The Lowest Depth | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 26, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 48.

The Lowest Depth.

It is one of the saddest things to see religious people professedly running after and defending the theater when the secular press are deploring its decadence as never before. Three different plays have recently been before the New York public, each successive one exceeding its predecessor in indecency. The New York World declares that this last drama touched “the lowest depth”; that “it shines and stinks with the slime of Sodom.” “There can be nothing worse to come,” it declares, “as an example of degenerate art than this play, whose motif is incest, complicated with adultery, and crowned with the murder of the innocent.” And yet all the witchery of scenery, the power of eloquence, and the pathos of sorrow are used to make the accursed thing popular. The critic of the Evening Post declares it to be “a work horrible in conception, ruthless in execution, poisonous in spirit, but full of tragic power, poetic imagination, and literary splendor,” and that “not even genius could make this piece fit for public performance.” The New York Tribune characterizes it as “particularly foul and offensive.” And the World’s critic proclaims it to be “the most malignant example of lust, cloaked with the flowers of poetic eloquence, that the stage of New York has yet seen.” But it tells us—sad it is ’tis true—that “the theater was filled with a large and brilliant audience, including the usual proportion of young women and their young-men escorts. Doubtless the matinée girls, if they have the opportunity, will flock like doves to this feast of buzzards.” And from the horrible depths of this foul thing the theater grades up to that which is almost innocuous. O, Christians can find a better place in the real dramas and tragedies of life than in the theater. Doubtless men and women who have lived with it have been kept pure in spite of it; but many, many have gone down to destruction because of its ever-downward influence.