, is employed with his father in the same mill.

Age intolerant of youth and laughter. “The vestal virgins of Uplift” succeed in reaching Miss Jenkins in their search for funds. In ancient Rome, Vestal virgins were priests of Vesta who were dedicated to the Roman goddess Vesta. We must have laws to make people good. There is dancing in cafes.

Comes now from out the cradle of yesterday, the story of an ancient people, whose lives, though far away from ours, run parallel in their hopes and perplexities. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke identify Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus.

Ancient Jerusalem, the golden city whose people have given us many of our highest ideals, and from the carpenter shop of Bethlehem, sent us the Man of Men, the greatest enemy of intolerance. Near the Jaffa gate.

This gate is one of the eight main gates of the wall of the old city of Jerusalem, the Arabic name of this gate is Bab al-Khalil. The house in Cana of Galilee

Cana is a city in Galilee, north of Nazareth, where, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus performed his first miracle there by turning water into wine. Certain hypocrites among the Pharisees. Pharisee…A learned Jewish party, the name possibly brought into disrepute later by hypocrites among them.

When these Pharisees pray they demand that all action cease. Oh Lord, I thank thee that I am better than other men. Amen. Another period of the past. .D. 1572…Paris, a hotbed of intolerance, in the time of Catherine de Medici, and her son Charles IX, King of France.

Catherine de’ Medici was an Italian noblewoman, famous for being the wife of King Henry II and later becoming regent, as well as participating in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Charles IX receiving his brother, Monsieur La France, Duc d’Anjou. The heir to the throne, the effeminate Monsieur La France. Pets and toys his pastimes.

Catherine de Medici, queen-mother who covers her political intolerance of the Huguenots… beneath the cloak of the great Catholic Religion. Note: Huguenots…the Protestant party of this period. The great Protestant leader, the Admiral Coligny, head of the Huguenot party. What a wonderful man, the Admiral Coligny, if he only thought as we do.

What a wonderful king, if he only thought as we do. The King’s favor to Coligny increases the hatred of the opposite party. Celebrating the betrothal of Marguerite of Valois, sister of the King, to Henry of Navarre, royal Huguenot, to insure peace in the place of intolerance. Marguerite of Valois. Henry of Navarre.

Brown Eyes, her family of the Huguenot party, and her sweetheart, Prosper Latour. Brown Eyes attracts the attention of a mercenary soldier. Returning to our story of today, we find the embittered Miss Jenkins… aligning herself with the modern Pharisees and agreeing to help the Uplifters. A diversion of the mill workers. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ

To every thing there is a season… a time to mourn and a time to dance…… He hath made everything beautiful in his time. Ecclesiastes iii. The little Dear One having the time of her life. ـــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــ Want my straw? ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ

Miss Jenkins receives a check from her brother for the purposed uplift of humanity. ـــــــــ Jenkins studies his employes’ habits. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ Ten o’clock! They should be in bed so they can work tomorrow. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ And now our fourth story of love’s struggle against Intolerance,

In that distant time when all the nations of the earth sat at the feet of Babylon. Outside of Imgur Bel, the great gate of Babylon, in the time of Belshazzar, 539 B.C. Merchants, farmers, East Indians, with trains of elephants, Egyptians, Numidians, and ambitious Persians spying upon the city.

¶ The Numidians were a barbarian population in northwest Africa. ¶ Imgur Bel and Nivit Bel are the two great walls of Babylon, which construction was started by Nabopolassar, the king of Babylon. The Mountain Girl down from the mountains of Suisana.

Suisana, which was the Greek name Susa, is the capital of Ilam and is located on the border between Iran and Iraq. The Rhapsode, a Warrior singer… poet agent of the High Priest of Bel.

Bel is the newer name of Marduk, the main Babylonian god. Bel had all the attributes of Marduk, and his position and ritual were almost the same, but gradually Bel was recognized as the god of order and destiny. The priest of Bel-Marduk, supreme God of Babylon, jealously watches the image of the rival goddess,

Ishtar, enter the city, borne in a sacred ark. Ishtar: The first Mesopotamian goddess who has a close relationship with love and war, this goddess is the first known deity for whom we have written evidence.

