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The Rock (1934) contains choruses of great beauty, of which its author was justly proud. Most readers of Eliot are only familiar with these as some of his finest religious poems, ignoring that they were originally part of a pageant play characterised by its ecclecticism: allegorical characters, historical as well as contemporary scenes, comic interludes, even song and dance. The Rock was an ambitious project, not only as a dramatic text, but as a fund-raising activity. During the interwar period, the Diocese of London became alert to the absence of worshipping communities in the city's suburbs, and issued an appeal for public funding destined for the building forty-five new churches. Eliot involved himself in the initiative, The Rock being the result. Decisively, it launched the author's career as a playwright and instigated a lasting collaboration with the director E. Martin Brown. Despite its shortcomings, The Rock was an achievement for Eliot and a source of profit for the Forty-Five Churches Fund, raising no less than £1,500.The leitmotif of Eliot's play is, not surprisingly, the building of a church in suburban London. Alfred, Edwin and Ethelbert, three cockney construction workers named after Christian Anglo-Saxon kings, discuss the necessity of the project and its difficulties. Ethelbert, a shrwed but charismatic foreman, defends co-operative economy, as opposed to the impersonality of the bank system: "That's a bank, that is. It's all profit what nobody gets and nobody knows 'ow they gets it. Nah, then: you take a church. There ain't no profit about that. It's for you and me". In response to a trade-unionist (the "Agitator") who accuses the three builders of "betrayin' your class" and "prostitutin' yourselves," Ethelbert comically asks "What's your view o' Maynard Keynes's theory o' money?". When the Agitator argues that society needs no churches but "decent 'omes for the workers," Ethelbert attributes this argument to "some antiquated theory of money." Later in the play, Bishop Charles Blomfield, "builder of many churches" in nineteenth-century London, appears as a character and echoes the foreman's view, in referring to "economic laws that are half superstition."Only a few years later, in The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Eliot defended "a direction of religious thought which must inevitably proceed to a criticism of political and economic systems." He denounced "the hypertrophy of the motive of Profit," "the misdirection of the financial machine" and "the iniquity of usury." This was after the Great Depression and immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War. The social thinker was, as The Rock evidences, also a social dramatist.