Those who defend theater-going say that if Christian people would patronize the theater that it would be made more respectable. But over a thousand years of history proves that this principle fails here as it does elsewhere. A Christian woman marries an unchristian man with the hope that he will become a Christian; a steady, sensible woman in all other matters marries a man who drinks, with the thought of reforming him; one associates with worldly and sensual companions, expecting to make them better; but, alas, what blasted hopes, what wretched failures in all of these instances, at least in the most of them! You can not reform vice; you may whitewash a sin, but it will be sin, still. To purify a character or an institution one must not become a part of it by sympathy, nor by association. This is what the psalmist meant when he said, "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsels of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful." And so it is, that every effort at reforming the theater, thus far has failed. The Rev. C.W. Winchester says concerning the reforming of the theater: "The facts are, (1) that the theater in this city and country never had the support and encouragement of moral and religious people it has now; (2) that the theater here was never so bad. Clearly, if Christian patronage is going to reform the theater, the reform ought to begin. But the grade is downward. The theater is growing worse and worse." Dr. Wilkinson makes this statement on the question of reforming the theater: "Now the Protestant Christians of New York number, by recent computation, less than seventy-five thousand souls, in a population of a million. Supposing a general agreement among them all that a regular attendance at the theater was at this juncture the most pressing and most promising method of evangelical effort, they would not then constitute even one-tenth of the numerical patronage which the management would study to please." Dr. Herrick Johnson says: "The ideal stage is out of the question. It is out of the question just as pure, chaste, human nudity is out of the question..The nature of theatrical performances, the essential demands of the stage, the character of the plays, and the constitution of human nature, make it impossible that the theater should exist, save under a law of degeneracy. Its trend is downward; its centuries of history tell just this one story. The actual stage of to-day..is a moral abomination. In Chicago, at least, it is trampling on the Sabbath with defiant scoff. It is defiling our youth. It is making crowds familiar with the play of criminal passions. It is exhibiting women with such approaches to nakedness as can have no other design than to breed lust behind the onlooking eyes. It is furnishing candidates for the brothel. It is getting us used to scenes that rival the voluptuousness and licentious ages of the past." As never before