We go to entertainments, such as the theatre—I say ‘we’, for _I_ also go to the play, whenever I get a chance of seeing a really good one—and keep at arm’s length, if possible, the thought that we may not return alive. Yet how do you know—dear friend, whose patience has carried you through this garrulous preface—that it may not be _your_ lot, when mirth is fastest and most furious, to feel the sharp pang, or the deadly faintness, which heralds the final crisis—to see, with vague wonder, anxious friends bending over you—to hear their troubled whispers—perhaps yourself to shape the question, with trembling lips, “Is it serious?”, and to be told “Yes: the end is near” (and oh, how different all Life will look when those words are said!)—how do you know, I say, that all this may not happen to _you_, this night? And _dare_ you, knowing this, say to yourself “Well, perhaps it _is_ an immoral play: perhaps the situations _are_ a little too ‘risky’, the dialogue a little too strong, the ‘business’ a little too suggestive. I don’t say that conscience is _quite_ easy: but the piece is so clever, I must see it this once! I’ll begin a stricter life to-morrow.” _To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow!_ “Who sins in hope, who, sinning, says, ‘Sorrow for sin God’s judgement stays!’ Against God’s Spirit he lies; quite stops Mercy with insult; dares, and drops, Like a scorch’d fly, that spins in vain Upon the axis of its pain, Then takes its doom, to limp and crawl, Blind and forgot, from fall to fall.” Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death—if calmly realised, and steadily faced—would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for _you_, a special horror when imagined as happening in a _theatre_, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for _you_, however harmless it may be for others; and that _you_ are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to _live_ in any scene in which we dare not _die_. But, once realise what the true object _is_ in life—that it is _not_ pleasure, _not_ knowledge, _not_ even fame itself, ‘that last infirmity of noble minds’—but that it _is_ the development of _character_, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect _Man_—and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!