all the children, who had ever gone to the edge of a precipice to play, had fallen down and been injured, it would be a necessary prudence in parents to prohibit all such goings in future.  So they conceive it to be only a necessary prudence in morals, to prohibit customs, where the use of them is very generally connected with a censurable abuse.  This case will comprehend music, as practised at the present day, because they believe it to be injurious to health, to occasion a waste of time, to create an emulative disposition, and to give an undue indulgence to sensual feeling.

And as the Quakers conceive this species of argument to be tenable in Christian morals, so they hold it to be absolutely necessary to be adopted in the education of youth.  For grown up persons may have sufficient judgment to distinguish between the use of a thing and its abuse.  They may discern the boundaries of each, and enjoy the one, while they avoid the other.  But youth have no such power of discrimination.  Like inexperienced mariners, they know not where to look for the deep and the shallow water, and, allured by enchanting circumstances, they may, like those who are reported to have been enticed by the voices of the fabulous Syrens, easily overlook the danger, that assuredly awaits them in their course.

CHAP.  IV.  SECT.  I.

The theatre—­the theatre as well as music abused—­plays respectable in their origin—­but degenerated—­Solon, Plato, and the ancient moralists against them—­particularly immoral in England in the time of Charles the second—­forbidden by George Fox—­sentiments of Archbishop Tillotson—­of William Law—­English plays better than formerly, but still objectionable—­prohibition of George Fox continued by the Quakers.

It is much to be lamented that customs, which originated in respectable motives, and which might have been made productive of innocent pleasure, should have been so perverted in time, that the continuation of them should be considered as a grievance by moral men.  As we have seen this to be the case, in some measure, with respect to music, so it is the care with respect to plays.

Dramatic compositions appear to have had no reprehensible origin.  It certainly was an object with the authors of some of the earliest plays to combine the entertainment with the moral improvement of the mind.  Tragedy was at first simply a monody to Bacohus.  But the tragedy of the ancients, from which the modern is derived, did not arise in the world, till the dialogue and the chorus were introduced.  Now the chorus, as every scholar knows, was a moral office.  They who filled it, were loud in their recommendations of justice and temperance.  They inculcated a religious observance of the laws.  They implored punishment on the abandoned.  They were strenuous in their discouragement of vice, and in the promotion of virtue.  This office therefore, being coeval with tragedy itself, preserves it from the charge of an immoral origin.