Dearest one…in the ash heaps of my backyard there will be small flowers; seven lilies…if thou wilt love me…but a little. Ishtar, goddess of love, seven times seven I bow to thee. Let her enjoy this kiss. ¶ On the great wall. ¶ The Prince, Belshazzar, son of Nabonidus, apostle of tolerance and religious freedom.

Note: …Replica of Babylon’s encircling walls, 300 feet in height, and broad enough for the passing of chariots. Belshazzar overthrew King Labashi-Marduk in a coup and put his father Nabonidus in power. Through proclaiming his father as the new king, Belshazzar also made himself the first-in-line to the throne.

The two-sword man, Belshazzar’s faithful guard, a mighty man of valor. The jealous priest of Bel sees in the enthronement of Ishtar loss of his religious power. He angrily resolves to re-establish his own god …incidentally himself. The gate of Imgur Bel which no enemy has ever been able to force.

Hand maidens from Ishtar’s Temple of Love and Laughter. The Princess Beloved, favorite of Belshazzar, in a room of scented cedar, plated with pure gold, in the hareem of My Lord the Prince. ¶ A love blossom from Belshazzar. ¶ Stricken by her pale beauty, as though by white lightning.

The brother of the Mountain Girl, having some slight trouble with his high-spirited sister, takes the matter to the court. The first known court of justice in the world. Note: …Babylonian justice according to the code of Hammurabi, protecting the weak from the strong.

The Law of Hammurabi, which was engraved on basalt stone by the order of Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon, contains 282 articles on criminal law, civil law, and business law. The Mountain Girl’s brother tells the Judge that she is incorrigible.

The judgment is that she be sent to the marriage market to get a good husband. Endlessly rocks the cradle uniter of here and hereafter. Chanter of sorrows and joys. ¶ Resuming our story of today. ¶ Dividends of the Jenkins mills failing to meet the increasing demands of Miss Jenkins’ charities,

She complains to her brother, which helps decide him to action. Order a ten percent cut in all wages. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ A great strike follows. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ They squeeze the money out of us and use it to advertise themselves by reforming us. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ Hungry ones that wait to take their places. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ

Clear the property. The Loom of Fate weaves death for the Boy’s father. ـــــــــــ ـــــــــــ The exodus after a time of waiting. Forced to seek employment elsewhere, many victims of the Jenkins’ aspirations go to the great city nearby…the Boy among them. A friendless one…alone…as the result of the strike. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ

So too, the Dear One…and her father. ـــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــ Fate leads them all to the same district. ــــــــــــ ــــــــــــ The Boy unable to find work…at last… ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ Adversity causes the friendless one to listen to a Musketeer of the Slums. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ And again in Babylon.

¶ The marriage market. ¶ Money paid for beautiful women given to homely ones, as dowers, so that all may have husbands and be happy. Lips brilliant with juice of henna; eyes lined with kohl. Note: …According to Herodotus, women corresponding to our street outcasts, for life the wards of Church and State. The auctioneer.

Tish tish! ’tis no place to eat onions. The girl’s turn…perhaps not so different from the modern way. In distant Nineveh… One who would give his life if he were able to buy the merchandise held so lightly upon Love’s market. And man will be happy with this sweet wild rose…this gentle dove.

But touch my skirt and I’ll scratch your eyes out! The temper and rough language of the “wild rose” prove her to be not without thorns. With her goes a third of a mina of silver. You lice! You rats! You refuse me? There is no gentler dove in all Babylon than I.

Belshazzar now ruling for his father. Oh, lord of lords! Oh, king of kings! Oh, masu! Oh, scorching sun of the mid-day, these bugs will not buy me for a wife! I dwell in sorrow.

Probably in Babylon, “Maso” was the title of Shamash (Sun God) who was the lawgiver and the son of Bel, and the brother of Ishtar, also in some sources it is mentioned a mountain from behind which the sun always rose.

This seal gives you freedom to marry or not to marry… to be consecrated to the goddess of love or not as thou choosest. The Rhapsode, working in the tenements, to convert backsliders to the true worship of Bel.

Put away thy perfumes, thy garments of Assinnu, the female man. I shall love none but a soldier.

