devotion in a white-washed Quaker meeting-house, void of ornamentation, than in the mere emotioneliciting temple, "with storied urn and animated bust," dim religious light, and music redolent of celestial harmonies "accompanied with beguiling shadows of the Infinite," which are often but distractions interposing between the worshiper and God.

This does not necessarily condemn imposing buildings, for we ourselves are as much impressed with the inherent dignity and sublimity of stately structures as the Puritans, Milton and Cromwell, were. Yet with Islam, too, we feel that any place clean enough to spread a carpet may become a temple, and we deny that the absence of great churches is a sign of moral or religious deterioration any more than their presence implies the opposite.

CHAPTER VIII

OR take the theater of to-day, which is said to reflect our moral decline, with its plays of evil import and suggestion. And bad enough they are, some of them, according to Joe Jefferson's "bon mot," to bring a blush of shame to the cheek of a brass monkey. But even they have their limitations, and, as a rule they are not patronized, after being discovered, by even the best of our merely fashionable people. But morally noxious as many of them are, how much better are they than the performances which preceded them before the Reformation of the "wicked Luther whose teachings led to death!" These were commonly so bad that Justinian in his Code made it a ground for divorce, a vinculo matrimonii, for a woman to attend one of them.

Theatricals were so reprehensible in the fourteenth century that both church and state were compelled to prohibit them. And to know how vicious the plays of this century were, you would need to know how supremely disorderly were the people who thought them too gross for stage publicity. The prohibition was soon evaded, however, by the performance of scenes dramatized from the Bible,-"moralities," cunningly so called, like our "Sacred (Sunday) Concerts," consisting of selections from the comic operas, with an

occasional hymn added. For they were not all by any means equal to "Everyman."

Coarseness was but half the name for the low buffoonery which went under the name of "moralities." As having anything to do with morality or literature they are not worth the paper on which they are printed, and are hardly read to-day except by specialists in letters. Most of them were merely strings to arrange beads of lewdness and indecency upon. The devil is nearly always given an important part in these performances — just that there might be an opportunity for the exhibition of all sorts of outrages upon respectability.

His majesty was expected to be prolific in evil suggestion, as an essential part of his character, and he never disappointed his admirers. This was not to tickle the ear of the groundlings, remember, or the vulgar, as with us, but to please the blooded aristocracy. Nothing was too scandalous for these exhibitions, and the idea seemed to be to crowd as much suggestion of sensuality and vice into dramatic performances as possible.

Scarcely an incident of life," says a well-known authority on the subject, “was too indecent to be portrayed or described; and if the latter, the description was given in the most undisguised language. It is almost impossible to describe scenes of this nature. Women were made to go through the pains of childbed on the stage; husbands and wives undressed and went to bed in the presence of the public, and the fact

was associated with the coarsest ribaldry. And when modesty prompted the actors to leave the stage a colleague always explained why they had retired and what they were doing behind the curtain."

The occasional low acts and performances that disgrace the stage to-day are examples of lofty refinement in comparison with what was common on the stage in the Middle Ages. To-day even many prominent vaudeville managements issue printed directions to the performers who take part in the entertainments to avoid unbecoming allusion or suggestions on pain of instant dismissal.

During the reigns of Henry III in France and Charles II in England women began to appear on the stage, and bad farces, more indecorous than the old "moralities," became popular. Many of La Fontaine's most artistic but shocking pruriencies were taken from farces, which, incredible as it may seem, were once acted with elaborate pantomime before the court and the ladies of the élite of Paris. And these unspeakable abominations were merely, in the polite language of the day, called grivois,—that is, jovial, merry, jolly, brisk. It was customary in those days for the star actor to speak at every performance a Prologue, or Interlude, crowded with every impropriety of speech or gesture. The very titles of these vile compositions are so libidinous that we decline to pollute our pen by transcribing them. We may be permitted to give just one guarded title. Uter vir aut mulier se

magis delectit in copulatione is the name of one of the

prologues that were popular. This implies their general character.

They all have to do with the desecration of marriage and with atrocious discrepancies of the sexes. Yet we are assured by shallow impertinence, gross ignorance, and pompous ethical pretense that we are morally deteriorating from the standards of the past, because of our not having accepted, as all these had, the Catholic doctrine of marriage as one of the seven sacraments.

The plays in the old days were so licentious that women never attended a theatrical representation except in masks, and it was as much as even a maid of honor's reputation was worth, bad as they were known to be in the way as it was significantly said of "gallantry," for it to be discovered that she had attended a play in a theater. And during the Restoration in England, which was just a return to the uncleanness of former times, after the removal of Puritan restraint, it may be seen by any one caring to read the often disgusting but sometimes witty things then produced that the majority of the plots of such plays were so arranged as to present the "primrose" and easiest way to double entente. And grossly immodest acting and insinuation were the consequence.

The general character of the times and of the theater before the Reformation may be gathered from the fact that the hero of one of the most popular of their dramatic productions is represented as being surrounded by six unfortunate women, whose ruin he had effected, and as being dunned for arrearage in wages