RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR As far as the photoplay is concerned, religious emotion is a form of crowd-emotion.

In the most conventional and rigid church sense this phase can be conveyed more adequately by the motion picture than by the stage.
There is little, of course, for the anti-ritualist in the art-world anywhere.

The thing that makes cathedrals real shrines in the eye of the reverent traveller makes them, with their religious processions and the like, impressive in splendor-films.
For instance, I have long remembered the essentials of the film, The Death of Thomas Becket.

It may not compare in technique with some of our present moving picture achievements, but the idea must have been particularly adapted to the film medium.

The story has stayed in my mind with great persistence, not only as a narrative, but as the first hint to me that orthodox religious feeling has here an undeveloped field.
Green tells the story in this way, in his History of the English People:-- "Four knights of the King's court, stirred to outrage by a passionate outburst of their master's wrath, crossed the sea and on the twenty-ninth of December forced their way into the Archbishop's palace.