Asino seems to have originally been a powerful and heroic man who participated in Ishtar’s festivals as an actor in a religious drama dressed to interpret gender, but gender in its unusual form (a man dressed as a woman). The love-smitten Mountain Girl vows eternal allegiance to Belshazzar.

In the Love Temple. Virgins of the sacred fires of Life. He promises to build her a city, beautiful as the memory of her own in a foreign land. The fragrant mystery of your body is greater than the mystery of life. Belshazzar the king, The very young king, of Babylon…And his Princess Beloved,

Clearest and rarest of all his pearls, The very dearest one of his dancing girls. The Dear One in her new environment forced upon her by the Jenkins strike. The same old love and dreams. The hopeful geranium. I’ll walk like her and maybe everybody will like me too. ـــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــ

In the same neighborhood, the friendless one again. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ Across the hall, The Musketeer of the Slums. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ The Boy, now a barbarian of the streets, a member of The Musketeer’s band. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ Imitating the walk of the girl of the street. ــــــــــــ ــــــــــــ

¶ The Boy’s news stand, a blind for his real operations. ¶ Their first meeting. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ The new walk seems to bring results. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ Say kid, you’re going to be my chicken. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ Pray to be forgiven! ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ

Inability to meet new conditions brings untimely death to The Dear One’s father. ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ

Currently, the city of Nazareth is under the rule of Israel, according to some, the Domed Church of the Annunciation in this city is the place where Gabriel told Mary: She will give birth to a child. According to some, Jesus lived in this city until he was 12 years old.

Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking… The Comforter, out of Nazareth. There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee. John ii-1. Note: …The ceremony according to Sayce, Hastings, Brown and Tissot. The first sop to the bride. Be ye as harmless as doves. Scorned and rejected of men. Mary, the mother.

Meddlers then as now. “There is too much revelry and pleasure-seeking among the people.” ¶ The poor bride and groom suffer great humiliation. ¶ The wine has given out. ¶ The first miracle. ¶ The turning of water into wine.

Note: …Wine was deemed a fit offering to God; the drinking of it a part of the Jewish religion. Now for a time the little love god works his small but mighty way, in other days the same as now. Brown Eyes and her family happily ignorant of the web intolerance is weaving around them.

Love’s silent mystery. The mercenary made bold by passion. In the good old summertime. For the little Dear One, passing days and youth have healed the wound. The end of a “Coney Island” day. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ

Coney Island is a peninsula and recreational neighborhood in the southwest of New York City and in the Brooklyn area. Nothing doing on the good night stuff, I always go inside to see my girls. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ Help me to be a strong-jawed jane. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ

I told you before…I promised Our Lady and I promised father that no man would ever come in this room. Just for that I’ll never see you again! I was thinking…suppose we get married, then I can come in. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ That’s me. Kiss me good night and we’ll call it settled. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ

The enormous sums supplied by Jenkins to be distributed as the meddlers see fit…in “charity”… ـــــــــــــــــ now make the Uplifters the most influential power in the community. ـــــــــــــــــ Mary T.Jenkins Foundation Fund General Offices Equally intolerant hypocrites of another age. And the Pharisee said: “Behold a man gluttonous,

And a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” St. Matthew XI-19. The woman taken in adultery. ــــــــــ ــــــــــ Now Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned; but what sayest thou? …John VIII. He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. ــــــــــ ــــــــــ

Neither do I condemn thee; go thou and sin no more. Now, how shall we find this Christly example followed in our story of today? The Committee of Seventeen report they have cleaned up the city. It is peaceful in the… No more dancing in… You yourself were with us when we raided…

When women cease to attract men they often turn to Reform as a second choice. But these results they do not report: ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ ¶ Each one his own distiller. ¶ Instead of mild wines and beers… The Boy, strongly braced in the Dear One’s sweet human

Faith, sets his steps with hers on the straight road. The Boy tells the boss he won’t need the ‘cannon’ any more; he is through with the old life. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ As an example to others of the band, ــــــــــــ ــــــــــــ

The Musketeer, with the help of men higher up, arranges the old familiar frame-up. ــــــــــــ ــــــــــــ The sometimes House of Intolerance. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ Stolen goods, planted on The Boy, and his bad reputation intolerate him away for a term. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ The broken love nest…The Dear One… …alone… ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ

While at the Jenkins home the Uplifters ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ celebrate their success in righting the world that was all wrong. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ ¶ In Babylon. ¶ The High Priest of Bel courts public homage. The Priest of Bel, frenzied at the worship of Ishtar, prophecies the loss of their souls and the downfall of Babylon.

