The following item, published in a recent paper, has been brought to our notice by a friend. It leads us to inquire, Who has changed, Mr. Collier, the theater, or hell? “Rev. Laird Collier, who has become famous since he was a ‘shouting Methodist’ in Davenport, twenty odd years ago, said recently in a sermon on the drama, preached before the members of the Bradford (England), Mechanics’ Institute: ‘To see Mr. Jefferson as “Rip Van Winkle” is a means of grace; it is better than a prayer-meeting.’ When Collier lived in Davenport, he told a young man, now a prominent merchant of that city, that ‘you might as well go to hell at once as to go to the theater!’” And here is another paragraph published in connection with the foregoing, which shows how the pulpit is turning drummer for the theater:— “Mr. Haweis, a leading London Episcopalian parson of the Broad Church type, has lately preached a striking sermon on the drama, in which he said: ‘Though the teaching may not be direct, no picture of human life can fail to be instructive, and the dramatist and actors are both responsible for impressions made. How incalculable for good and evil are these indirect teachings of the stage. How often a man has sat quietly and seen his own mean life sifted before his eyes—seen the Nemesis fall which was awaiting the close of his own career—watched tendencies in himself played out to the bitter end,—and paused. There are sermons preached before the footlights which go home, where the pulpit is unheard or unheeded.’” We think the church which will advocate such sentiments as the foregoing may well be styled “broad” church; so broad that there is no visible distinction between it and that “broad way” pointed out by Christ “which leadeth to destruction.” If the minister, in speaking of the teachings of the stage as being “incalculable for good and evil,” had left out the good and let it rest wholly on the evil, he would have been nearer right. In view of such teaching as this, can any one doubt that a wonderful change has taken place in the professedly religious world, both in teachers and people, within the last thirty years? When the church preaches what the world practices, where is the difference between the two? But the deplorable fact revealed is that all the change has been on the part of the church. The world has not changed. It has not come up to higher ground; but the church has gone down to vastly lower. Was, then, the founding of the Christian church a mistake? and have all its efforts to live above the world sprung simply from fanaticism, superstition, and bigotry?