To enter into and appropriate the states and prerogatives of those happier, greater, and better than we, either for an admiring estimate of them, for the enrichment of ourselves, or for the free play of desirable spiritual qualities, is at once recreation, luxury, redemption, and education. This is the highest application of the dramatic principle, the mending of the characters of men with the characters of superior men. And it tends to the reconciliation and attuning of all the world. This is the principle which Paul illustrates in his doctrine that true circumcision is not of the flesh but of the soul, and that the genuine children of Abraham are the new race of spiritual characters which, reproducing his type of faith and conduct, will supersede his mere material descendants. He also says that those who measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves among themselves are not wise. The complement of this statement would be that we should compare ourselves with all sorts of people, that we may put off every imperfection of our own and put on every perfection of theirs. And the same apostle gives this principle its supremest application in his immortal text, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” The Pauline formula for the salvation of the world embodies the regenerating essence of the dramatic art, which is the assimilation by less divine characters of a more divine one, raising them into fellowship with the Divinest. It calls on all men to “behold with open face, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord,” and gaze on it until “they are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, by the Spirit of the Lord.” In distinction from this high use of the dramatic life and spirit, the fault of the ordinary range of coarse and careless men is the utter absence of all vital sympathetic insight. Fixed in the grooves of habit, shut up in their own hard and narrow type, they move stolidly among other men, insensible to the treasures they contain, giving and taking no more than so many sticks would. And in some who have a fair share of the dramatic instinct it suffers a direct inversion of its purest office. For the weak and reckless allow themselves to be degraded to the level of the worst characters they behold, adopt their customs, assume their traits, copy their vices, and repeat their retributive ruin. The man of moral earnestness is warned and armed by a dramatic knowledge of the profligate and criminal. Only the impure or heedless idler will be led astray by it.