Belshazzar’s father has a red letter day. He excavates a foundation brick of the temple of Naram-Sin, builded 3200 years before. Like other Mesopotamian kings, Naram Sin made stone statues to commemorate his military victories, this statue is now kept in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Incidentally he remarks that Cyrus, the Persian, Babylon’s mighty foe, is nearing the city. We will begin building your city, oh dove of Ishtar, when Cyrus is conquered. The Persian camp. Cyrus, world-conqueror, preparing for the titanic struggle with Babylon, in secret league with the priest of Bel.

Note: …Situate between the Euphrates and post road to Egypt. The treacherous priest of Bel receives assuring news from Cyrus. In his tent, Cyrus, before the sacred image of the sun. ¶ The institution of Cyrus. ¶ The Medes and Persians at exercises. Note: …It was required that each man perspire every day. Ethiopians. Barbarians.

Out of the cradle…endlessly rocking, Baby fingers hopefully lifted. The little wife, now a mother, plans for the day of daddy’s return. ـــــــــــ ـــــــــــ The Uplifters, claiming the regular children’s societies are inefficient, now turn to “negligent” mothers. ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ A cold sends our little mother to an old-fashioned remedy, ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ

Condemned publicly yet used privately by many physicians and hospitals. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ The Uplifters investigate. “Child…evil surroundings…criminal father.” ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ Whisky! We are afraid you’re no fit mother… ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ Reporting the case. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ Despite the objections of some of the members, they decide to seize the baby. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ

The friendly neighbor, with a glass of beer. Did you see that? A man visitor! ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ We have a warrant to take your baby. ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ Suffer Little Children The Jenkins Foundation Hoping for a sight of her baby. “Perhaps they are right and baby is happy after all.” ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ

Of course, hired mothers are never negligent. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ A new dissipation…watching the happiness of others. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ In another bitter day, memorable through intolerance. The threatening attitude of the Huguenots throughout France is reported to Catherine. The “old serpent” uses the incident to inflame the minds of the Catholics against the Protestants.

Remember, gentlemen, the Michelade at Nimes when hundreds of our faith perished at the hands of the Huguenots! Michelade is the name given to the massacre of Catholics, including 18 Catholic priests and monks, by Protestant coup officials in Nimes on Michaelmas

And so, our very lives depend upon their extermination. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth… Cyrus moves upon Babylon; in his hand the sword of war, most potent weapon forged in the flames of intolerance. Belshazzar leaving to take charge of the city’s defense.

My Lord, like white pearls I shall keep my tears in an ark of silver for your return. I bite my thumb! I strike my girdle! If you return not, I go to the death halls of Allat.

Allat is the goddess of the underworld in Babylonian stories. The same goddess was later worshiped by the Arabs as one of the daughters of God. While the Princess Beloved prays, the Mountain Girl goes to fight for her Belshazzar. Babylon’s gates close against the foe. War drums and trumpets!

On the walls of my city, I, Belshazzar, defy the enemies of Babylon. Allato! Allato! Allato! It seems that the meaning of Allato is the same Babylonian goddess that the prince gives the order to start the battle by naming her. Great moving siege towers covered with ox hide. Inside the city walls.

Ancient instruments of war. Rock-throwers, catapults, battering rams, mighty crossbows, burning oil. Prayers in the temples and burning of frankincense. Burnt offerings. Ishtar, beloved, though our sins be many, forgive us. In our behalf seize thou now the burning sword. The city assaulted on all sides. Cyrus, the head of the war machine.

Cyrus repeats the world-old prayer to kill, kill, kill… and to God be the glory, world without end, Amen. Help us, Ishtar! ــــــــــ ــــــــــ Babylon is falling! Babylon, that mighty city is falling, is falling! Oh, God! Fight for us! Save us! ــــــــــ ــــــــــ

The Princess Beloved, frenzied with war’s terrors, watches the battle from afar. Great timbers against the towers. Into the night. Fight for him, Ishtar, fight for him! The women aid. Morning brings fresh assaults and towers. Belshazzar’s mighty man of valor and his legion oppose the threatening tide.

