all the false; He regards as adultery all that is unreal. Condemning, therefore, as He does hypocrisy in every form, He never will approve any putting on of voice, or sex, or age; He never will approve pretended loves, and wraths, and groans, and tears."1 Both Tertullian and Tatian, however, introduced much of the more strictly Christian teaching. Tertullian admitted that play-houses were made from the fruits of God's handiwork, but denied that the materials were intended for any such use; he admitted that plays were nowhere specifically forbidden in the Scriptures, but showed how contrary they were to the first verse of the Psalms, and to Christ's life and teaching. From this he reasoned that the Roman games were not "consistent with true religion, and true obedience to the true God." Tertullian was speaking to a company of Christians about to draw near to God in worship and communion; consequently his main concern was to prove this utter inconsistency. All public spectacles, in his opinion, were based on idolatry. This was shown not merely by history, but also by the very names of the festivals, and, in the case of circus games, by the images and chariots in the gorgeous processions.3 Hence all were included among those pomps of the Devil renounced by Christians in baptism. No proviso was made in favor of any class of games. Tertullian expressly stated, "It may be grand or mean, no matter, any circus procession whatever is offensive to God. Though there be few images to grace it, there is idolatry in one; though there be no more than a single sacred car, it is a chariot of Jupiter: anything of idolatry whatever, whether meanly arrayed or modestly rich and gorgeous, taints it in its origin." This last clause applied the words to games and exhibitions in general; for unhesitatingly the author affirmed that the theater had "a common origin with the circus," and bore "like idolatrous designations." Thus we see how Christianity, in the days when paganism was still strong in the world, was forced to a position more 3 p. 12-15. * p. 15, 18.

1 p. 30.

2 p. 8.

4

extreme in its condemnation than that of the few isolated pagans who felt the falsity of art.

It was no mere spirit of rivalry between the doctrines of the two religions, no mere sectarianism, that so moved the ane Fathers. Against the vices of paganism Christianity stood s for truth, purity and brotherly love, irreconcilably opposed, therefore, to Rome's scenic exhibitions. They were filled with the grossest impurity, and Tertullian proceeded logically from the idolatry of plays to their moral depravity. Since in the theater, "immodesty's own peculiar abode, where nothing is in repute but what elsewhere is disreputable," the forbidden excitements are roused to the highest pitch in the audience, plays must be evil.1 It is hardly necessary to quote his picture of the obscenity of the Roman stage, since his thought can easily be gained by analysis. If every idle word is forbidden by God, surely the impious words of actors must be almost unpardonable; if it is prohibited under all circumstances to wear woman's garments, then surely the "vileness which the buffoon in woman's clothes exhibits" is an utter abomination; and "if tragedies and comedies are the bloody and wanton, the impious and licentious inventors of crimes and lusts," as he thought them, they must be as evil as the deeds which they devise.2

Tertullian was not one to temporize or trifle with sin. From his principle, "Never and nowhere is that free from blame which God ever condemns; never and nowhere is it right to do what you may not do at all times and in all places," there was possible but one conclusion to the treatise.3 Extreme his position may seem, but amply justified by the world around him; the Puritan heart feels a willingness to sacrifice everything in order that God's will may prevail on earth, and this Tertullian possessed. But lest his conception of the Christian life should seem forbidding, he closed his appeal with a picture of its joys. "If the literature of the stage delight you, we have literature 3 p. 27.

1 p. 24.

2 p. 25.

in abundance of our own. Would you have also fightings and wrestlings? Well, of these there is no lacking, and they are not of slight account. Behold unchastity overcome by chastity, perfidy slain by faithfulness, cruelty stricken by compassion, impudence thrown into the shade by modesty: these are the contests we have among us, and in these we win our crowns. But would you have something of blood too? You have Christ's."1

Thus at the very beginning, the opposition of Christianity to the stage was felt in all its force and completeness. The danger was so apparent and so real that no time was necessary for a slow maturing of sentiment. We have taken the words of Tertullian to represent the general feeling of the church of the second and succeeding centuries against secular games; because he, the father of Christian Latin literature and the Saint Paul of the second century, with his practical wisdom, his evangelical fervor and his earnest piety, exerted such a power on the minds of his successors.

