A few plays have been written in which conscientious piety has been justly commended and illustrated, but they never became popular, and it is difficult to name one that was ever performed three times in the same place. And yet this is the only kind of piety to which the promise of salvation is annexed-a piety which is distasteful to man until he is renewed by the Holy Spirit, and which even then requires much prayer and self-denial to bear its burdens and discharge its duties.

Again, in most plays, wickedness is made to furnish amusement. Lying, drunkenness, adultery, and "other" works of the flesh, "become the cause of sport," and the occasion of hilarity. And, as it has been truly said, "Crimes that would call down the wrath of God on their perpetrators are systematically made to provoke laughter."

To this charge it may be said, "Such is life; the newspapers abound with accounts of similar crimes daily committed among us; history is full of them." This, alas! is too true; but who, if his moral sense be acute, would read them anywhere, or behold them for diversion, or otherwise than from necessity,

and with feelings of real horror. On the stage one character is introduced "who incessantly lies;" another, who steals; another, who is always drinking and reveling; another, who is conspiring; another, who attempts intrigue; another, who poisons; another, who commits adultery or murder: and though some of these actions are not now, as they were at one time, actually represented before the spectators, yet all is done to produce the illusion that they are really happening. Oaths and profane expressions are often introduced, and in some popular plays are used by the actors more frequently than they occur in the original text. Witticisms, whose whole point lies in an indecent allusion or implication, are very common; and in many cases if the open obscenity, the licentious wit, the profaneness, and the turns of expression which run along the confines of impropriety, always apparently about to cross, but just escaping, were expurgated, there would be little left to excite, or even to hold, attention.

Much is sometimes said of the "moral" of the play being good. As a rule, where there is any moral, in the technical sense of that word, it is has

tily disposed of in the fifth act. But this cannot counteract the evil influence of what has preceded it.

Suppose a story for youth, full of reckless adventures, illicit loves, profane and vulgar witticisms, in which the characters have a good time, and though getting into many perplexities generally extricate themselves by their own ingenuity, or escape by some stroke of fortune, is it to be believed, or even. fancied, that if on the last page it should be stated that the "way to be happy is to be good," or the "path of duty is the path of safety," the effect of the previous narrative would be favorably modified?

It is sometimes affirmed that this objection, that plays contain obscene allusions, would condemn the Bible. This reply will have force when one passage can be found in the Bible in which a word was introduced for the sake of its obscenity. And the attempt to bolster up the filthy allusions in plays by the Bible will be seen to be as absurd as it is profane when we remember, that from the sixty-six different books of which the Bible is composed, not an instance can be produced of a joke founded on

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licentiousness or sin, while its solemn declaration is, that neither "drunkards," nor nor "thieves," nor fornicators," nor "adulterers," nor "liars," nor profane" swearers, nor "murderers," "shall inherit the kingdom of God."

CHAPTER XIII.

HOW PLAYS ARE PUT UPON THE STAGE.

HUS far we have spoken of the matter of

THUS

plays; but when we inquire into the manner in which they are put upon the stage it becomes apparent that good impressions cannot be made. To sit unmoved, coldly critical, saying to one's self, "This is but fiction," would not admit of much enjoyment. The greater the sympathetic excitement the more exquisite the emotion. The spectator must laugh with him that laughs, rave with him that raves, and weep with him that weeps; or if the play be such as to require sympathy with one character and antipathy to another, this feeling must be maintained all the way through.

The terror-stricken old lady who, being at the Theater for the first time, cried out, "Are you going to let him kill her right here!" as a disappointed lover was about to plunge his dagger into the heart of a young woman, was in the state to get the great