A new and flaming engine of destruction attempts to burn the towers of Cyrus. The army of Cyrus repulsed by Belshazzar. Babylon’s paean of victory. My glorious Belshazzar. A Sun-play of the Ages _ Intolerance ـــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــ A drama of Comparisons _ ACT II. ـــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــ

In this last act the events portrayed in Babylon are according to the recently excavated ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ cylinders of Nabonidus and Cyrus, that relate Babylon’s betrayal by the priests of Bel. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ These cylinders describe the greatest treason of all history, by which a civilization of countless ages was destroyed,

And a universal written language (the cuneiform) was made to become an unknown cypher on the face of the earth.

Nabonidus was absent for about 10 years in self-imposed exile in Tima Arabia for unknown reasons. Belshazzar ruled Babylon as regent during his father’s decade-long absence. The cylinders of Nabonidus refer to the cuneiform inscriptions of the last king of Babylon, which are 4 in number. The Cyrus Cylinder is a cuneiform inscription that Cyrus the Great ordered to be made during the conquest of Babylon.

In our modern story, The Musketeer, inflamed by a new face wins the unsuspecting little mother’s confidence with a promise to recover her baby. Jealousy. ـــــــ ـــــــ The Boy’s return to The Dear One. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ ¶ The Feast of Belshazzar. ¶ In the great court of the palace, rejoicing over Babylon’s victory.

Before the nobles of Babylon, Belshazzar pours out the colossal hospitality of an ancient time. Note: …This hall over a mile in length. imaged after the splendor of an olden day. A golden moment for Belshazzar and the Princess Beloved. To thee, oh Ishtar, all praise for the victory.

¶ A gateway of the banquet hall. ¶ The Mountain Girl happy in being even in the fringe of her hero’s glory. The High Priest looks down upon the city he seeks to betray to Cyrus. They give thanks to Ishtar now, but Oh Lord Bel…tomorrow Cyrus, ـــــــــ ـــــــــ thy servant, shall avenge thee!

The Rhapsode, unaware of the dastardly purpose, is ordered by the High Priest to have chariots at the great gate for a journey to Cyrus. In the tenement district, a simpler repast …her last in Babylon. The Egibi family was a family from ancient Babylon that was involved in business activities and land management.

At the table of Egibi, Babylonia’s greatest noble. Note: …Following Babylonian custom, the feasting lasts many days. Spiced wine, made cool with snow from the mountains. Soldiers, barbarians and camp followers. The Rhapsode, having completed his arrangements for the journey, turns to thoughts of love.

Thinking only of Belshazzar, her hero, The Mountain Girl leads on the love-sick boy, until… … …as always since the beginning of time between man and maid, boasting, he tells everything he knows. I know not why we go, but if I don’t return soon you can use the password to visit me.

The conspiring priests leave the banquet hall. The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence, directed against the Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion. Catherine’s audience with the King to secure his signature to the order for the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

Note: …Councillors present: Nevers, Tavannes, Retz and Birague. I will not consent to this intolerant measure to destroy any of my people. After a long session, the Intolerants sway the King. “We must destroy or be destroyed.”

By God’s death, since you wish it, kill them all! Kill them all! Let not one escape to upbraid me. Prosper and Brown Eyes betrothed. The banns…tomorrow, St. Bartholomew’s morn. Candles out…fading lights. Prosper puzzled by the ominous activities. ¶ St. Bartholomew’s eve. ¶ Upon the doorways of the Huguenots… the chalk of doom.

Prosper’s lodgings across the town. ¶ In the Temple of Love. ¶ The sacred dance in memory of the resurrection of Tammuz. In Mesopotamian religion, Tammuz is the god of fertility, who embodies the power of new life in nature and spring. Beloved…a white rose…from Beloved.

