While War and Work, with the rehearsing discipline they exact, occupy and ravage the fairest fields and promises of Human Life, and create Weariness, Crime, Lust, and Death, as the horrid Reapers who tread close in their steps, the Theatre--one bright home of Freedom, Art, and Beauty, planted in a paradisal place--is prophetic of the time to come when Love and Leisure shall have room to people the redeemed world with their fair and sweet offspring, Play and Joy. In the mean time, while the spirit of doubt, banter, and insincerity is so rife,--while we meet on every hand that arid, cynical, and contemptuous temper which thrives on mockery and badinage, fosters an insolent complacency and laughter by degrading superior persons and subjects in parodies and lampoons,--while our young men and women are infested with a boastful conceit of superiority to all sentiment and enthusiasm, and even our rising authors are so disenchanted, so knowing, that persiflage and the ridicule of illusion and devotion are their highest tests of experience and power,--under such conditions, surely we shall all agree that the ideal revelations, the impassioned music and eloquence, the free elevation above commonplace, the portrayals of ingenuous faith and energy, that still linger on the Stage, are to be held precious. Amidst so much formality and hypocrisy, it is a boon to have a great actor break into us through the crust of custom and startle our noblest powers into life. The actor, in laboring to fit himself for the highest walk in his profession, studies all forms of human nature and experience, discriminates their ranks and worth, sees what is congruous and becoming, or the contrary, and reproduces their powers in himself by the practice of putting on their states and showing their signals. This done disinterestedly, with a sovereign eye to duty and the Divine Will, is the way for every one to educate himself towards that personal perfection the pursuit of which is his supreme business on earth. He thus learns to assume and absorb the ascending ideals that brighten the pathway to heaven. Herein the dramatic art becomes glorified into identity with religion.