element in it, religion acts
mostly on the senses; she loses her sway if the senses are gone. By what
channel does the stage operate? To most men religion vanishes with the
loss of her symbols, images, and problems; and yet they are only pictures
of the imagination, and insolvable problems. Both laws and religion are
strengthened by a union with the stage, where virtue and vice, joy and
sorrow, are thoroughly displayed in a truthful and popular way; where a
variety of providential problems are solved; where all secrets are
unmasked, all artifice ends, and truth alone is the judge, as
incorruptible as Rhadamanthus.

Where the influence of civil laws ends that of the stage begins. Where
venality and corruption blind and bias justice and judgment, and
intimidation perverts its ends, the stage seizes the sword and scales and
pronounces a terrible verdict on vice. The fields of fancy and of
history are open to the stage; great criminals of the past live over
again in the drama, and thus benefit an indignant posterity. They pass
before us as empty shadows of their age, and we heap curses on their
memory while we enjoy on the stage the very horror of their crimes. When
morality is no more taught, religion no longer received, or laws exist,
Medea would still terrify us with her infanticide. The sight of Lady
Macbeth, while it makes us shudder, will also make us rejoice in a good
conscience, when we see her, the sleep-walker, washing her hands and
seeking to destroy the awful smell of murder. Sight is always more
powerful to man than description; hence the stage acts more powerfully
than morality or law.

But in this the stage only aids justice. A far wider field is really
open to it. There are a thousand vices unnoticed by human justice, but
condemned by the stage; so, also, a thousand virtues overlooked by man's
laws are honored on the stage. It is thus the handmaid of religion and
philosophy. From these pure sources it draws its high principles and the
exalted teachings, and presents them in a lovely form. The soul swells
with noblest emotions when a divine ideal is placed before it. When
Augustus offers his forgiving hand to Cinna, the conspirator, and says to
him: "Let us be friends, Cinna!" what man at the moment does not feel
that he could do the same. Again, when Francis von Sickingen, proceeding
to punish a prince and redress a stranger, on turning sees the house,
where his wife and children are, in flames, and yet go