Good plays may, indeed, be acted; but they will not long continue to call forth what are styled _good audiences_--the term having reference to numbers and pecuniary avails, rather than to moral worth. In fact, the theatre presents its most mischievous aspect when it claims to be a school of morals. Its advocates may talk as they will about "holding the mirror up to Nature, showing Virtue its own feature, Vice its own image;" but it can only remind us that there is a cant of the play-house as well as of the conventicle, and that Shaftsbury and his sentimental followers can "whine" as well as Whitfield and Beecher. The common sense of mankind pronounces it at once the worst of all hypocrisies--the hypocrisy of false sentiment ashamed of its real name and real character. As a proof of this, we may say that the stage has never been known in any language by any epithet denoting instruction, either moral or otherwise. It is the _play-house_, or house of amusement--the _theatrum_, the place for shows, for spectacles, for pleasurable emotions through the senses and the excitements of the sensitive nature. There may have been periods when moral or religious instruction of some kind could, perhaps, have been claimed as one end of dramatic representations, but that was before there was a higher stage, a higher _pulpitum_ divinely instituted for the moral tuition of mankind. Since that time, the very profanity of the claim to be a "school of morals" has only set in a stronger light the fact that, instead of elevating an immoral community, the stage is itself ever drawn down by it into a lower, and still lower degradation. We will venture the position, that no open vice is so pernicious to the soul as what may be called a false virtue; and this furnishes the kind of morality to which the stage is driven when it would make the fairest show of its moral pretensions. The virtues of the stage are not Christian virtues. If they are not Christian, they are anti-Christian; for on this ground there can be no _via media_, no neutrality. Who would ever think of making the moral excellences commended in the Sermon on the Mount, or in Paul's Epistles, the subjects of theatrical instruction? How would humility, forgiveness, poverty of spirit, meekness, temperance, long-suffering, charity, appear in a stage hero? In what way may they be made to minister to the exciting, the sentimental, the melodramatic? These virtues have, indeed, an elevation to which no stage-heroism or theatrical affectation ever attained; but such a rising ever implies a previous descent into the vale of personal humility, a previous lowliness of spirit altogether out of keeping with any dramatic or merely æsthetic representation. The Christian moralities can come upon the stage only in the shape of caricatures, or as the hypocritical disguise through which some Joseph Surface is placed in most disparaging contrast with the false virtues or splendid vices the theatre-going public most admires.