le of righteousness and peace, read and believed and honored
by all men.

"Some time ago a gentleman teaching a large class of young men in a
Chicago Sunday-school, desired to attend a theater for the purpose of
seeing a celebrated actor. He was not a theater-goer, and thought that
no harm could come from it. He had no sooner taken his seat, however,
than he saw in the opposite gallery some of the members of his class.
They also saw him and began commenting on the fact that their teacher
was at the theater. They thought it inconsistent in him, lost their
interest in the class, and he lost his influence over the young men.
That teacher tied his hands by this one act, so that he could not speak
out against the gross sins of the theater."

Those who defend theater-going say that if Christian people would
patronize the theater that it would be made more respectable. But over
a thousand years of history proves that this principle fails here as it
does elsewhere. A Christian woman marries an unchristian man with the
hope that he will become a Christian; a steady, sensible woman in all
other matters marries a man who drinks, with the thought of reforming
him; one associates with worldly and sensual companions, expecting to
make them better; but, alas, what blasted hopes, what wretched failures
in all of these instances, at least in the most of them! You can not
reform vice; you may whitewash a sin, but it will be sin, still. To
purify a character or an institution one must not become a part of it
by sympathy, nor by association. This is what the psalmist meant when
he said, "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsels of the
ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of
the scornful." And so it is, that every effort at reforming the theater,
thus far has failed. The Rev. C.W. Winchester says concerning the
reforming of the theater: "The facts are, (1) that the theater in this
city and country never had the support and encouragement of moral and
religious people it has now; (2) that the theater here was never so
bad. Clearly, if Christian patronage is going to reform the theater, the
reform ought to begin. But the grade is downward. The theater is growing
worse and worse." Dr. Wilkinson makes this statement on the question
of reforming the theater: "Now the Protestant Christians of New York
number, by recent computation, less than seventy-five thousand souls, in
a population of a million. Supp