Molière can show up Tartuffe, Tartuffe cannot show up Molière. Therefore Tartuffe fears and hates Molière, excommunicates him, denies his body consecrated burial, and, with a sharp relish, consigns his soul to the brimstone gulf. The prevailing temper of the clerical guild towards the histrionic guild, from the first till now, has been uncharitable and unjust, intellectually unappreciative and morally repulsive. This is shown all the way from the frenzied De Spectaculis of Tertullian and the vituperative Histrio-Mastix of Prynne to the sweeping denunciation of the drama by Henry Ward Beecher, who, never having seen a play, condemns it from inherited prejudice, although himself every Sunday carrying a whole theatre into his pulpit in his own person. An English clergyman in 1792 uttered these words in a sermon on the drama: “No player or any of his children ought to be entitled to Christian burial or even to lie in a church-yard. Not one of them can be saved. And those who enter a play- house are equally certain with the players of eternal damnation. No player can be an honest man.” Richard Robinson, who played Wittipol in “The Devil is an Ass” so as to win warm praise from Ben Jonson, was, at the siege of Bassinge-House, shot through the head after he had laid down his arms. A puritan named Harrison shot him, crying, “Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully!” The body of the favorite Parisian actor Philippe in 1824 was refused religious rites by the priests, and his friends were so incensed that the military had to be called out to quell the riot. A kindred disturbance was narrowly escaped at the death of Talma. When the wife of Nokes, a dancing-master, had rescued Edmund Kean and his wife and children from actual starvation and lent them a room, the landlord, a Christian clergyman named Flower, said that “no theatrical people should have the room.” And it is matter of fresh remembrance how the same spirit of bigotry was manifested by a Boston bishop in refusing confirmation to the universally respected and beloved Thomas Comer because he led the orchestra in a theatre, and by a New York pastor who declined to read the funeral-service over the estimable George Holland because he had been an actor. It must be affirmed that the chief animus of the clerical profession has been the desire to be obeyed, and that this is less Christian and less amiable than the ruling spirit of the dramatic profession, which is the desire to be loved. But the real spirit which ought to reign supreme in every one is neither the desire to be obeyed nor the desire to be loved, but the desire to be harmonized with the principles of universal order, giving and taking accordingly without egotistic exactions of any kind whether dictatorial or sympathetic. And this result can only be attained by means of the dramatic art of mutual sympathetic interpretation universally applied under the guidance of moral and religious principles.