But when the early christians abandoned the theatre, they abandoned it, as the Quakers contend, not because, leaving Paganism they were to relinquish all customs that were Pagan, but because they saw in their new religion, or because they saw in this newness of their minds, reasons, which held out such amusements to be inadmissible, while they considered themselves in the light of christians. These reasons are sufficiently displayed by the writers of the second, third, and fourth centuries; and as they are alluded to by the Quakers, though never quoted, I shall give them to the reader. He will judge by these, how far the ancient coincide with the modern christians upon this subject; and how for these arguments of antiquity are applicable to modern times.
The early christians, according to Tertullian, Menucius Felix, Cyprian, Lactantius, and others, believed, that the "motives for going to these amusements were not of the purest sort. People went to them without any view of the improvement of their minds. The motive was either to see or to be seen."
They considered the manner of the drama as objectionable. They believed "that he who was the author of truth, could never approve of that which was false, and that he, who condemned hypocrisy, could never approve of him, who personated the character of others; and that those therefore, who pretended to be in love, or to be angry, or to grieve, when none of those passions existed in their minds, were guilty of a kind of adultery in the eyes of the Supreme Being."
They considered their contents to be noxious. They "looked upon them as consistories of immorality. They affirmed that things were spoken there which it did not become christians to hear, and that things were shewn there, which it did not become christians to see; and that, while these things polluted those from whom they come, they polluted those in time, in whose sight and hearing they were shewn or spoken."
They believed also, "that these things not only polluted the spectators, but that the representations of certain characters upon the stage pointed out to them the various roads to vice, and inclined them to become the persons, whom they had seen represented, or to be actors in reality of what they had seen feigned upon the stage."