Intimate as this incident shows Betterton to have been with Dryden, there are others which indicate a closer intimacy of the player with Tillotson. The divine was a man who placed charity above rubrics, and discarded bigotry as he did perukes. He could extend a friendly hand to the benevolent Arian, Firmin, and welcome, even after he entered the archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth, such a visitor as the great actor Betterton. Did objection come from the rigid and ultra-orthodox?--the prelate might have reminded them that it was not so long since a bishop was hanged, and that the player was a far more agreeable and, in every respect, a worthier man than the unlucky diocesan of Waterford. However this may be questioned or conceded, it is indisputable that when Tillotson and Betterton met, the greatest preacher and the greatest player of the day were together. I think, too, that the divine was, in the above respect, somewhat indebted to the actor. We all remember the story how Tillotson was puzzled to account for the circumstance that his friend the actor exercised a vaster power over human sympathies and antipathies than he had hitherto done as a preacher. The reason was plain enough to Thomas Betterton. "You, in the pulpit," said he, "only tell a story: I, on the stage, show facts." Observe, too, what a prettier way this was of putting it than that adopted by Garrick when one of his clerical friends was similarly perplexed. "I account for it in this way," said the latter Roscius: "You deal with facts as if they were fictions; I deal with fictions as if I had faith in them as facts." Again, what Betterton thus remarked to Tillotson was a modest comment, which Colley Cibber has rendered perfect in its application, in the words which tell us that "the most a Vandyke can arrive at is to make his Portraits of Great Persons seem to _think_. A Shakspeare goes farther yet, and tells you _what_ his Pictures thought. A Betterton steps beyond 'em both, and calls them from the grave, to breathe and be themselves again in Feature, Speech, and Motion." That Tillotson profited by the comment of Betterton--more gracefully than Bossuet did by the actors, whom he consigned, as such, to the nethermost Gehenna--is the more easily to be believed, from the fact that he introduced into the pulpit the custom of preaching from notes. Thenceforth, he left off "telling his story," as from a book, and, having action at command, could the nearer approach to the "acting of facts."