Applauding a _Vitious_ Play; yet, will that exempt him from a Share of that _Guilt_ which his Presence and Purse has help'd to support? No, _Madam_, 'tis _Numbers_ strengthen the Enemy, and give fresh Courage to his Attempts! A _Full_ House is the very _Life_ of the Stage, and keeps it in Countenance, whereas _thin Audiences_ would, in time, make it dwindle to nothing. I know, _Madam_, this is strange Doctrine to some People. If a Man talks to them of leaving the Plays, they wonder what he means, and are ready to take him for a Madman. They have so long habituated themselves to the _Play-Houses_, that they begin to think a _Place_ there, to be part of their _Birth-Right_: But I desire such would be perswaded to hear what the late A. B. Tillotson thought of these matters, (and I hope some Deference is due to his Judgment). If they look into the 11th Volume of his 'Sermons', they will find that in his Discourse against the _Evil of Corrupt Communication_, he tells them, _That Plays, as the Stage now is, are intolerable, and not fit to be permitted in a Civiliz'd, much less in a Christian Nation, They do most notoriously minister_, says he, _both to Infidelity and Vice. By the Prophaneness of them they are apt to instil bad Principles into the Minds of Men, and to lessen that Awe, and Reverence which all Men ought to have for God and Religion: and by their Lewdness they teach Vice, and art apt to infect the Minds of Men, and dispose them to Lewd and Dissolute Practices. And therefore_, says he, _I do not see how any Person pretending to Sobriety and Virtue, and especially to the pure and holy Religion of our Blessed Saviour; can, without great Guilt and open Contradiction to his Holy Profession, be present at such Lewd and Immodest Plays, much less frequent them, as too many do, who would yet take it very ill to be shut out of the Communion of Christians, as they would most certainly have been in the first and purest Ages of Christianity._