Love-tales may produce in him a romantic imagination. Low characters may teach him low cunning. If the laws of honour strike him as the laws of refined life, he may become a fashionable moralist. If modes of dissipation strike him as modes of pleasure in the estimation of the world, he may abandon himself to these and become a rake. Thus may such representations, in a variety of ways, act upon the moral principle, and make an inno-. vation there detrimental to his moral character.

Lord Kaimes, in his Elements of Criticism, has the following observations.

"The licentious court of Charles the Second, among its many disorders, engendered a pest, the virulence of which subsists to this day. The English comedy, copying the manners of the court, became abominably licentious; and continues so with very little softening. It is there an established rule to deck out the chief characters with every vice in fashion, however gross; but as such characters, if viewed in a true light, would be disgustful, care is taken to disguise their deformity under the embellishments of wit, sprightliness, and good humour, which in mixed company make a capital figure. It requires not much thought to discover the poisonous influence of such plays. A young man of figure, emancipated at last from the severity and restraint of a college education, repairs to the capital, disposed to every sort of excess. The playhouse becomes his favourite amusement, and he is enchanted with the gaiety and splendour of the chief personages. The disgust, which vice gives him at first, soon wears off, to

make way for new notions, more liberal, in his opinion, by which a sovereign contempt of religion, and a declared war upon the chastity of wives, maids, and widows, are converted from being infamous vices to be fashionable virtues. The infection spreads gradually through all ranks, and becomes universal. How gladly would I listen to any one who should undertake to prove that what I have been describing is chimerical! But the dissoluteness of our young men of birth will not suffer me to doubt its reality. Sir Harry Wildair has completed many a rake; and, in the Suspicious Husband, Ranger, the humble imitator of Sir Harry, has had no slight influence in spreading that character. What woman, tinctured with the playhouse morals, would not be the sprightly, the witty, though dissolute, Lady Townley, rather than the cold, the sober, though virtuous, Lady Grace? How odious ought writers to be, who thus employ the talents they have from their Maker most traitorously against himself, by endeavouring to corrupt and disfigure his creatures! If the comedies of Congreve did not rack him with remorse in his last moments, he must have been lost to all ser se of virtue."

SECTION IV.

The theatre forbidden, because injurious to the happiness of man by disqualifying him for the pleasures of religion—This effect arises from its tendency to accustom individuals to light thoughtsto injure their moral feelings-to occasion an extraordinary excitement of the mind—and from the very nature of the enjoyments, which it produces. As the Quakers consider the theatre to have an injurious effect on the morality of man, so they consider it to have an injurious effect on his happiness. They believe that amusements of this sort, but particularly the comic, unfit the mind for the practical performance of the Christian duties; and that as the most pure and substantial happiness that man can experience is derived from fulfilling these, so they deprive him of the highest enjoyments of which his nature is capable-that is, of the pleasures of religion.

Were a man asked, on entering the door of the theatre, if he went there to learn the moral duties, he would laugh at the absurdity of the question; and, if he would consent to give a fair and direct answer, he would either reply that he went there for his amusement, or to dissipate gloom, or to be made merry; some one of these expressions would probably characterize his errand there. Now this answer would comprise the effect, which the Quakers attach to the comic performances of the stage.

They consider them as drawing the mind from serious reflection, and disposing it to levity. But they believe that a mind, gradually accustomed to light thoughts, and placing its gratification in light objects, must be disqualified in time for the gravity of religious exercise, and be thus hindered from partaking the pleasures which such an exercise must produce.

They are of opinion, also, that such exhibitions, having, as was lately mentioned, a tendency to weaken the moral character, must have a similarly injurious effect. For what innovations can be made on the human heart, so as to seduce it from innocence, that will not successively wean it both from the love and the enjoyment of the Christian virtues?

They believe also that dramatic exhibitions have a power of vast excitement of the mind. If they have no such power, they are insipid. If they have, they are injurious. A person is all the evening at a play in an excited state. He comes home and goes to bed with his imagination heated and his passions roused. The next morning he rises: he remembers what he has seen and heard,—the scenery, the language, the sentiments, the action. He continues in the same excited state for the remainder of the day. The extravagant passions of distracted lovers, the wanton addresses of actors, are still fresh upon his mind. Now it is contended by the Quakers, that a person in such an excited state, but particularly if the excitement pleases, must be in a very unfavourable condition for the reception of the pure principle, or for the promo

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tion of the practical duties of religion. It is supposed that if any religious book, or if any parts of the sacred writings, were handed to him in these moments, he would be incapable of enjoying them; and, of course, that religious retirement, which implies an abstraction from the things of the world, would be impracticable at such a season.

They believe also, that the exhibitions of the drama must, from their own nature, without any other consideration, disqualify for the pleasures of religion. It was a frequent saying of George Fox (taken from the apostle Peter), that "they who indulge in such pleasures were dead while they were alive;" that is, they were active in their bodies; they ran about briskly after their business or their pleasures; they showed the life of their bodily powers; but they were extinct as to spiritual feeling. By this he meant, that the pleasures of the theatre, and others of a similar nature, were in direct opposition to the pleasures of religion. The former were from the world, worldly. They were invented according to the disposition and appetites of men. But the latter were from the spirit, spiritual. Hence there was not a greater difference between life and death than between these pleasures. Hence the human mind was made incapable of receiving both at the same time; and hence, the deeper it were to get into the enjoyment of the former, the less qualified it would become of course for the enjoyment of the latter.