city, and to have carried all who are now its living tenants with it, into the dread unknown. I will imagine that crowning success has, year after year, filled with devoted followers, this temple of irreligion, vulgarity and immorality. How many thousands will have drunk in the inspiration of vice-been lured further and further from the ways of virtue, and plunged deeper in the haunts of dissipation, and of low and corrupting pleasures! How many broken hearts will turn towards this theatre, as they weep over their buried joys! How many shamed* parents will attribute to this theatre the disgrace of them and their children! How many forlorn mothers will trace up to this fountain, the impure streams by which their daughters have been poisoned to all virtue, and to all good! Let all the members of this community, who, through the agency of this theatre, shall have suffered in their purse, or character, or happiness; in their children or friends-be assembled together within it, in one dense and overcrowded audience. Let all their sighs become vocal, and all their groans audible. Let their tears flow out together, and commingle in one flood of sorrows. And let the lost spirits of the departed dead be permitted to revisit this scene of their earthly dissipation; and in those forms of woe, which the genius of a Dante could give them, let them be made visible to their bewailing friends. Let them pass by, in their dark and terrific figures of unearthly torture, and in unison with the loud wail of their children, wives or parents, cry out, in the dismal tone of hopeless despair, "Lost! Lost! Lost! for ever! for ever! for ever! Lost! Lost! Lost!" That were a scene which would arouse you to a just perception of the character and magnitude of the evil we exhibit. That were a scene, yet still feeble in its representation of the still more awful reality. We look upon the Theatre as another Juggernaut, around which will fall, year by year, the crushed and famished victims of its vile idolatry,-whose bones, as they lie mouldering and whitening amid the foul vapours and gloomy shades of the deepening horror-will fill up the measure of its iniquity, and complete that desolation it has "such immeasurable power to effect." N. B. To prevent the possibility of any false issue being made, as to the bearing of these discourses, the author would state, that it is barely possible, some of the statements made may not, in their fullest force, apply to the new theatre. Should such be proved to be the case with any, they may be deducted from the amount of the testimony given, but cannot *Prov. xvii., 2, "A son that causeth shame." certainly affect the general argument. Thus it is possible, that the allusion on page 16, though already publicly made without contradiction, may be true only to a limited extent; and that the noise of the workmen as heard by many, may have proceeded from accidental causes, or have arisen from the suspicious imagination of the witnesses. If so, then the application of that part of the discourse must be made to theatres, where the arrangements of Saturday night, extend into sabbath morning, or sabbath noon; where, if the community can be induced to sanction it, the theatre is open on sabbath evening itself, "to second the efforts of the pulpit;" where actors travel on the sabbath, to fulfil their appointments and save time, or spend the sabbath in their preparations-and to the new theatre as far as it sanctions any of these practices. |