The church of Christ, in opposition to the example of its divine Founder, has been made an exclusive enclosure for a privileged class of believers. In it their prejudices are cherished and their ascetic ideal glorified and urged on all. The Saviour himself was a miracle of tolerance and inclusiveness, mingling freely with the common people, not spurning the publican, the sinner, or the harlot, but regarding all ranks in the great brotherhood of humanity with a sweet and inexhaustible kindness. There was one exception alone. Towards the bigot, the pharisee, the hypocrite, the tyrant, his scorn and indignation burned. But all other forms of man moved only his impartial love or his healing compassion. This was the divinely democratic genius of Christ, but has not been the genius of the priesthood who with arrogance and persecution have claimed to represent him. The theatre has been far more expansive in the range of its sympathies than the church. The highest dramatic genius that has ever appeared in the world, Shakspeare, shows in his works a serene charity, a boundless toleration, a genial appreciation of the widest extremes, kindred to that of God in nature and grace. His loving imagination, like the all-holding sky, embraces Trinculo, Bardolph, Poins, Falstaff, and Malvolio, as well as Bassanio, Prospero, Hamlet, Cæsar, and Lear; Audrey and Quickly, as well as Portia and Cordelia. The first glory of the theatre is its freedom from sectarianism; and its first use is to radiate abroad this generous spirit of universality, not bigotedly limiting attention to any one province of life or any single ideal, but revealing the whole world of man in its heights and breadths and depths, exhibiting in turn every variety of ideal and doing justice to them all. “The drama,” Macklin said, “should be a perfect reproduction of general nature as it passes through human life in every character, age, rank, and station.” Taught this by genius, experience, and learning, it teaches the common observer how wondrously large and rich is the world of mankind. Emperors and clowns pass, saints and villains jostle, heroes and murderers meet, the divine lady and the foul virago appear and vanish,—and all the meanings and values of their traits and fortunes are laid bare to those who see and can understand. There is indeed no other revelation of the complex contents and destinies of humanity in this world so competent as that afforded in dramatic literature and the theatre. For here all is concentrated, heightened, set off, and revealed by aid of the most exquisite contrivances of art of every sort.