The church paints the world as a sad and fearful place of probation, where redemption is to be fought for while the violent and speedy end of the entire scene is implored. The theatre regards it as a gift of beauty and joy to be graciously perfected and perpetuated. The ideal of the priest and the ideal of the actor contrast as Dominic and Pericles, or as Simeon Stylites and Haroun-al-Raschid. All the words denoting the church and its party—ecclesia, église, kirche, congregation—signify a portion selected or elected and called aside by themselves for special salvation, apart from the great whole who are to be left to the general doom. But the word theatre in its etymology implies that the world of life is something worthy of contemplation, beautiful to be gazed at and enjoyed. The priest naturally disliked the player because he was more attractive to the public than himself. He also disliked him because disapproving his art. The very object of the drama is by its spectacle of action to rouse the faculties and excite the feelings of the assembly who regard it. But the priest would not have the passions vivified; he would have them mortified. The contemplation of the dread passion and sacrifice of Christ, the fear of sin and of death and judgment, should exclude or suppress all other passions. On the contrary, the dramatist holds to the great moral canon of all art, that perfected life is the continuous end of life, and that the setting of intelligence and emotion into ideal play, a spiritual gymnastic of the passions in mental space disentangled from their muscular connections, purifies and frees them. The priest not only holds that the dramatic ideal of the natural fulfilment of the offices of being is opposed to the religious ideal of grace, is profane, and tends directly to ruin; he likewise, from all the prejudices of his own rigidity of mould and bigoted routine, believes that the facility and continual practice of the actor in passing from assumption to assumption and from mood to mood must be fatal to moral consistency, must loosen the fibre of character, and produce dissoluteness of soul not less than of life. This is mostly a false prejudice. Those of the greatest dramatic mobility of genius and versatile spiritual physiognomy, like Cervantes, Molière, Goethe, Schiller, Dickens, Voltaire, and the very greatest actors and actresses, like Talma, Garrick, Rachel, Siddons, had the most firm and coherent individuality of their own. Their penetrations and impersonations of others reacted not to weaken and scatter but to define and gird their own personal types of being and behavior. The dramatic type of character is richer and freer than the priestly, but not less distinctly maintained.