Ministers in the Theatre.
By Editor
THE editor of the Sacramento Bee was at the theatre in that city on the evening of the 14th, and saw Christian ministers, and "honored them for being there." Whereupon The People's Cause, of Colusa, says with as much truth as pertinence and force:— "There has been, and there will continue to be, as long as time lasts, a positive and deadly conflict between vice and virtue, right and wrong, the world on the one side and a pure religion on the other; infidelity and deism, as against the teachings of the humble Nazarine. We deny the purity of the drama. The fountain is corrupt and you cannot get pure water from a corrupt fountain. The drama is the product of immoral and irreligious men, in fact no pure minded Christian has ever undertaken the task of writing dramas. There is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and a minister of the gospel who fills the sacred desk on the Sabbath, teaching the grand and sublime truths of the Bible, and on a week-day night seats himself in the theatre to listen to the coinings of imaginative brains, studying character in the delineation of 'Richlieu' or any other picture, has taken that step, and in the eyes of the world has let himself down below the veriest buffoon of modern theatricals. There is not, there cannot be in the very nature of things, a soul-saving clause in any human production. There is no religion in the drama, nothing that will lead man to make that preparation, that will fit and prepare him for Heaven and all that Heaven means. The command given to the apostles over 1800 years ago, is in full force now; 'go preach my gospel to every creature.' Either turn theatres into churches or churches into theatres; let there be one common temple in which to worship."