If anybody thinks I have given an unfair instance, or that I characterize it unfairly, let them take other testimony where no prejudice can be supposed. Read Mrs. Kemble's "Journal" of her stage life. Read the opinion she gives of it all in her later "Recollections." Yet from childhood some of her nearest and dearest she had known as actors.
I have spoken first as to people bound by the Golden Rule, and forbidden therefore to help anybody even to get a living in an evil way. For the work the theatre does upon yourselves, you know it, if you will be honest. People answer: "O if it hurt me, of course I would give it up." Be honest with yourself, and you will come out of that delusion. You know it does not make love to Christ warmer, or thoughts of heaven sweeter; or the atmosphere of your everyday life more wholesome and sound. You know it leaves a restless craving for excitement,—you know it exalts the world before your eyes; and if you think a little you will find that, like my poor young friend in her dancing, you are not edified, not built up, but pulled down. Let me tell you of one case where the mother was a Church member, and had prayers regularly every morning with her family, But the command to watch as well (i.e., "keep awake") she had forgotten. And the desire seized her to see—I will not write the name down here, but it was one of those foreign importations which have beguiled thousands. She did not want her son to know of her going, and so went with her young daughter for escort! But she found her son already there, and for twenty-eight nights running he was there again. Why not?—if his mother went once? And as might be expected, the daughter has become (as people say) "wild for the theatre."
Among the people who loved Mr. Lincoln best, and could best understand the semi-official way in which he went to the theatre that fatal night, there was not one, I fancy, who did not feel an added shock at learning where he was when the messenger came, and who did not wish that he had been almost anywhere else. Yet why? If the theatre is a proper place for Christians to enter, it is as good a place as any other to be
"Waiting—waiting—when the Lord shall come."
The only thing I think of mentioned in the Bible that is much like modern performances on the boards, is the dancing of the daughter of Herodias before Herod. She worked for hire, she beguiled her audience. "She pleased the king," and got from him all she asked for. It sounds very dreadful to you, no doubt, that the prophet's head should have been danced off by a pair of whirling feet?—but that is a slight matter. If dancing and theatre going did only take off the heads of protesting saints, like an old-time persecution, they at least would but exchange the prison for the palace, and so not lose much. But this stealing away the heart and service once vowed to Christ, is another matter. You think it does not do this. You think your eye is as clear for heaven in the boxes as elsewhere. You think you can dress and go and look on and listen, keeping close to this command:
"Whatsoever ye do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord
Jesus."
Do you think so?
"I have never been to hear him," said Dr. Skinner, speaking then, only of a false prophet in a false Church, "because I could not expect to meet my Master there; and I will go nowhere for pleasure where he is not." What about the theatre, tried by that test?
How surely the world marks every Christian who is seen at such places; how certainly the children know that the parents have not yet forsaken all for Christ. And how constantly ungodly men fence off your warning, with the words: "Look at —— and ——, I am as good as they. I do this and that, and they do it too. I don't see the difference."
But "nobody knows." O yes, everybody knows. No matter if you are across the sea,—"A bird of the air shall carry the matter." But especially, the Lord knows. He setteth "a print on the heels of my feet" [1]—and step you never so lightly, the mark will be there, and the Lord will know.