The Theater in the Church.
We take the following from the Evangelical Messenger, and would commend it to the thoughtful reader. Too much cannot be said in denouncing this sin: “Who has not felt while looking at the exhibitions and sceneries of modern Sunday-school festivals, &c., a strange consciousness coming over him that the theater had been slyly introduced into the church under an innocent name?” We confess that we have looked upon some of them with the most painful solicitude for the future of the children who were dressed to represent different characters and appeared upon the platform as actors, while the audience cheered them in their performance. We have never learned that any good has been accomplished thereby. The feelings which have been awakened, the tears that have been shed, and the joys that have been felt, were akin to those of the theater; the harm that has been done is positive and far-reaching. By these exhibitions the Sunday-school has been measurably turned into a nursery for the play-house. Read what a worldly man, a correspondent of the N. Y. Tribune, says of a recent Presbyterian Sunday-school celebration in Philadelphia: “‘The feature of the evening was a dramatic representation. The Four Seasons, in appropriate costumes, appeared under an arch inscribed with the name of “Jesus” in blazing gas jets; snow fell, grass grew, flowers, corn, grapes, and grain, sprung up, forming a fore-ground behind which stood Faith and Hope, who, in exquisite fancy dresses, recited their parts. A little girl then appeared, who with folded hands declaimed a prayer. The lights of the church were then turned down, a curtain arose, revealing en tableau a mother and children also kneeling in prayer. The Sixteen Seasons and Virtues assumed the attitude of worship, and the Holy Ghost, represented by a white dove, fluttering overhead. Red and blue fires were then lighted, and Faith and Hope kneeling supplicants, and the Holy Spirit disappeared in a blaze of glory. “‘Now it is but too evident that some of our Presbyterian brethren have been visiting the Black Crook. But what are we to think of the practice against profession? We boldly recognize in the drama a powerful agent of civilization and morality; while our friends denounce even plays which stir the profoundest and purest emotions of the soul, and through which great artists, as authors and actors, express to us the truths which life has taught them, as the work of the devil and seductions from hell. Yet they initiate their children into a weak and mawkish imitation of the poorest class of the spectacular drama for no purpose, apparently, but to gratify their vanity and to tamper with holy things. We would be willing to take our children to any play where the meaning was clean and healthy, and the acting not so bad as to corrupt their taste. We could call it wholesome amusement for them to laugh at Pantaloon or wonder at Harlequin, or to be bewildered by red and blue fires in a decent transformation scene; but to permit them to see the holiest and most awful thoughts which their innocent minds had yet conceived, their prayers and the answering Spirit of God, burlesqued in a farce show, is a sacrilege from which any thoughtful man would shrink. It would be impossible, indeed, to find such a dramatization at any theater. No respectable manager would dare to present it upon his boards.’”