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    both should be sinful , they yet must needs belong to very different classes and degrees of crime . The gambler is a knave , who covets and purposes to appropriate his neighbour ' s money . That

    guilt is essential to the action ; while it has many incidental aggravations , varying according to circumstances . Now the purpose of the playgoer is not , necessarily , to plunder anybody , or to inflict any other kind of injury upon anybody ; he goes to witness the recitation of poetical , witty , humorous , or pathetic

    composition , by persons dressed in appropriate costume , using appropriate gesture , and surrounded by mimic paintings of appropriate scenery . In this it is difficult to perceive any sinfulness ; nor is it usually alleged that there is any . The censure is directed to the supposed character of actors in general , the consumption of time , the excitement , the lateness of the hours , the miscellaneous description of the audience , &c . ; that is , to the circumstances , and not the essentials , of the action . Accordingly

    many professors of religion , in different denominations—many ministers even—and we know the fact of more orthodox than Unitarian ones—have been occasionally seen ' entering the portals of a theatre , ' who were as incapable of gambling as of felony . There should at least be a classification of the accused . The

    worst offence , of the detection of which we are sure , would perhaps be amongst those who are called evangelical , that of hypocritical concealment occasioned by the vehement denunciations of the anti-dramatists . The opinion of a party , like the law of a country , sometimes creates an undoubted crime in the violent attempt to suppress one which is only questionable . In the metropolis , where chiefly the theatre has any very strong

    attraction , it may safely be predicted of educated families that their young people—not only the young Unitarian , but the young churchman , the young calvinist , the young quaker , and quakeress too—will some time or other , when opportunity offers , peep within those portals . Let their seniors consider what is best to be done ; let them beware of creating temptations to insincerity ; and let them not confound the absence of desire or enjoyment with moral

    condemnation . There is an application of the parable of Nathan , in page 93 , which is objectionable because the logical failure injures the effect of the exhortation . ' In what does the despotic head of a family differ from the despotic head of a state , except that his power is

    more limited ? yet , perhaps , he is the loudest in condemning acts of kingly tyranny , suspecting neither that he thereby condemns himself , nor that he would doubtless be the perpetrator of the same acts , were his fellow-despot and he to exchange situations . ' The preacher has reversed the course which Nathan employed with David . He , by exciting the monarch ' s anger for the lesser offence , inspired him with self-abhorrence for the greater offence which he had committed * Such is the unhappy peculiarity of

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    84 Beard ' s Family Sermons .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1832, page 84, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1806/page/12/