WITH drunkenness, gambling, and dancing, theater-going dates from the beginning of history, and with these it is not only questionable in morals, but it is positively bad. Every one who knows any thing about the institution of the theater, as such, knows that it always has been corrupting in its influence. Not only those who attend the theater pronounce it bad, as a whole, but it is frowned upon by play-writers, and by actors and actresses themselves. Five hundred years before Christ, Jew, Pagan, and Christian spoke against the theater. It is stated on good authority that the dissipations of the theater were the chief cause of the decadence of ancient Greece. At one time, Augustus, the emperor of Rome, was asked as a means of public safety, to suppress the theater. The early Christians held the theater in such bad repute as to rank it with the heathen temple. And to these two places they would not go, even to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ. Nor has the moral tone and character of the theater improved, even in our day. Dr. Theodore Cuyler, for many years an experienced pastor in Brooklyn, Says: "The American theater is a concrete institution, to be judged as a totality. It is responsible for what it tolerates and shelters. We, therefore, hold it responsible for whatever of sensual impurity and whatever of irreligion, as well as for whatever of occasional and sporadic benefit there may be bound up in its organic life. Instead of helping Christ's kingdom, it hinders; instead of saving souls, it corrupts and destroys." Dr. Buckley gives this testimony: "Being aware of the fact that the drama, like every thing else which caters to the taste, has its fashions--rising and falling and undergoing various changes--now improving, and then degenerating, I have thought it desirable to institute a careful inquiry into the plays which have been performed in the principal theaters of New York during the past three years. Accordingly, I procured the copies used by the performers in preparing for their parts, and took pains to ascertain wherein, in actual use, the actors diverged from the printed copies. They number over sixty, and, with the exception of a few unprinted plays, include all that have been produced in the prominent theaters of New York during the three years now about closing..It is a singular fact, that, with three or four exceptions, those dramatic compositions, among the sixty or more under discussion, which are morally objectionable, are of a comparatively low order of literary execution. But if language and sentiments, which would not be tolerated among respectable people, and would excite indignation if addressed to the most uncultivated and coarse servant girl, not openly vicious, by an ordinary young man, and profaneness which would brand him who uttered it as irreligious, are improper amusements for the young and for Christians of every age, then at least fifty of these plays are to be condemned."