A reader of this column who on the suggestion made
here a fortnight ago went to see The First Legion makes an interest- ing, though I think only partially just, comment. The crux of the play is whether the apparently miraculous recovery of a brother in the Jesuit community house is in fact a miracle. The brother who is commissioned to go to Rome and argue that it is, and on the strength of it seek canonisation for the original founder of the house, has learned from the doctor that it was no miracle at all—but learned it under the seal of the confessional, so that it cannot be divulged. The comment is the familiar " Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive."
But there was no general intent to deceive. The Father Rector, and all the community except the one brother to whom the doctor told the facts (he would tell them to no one else), believed firmly in the miracle. The problem for the playgoer is to decide how the play should end. The author has obviously created an interesting situation and found no way of dealing with it. So he simply introduces a new miracle to prove the old one genuine—a despairing expedient.
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