The gates manned with their own guards, the priests are guided by the Rhapsode on their mission of treason to the camps of Cyrus. ¶ In the interests of her prince… ¶ A little flirtation. Suspicious of the hated priests’ journey to Cyrus, she uses the password and follows them.

The Musketeer of the Slums seizes an opportune time to visit the little wife. ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ You go in and get the address where the kid is. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ You know me…I can get your baby for you. ـــــــــــ ـــــــــــ Just saw the boss go up to see your wife. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ

Nearing the end of the Boy’s trial for murder. ـــــــــ ـــــــــ Love’s brave encouragement. Yes, it was once my gun…but I…I…didn’t do it. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ The maiden case of The Boy’s attorney. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ I mean…can we hang…I mean, it’s only circumstantial evidence. ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ

¶ The verdict…guilty. ¶ Universal justice, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a murder for a murder. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ Outside the Roman Judgment Hall, after the verdict of Pontius Pilate: “Let Him Be Crucified”

Pontius Pilate was the fifth governor of the Roman province of Judaea, serving under Emperor Tiberius. he is being the official who presided over the trial of Jesus and ordered his crucifixion. The Boy’s sentence. Please…Mister Judge… To be hanged by the neck until dead, dead, dead! ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ

The Kindly Officer on the beat learns of the sentence. ـــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــ The people everywhere are singing your praises. The irresistible impulse. ــــــــــــ ــــــــــــ In his distant camp, Cyrus awaits the priests. The Mountain Girl’s bold pursuit. The day before the Boy’s execution. Feeling the Boy wrongly convicted by some mischance of fate,

The Kindly Heart sees a ray of hope in the visit of the governor to the city. And wondered if each one of us Would end the self-same way, ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ For none can tell to what red Hell His sightless soul may stray. ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ The governor unable to give any hope. ـــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــ

At the tents of Cyrus. The Mountain Girl from a distance watches the priests’ arrival. The great conspiracy. ¶ The Boy’s last dawn. ¶ The hangman’s test. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ Desperate, the little wife herself goes to the governor. ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ Oh God, don’t let them do it! ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ

¶ St. Bartholomew’s morn. ¶ The bell of St. Germain. The beginning of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. For Brown Eyes, a terrible awakening. The Dear One’s appeal to the Governor fruitless. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ The Governor leaves. ـــــــــــ ـــــــــــ I killed him! I did it, I did it! ــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــ

The attempt to overtake the governor before he reaches the train. ــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــ Her long wait rewarded, she goes to warn Belshazzar of the new advance on Babylon. The last Sacrament. No. 8, after the train, leaps with a new impulse. ـــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــ Intolerance, burning and slaying.

In the doomed city. “Our marriage will be announced tomorrow.” This bud will blossom…tomorrow. Beloved, I will begin building your city…tomorrow. Cyrus sweeps on to Babylon’s destruction. Medici, the old cat, is scratching out the lives of all your people. ¶ At the house of Brown Eyes. ¶ The mercenary’s opportunity.

Prosper, with the badges of safety, goes to rescue his loved ones. Even with the password, Prosper’s way beset with danger. Babylon’s last Bacchanal. The Bacchanal were ancient Roman festivals of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine, freedom, intoxication, and ecstasy. Brown eyes…ah me, ah me! Cyrus unites forces with his lieutenant, Gobryas.

As the leader of the Medo-Persian army of Cyrus, Gobryas took Babylon without battle. The Mountain Girl’s warning delayed by the revelers. A new appeal. While Belshazzar doubts, the army of Cyrus enters through the gates left open by the priests. Belshazzar at last convinced by his own servants.

Belshazzar finds only twelve guards to defend his palace gates against the hordes of Cyrus. The Princess’ vain appeal. To save Belshazzar the disgrace of captivity, they send him back to his throne. ¶ At the threshold of death. ¶ The farewell.

Honor commands that you go with your king to the death halls of Allat. Come! To God the glory! Long live Cyrus, King of Kings and Lord of Lords! ــــــــــ When cannon and prison bars wrought in the fires of intolerance…

And perfect love shall bring peace forevermore. Perfect love in the Bible is an expression of God’s love for us, and it is only complete when we reflect it back onto Him.There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear. Instead of prison walls…Bloom flowery fields. The End