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 play-house 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 sense of virtue.”

SECT.  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 thoughts—­to 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 a fulfilment of these, so they deprive him of the highest enjoyment of which his nature is capable, that is, of the pleasures of religion.

If a man were 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 amusement, or to dissipate gloom, or to be made merry.  Some one of these expressions would probably characterise 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 best gratification in light objects, must be disqualified in time for the gravity of religious exercise, and be thus hindered from partaking of 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?