"The stage? The stage as an institution?" John appeared to pause and wind himself up. "Why, listen! The stage function is a godlike function. When God created man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life he planted in man’s breast also the instinct to create. That instinct is the foundation of all art. Man has always exhibited this passion to create something in his own image. It might be a rude drawing on a rock, or only a manikin sculptured in mud and set in the sun to dry; or it might be a marble of Phidias, with the form, the strength, the spirit of life upon it. The painter can go farther. He gets the color and the very visage of thought and even of emotion. Yet each falls short. There is no God to breathe into their creations the breath of life." The minister leaned back a little as if to put his understanding more at poise. "But," continued Hampstead, "the playwright and the actor can go farther. They breathe into their creations that very breath of God himself, which he breathed into man. They make a character real because he is a living man. They put him in the company of other men and women who are as real for the same reason; they toss them all into the sea of life together; the winds of life blow upon them. Hate and love, virtue and vice, hope and despair, weakness and strength, birth and death, work their will upon them." "That is very beautiful, John," said Doctor Campbell, "very beautiful." The tribute was sincere, but John was not to be checked even by a compliment. "The stage creates and recreates," he rushed on. "It can raise the dead. It makes men and women live again—Julius Cæsar and Cleopatra, Napoleon and Dolly Madison. It seizes whole segments out of the circles of past history and sets them down in the midst of to-day, with the glow of life and the sheen of reality over all, so that for an afternoon or a night we live in another continent or another age. We see the life, the customs, the petty quarrels, the sublimer passions, the very pulse-beats of men of other circumstances and other generations than our own, so that when we come out of the theater into the times of to-day, we have actually to wake ourselves up and ask: Which is real, and which is art?" Doctor Campbell leaned forward now. His mouth was round, his eyes were widely open. "It is that which gives the stage its dignity and power," concluded John. "It is the highest expression of man’s instinct to create a new life in a more ideal Eden than that in which he finds himself. When you condemn the stage you condemn the creative instinct, and," exhorted John, with the sudden sternness of a hairy prophet on his desert rock, "you had better pause to think if you do not condemn Him who planted that instinct in the human breast."