Tertullian's work was carried on in the next century by his loving admirer Cyprian, whose treatise on the public exhibitions, modeled throughout on its predecessor, closed with the same picture of the joys of the Christian life. From that author one passage is well worth quoting. "It is the tragic buskin," he said, "which relates in verse the crimes of ancient days, so that, as the ages pass by, any crime that was formerly committed may not be forgotten."2 Lactantius, in the same century, held as extreme a position as Tertullian. After enumerating the lewd themes of comedy, he asserted: "The more eloquent they are who have composed the accounts of these disgraceful actions, the more do they persuade by the elegance of their sentiments." And from a single passage in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, we see how manifold and how varied were the objections brought against the dramathe waste of time and money involved, the confusion and

1

P. 34.

2

3 Divine Institutes, I, 408; II, 148.

Epistle to Donatus, I, 6–7.

disorder filling the theater, the iniquity arising there from the shameless words and acts of the players and from the close mingling of men and women in the throng.1 Gradually the Fathers had come in the third century to paint more in detail the lusts of the theater.

Thus far the protest had come from a despised sect, having neither social rank nor legal sanction in the community. But after the terrible days of the Diocletian persecution, after the year 312 when Constantine granted to Christianity its first recognition, and removed the burdens from its ministers, the condition of affairs greatly changed. As long as Christians had been outcasts hunted by Roman hirelings, their band was free from cowards and impostors, and their path ran apart from the pagans. But when those dark days passed away, hypocrites crept into the fold, and with them came selfishness and luxury; and as Christians left their seclusion in the catacombs and lived among men, they came into close communication with the pagan society around them. Though their influence, then, was good, on society and legislation, they in turn became tainted by that association, and the weaker ones, tempted once more by the corrupt games, sank back into the old vices from which the new faith had called them. What wonder, then, that in this fourth century the attacks on the theater were redoubled, or that the fervency of the Fathers' warnings increased! More than ever before plays were manifestly the very pomps of the Devil, renounced by Christians in baptism; and any yielding to their siren call was apostacy. We need take at length but two of the Fathers to illustrate the spirit of this time. Augustine pleaded unceasingly against all public spectacles. He records in his Confessions how plays at a critical period of his youth raised in him false and foolish passions, and—a re-echo of Plato-what evil he sustained in school from the study of poetic fictions and from the enforced discipline of reproducing their feigned passion.2 His Soliloquies testify to his sense of

1 The Instructor, III, 326-7.

2 Book III, 1; I. 12-17; also City of God, II, 8.

2

the falseness of a life spent in acting other thoughts and feelings than one's own.1 But his main plea against plays was on the score of idolatry. Although the Christian religion was firmly established when the De Civitate Dei appeared, paganism was still of sufficient strength to strive for a full century later to win back its apostates and to uproot the new faith. Consequently, in the De Civitate Dei the intimate connection of all scenic games with pagan worship is argued to its utmost. They were established at Rome by the gods for their worship, Augustine's argument ran, and had always been used to appease their wrath or to avert disaster. Those gods cared not at all for virtue; rather they encouraged directly all sorts of vice, even in their prescribed worship, and rejoiced at the viciousness of the stage even when it disclosed their own iniquity. Augustine here contrasted the purity of the Christian worship with the depravity of the pagan; and attributed Rome's suffering, not to the new, health-giving religion, as many did, but to the sins of the fêtes in pagan shrines. Such a line of argument led to but one conclusion—a curse in this world, dramatic literature is equally futile for the next, since to rest one's hope of salvation, or to base one's trust in eternal life on the fictions of poets, is madness.

The force of Augustine's position is not in its novelty; he simply reaffirms what Plato and Tertullian had already said. It lies rather in its all-absorbing dread of idolatry, and in its zeal for reform. At the same time, Arnobius was speaking in the vein of Plato against the evil fictions concerning the gods; and Salvian, of playgoing as utterly incompatible with the professions of a Christian. But the other great figure of the century is for us Chrysostom. Through his impassioned homilies to the people, spoken in unveiled language and with detailed description, he reveals, more clearly than do others, the state of moral degradation 1 Soliloquies, II, 16.

4

See I, chap. 32-33; II, 3-14, 20, 27; III, 19; IV, 10, 26, 28; VI, 5–8. 3 Adversus Gentes, p. 217-18.

4 See chapter 4, p. 68 for the English translation of 1581.