human
but it can only remind us that there is a cant of the play-house as well as of the conventicle, and that Shaftsbury and his sentimental followers can
gpt
as well as Whitfield and Beecher. The common sense of mankind pronounces it at once the worst of all hypocrisies--the hypocrisy of false sentiment ashamed of its real name and real character. As a proof of this, we may say that the stage has never been known in any language by any epithet denoting instruction, either moral or otherwise. It is the _play-house_, or house of amusement--the _theatrum_, the place for shows, for spectacles, for pleasurable emotions through the senses and the excitements of the sensitive nature. There may have been periods when moral or religious instruction of some kind could, perhaps, have been claimed as one end of dramatic representations, but that was before there was a higher stage, a higher _pulpitum_ divinely instituted for the moral tuition of mankind. Since that time, the very profanity of the claim to be a