“They are founded, again, they conceive, on false principles, inasmuch as the Quakers confound causes with sub-causes, or causes with occasions.  If a person, for example, were to get over a hedge, and receive a thorn in his hand, and die of the wound, this thorn would be only the occasion, and not the cause of his death.  The bad state in which his body must have been, to have made this wound fatal, would have been the original cause.  In like manner neither the theatre, nor the ball-room are the causes of the bad passions, that are to be found there.  All these passions must have existed in persons previously to their entrance into these places.  Plays therefore, or novels, or public dances, are only the sub-causes, or the occasions of calling forth the passions in question.  The real cause is in the infected state of the mind, or in the want of knowledge, or in the want of a love of virtue.”

“Prohibitions therefore, though they may become partial checks of vice, can never, they believe, be relied upon as effectual guardians of virtue.  Bars and bolts seldom prevent thieves from robbing a house.  But if armed men should be in it, who would venture to enter in?  In the same manner the mind of man should be armed or prepared.  It should be so furnished, that men should be able to wander through a vicious world, amidst all its foibles and its follies, and pass uncontaminated by them.  It should have that tone given to it, which should hinder all circumstances from becoming occasions.  But this can never be done by locking up the heart to keep vice out of it, but by filling it with knowledge and with a love of virtue.”

“That this is the only method to be relied upon in moral education, they conceive may be shewn by considering upon whom the pernicious effects of the theatre, or of the ball-room, or of the circulating library, principally fall.  Do they not fall principally upon those, who have never had a dignified education.  ’Empty noddles, it is said, are fond of playhouses,’ and the converse, is true, that persons, whose understandings have been enriched, and whose tastes have been corrected, find all such recreations tiresome.  At least they find so much to disgust them, that what they approve does not make them adequate amends.  This is the case also with respect to novels.  These do harm principally to barren minds.  They do harm to those who have no proper employment for their time, or to those, who in the manners, conversation, and conduct, of their parents, or others with whom they associate, have no examples of pure thinking, or of pure living, or of a pure taste.  Those, on the other hand, who have been taught to love good books, will never run after, or be affected by, bad ones.  And the same mode of reasoning, they conceive, is applicable to other cases.  For if people are taught to love virtue for virtue’s sake, and, in like manner, to hate what is unworthy, because they have a genuine and living knowledge of its unworthiness, neither the ball, nor concert-room, nor the theatre, nor the circulating library, nor the diversions of the field, will have charms enough to seduce them, or to injure the morality of their minds.”