What woman, tinctured with the play-house morals, would not be the sprightly, the witty, though dissolute Lady Townley, rather than the cold, the sober, though virtuous Lady Grace?
How odious ought writers to be who thus employ the talents they have from their maker most traitorously against himself, by endeavouring to corrupt and disfigure his creatures! If the comedies of Congreve did not rack him with remorse in his last moments, he must have been lost to all sense of virtue." SECT.

IV.
_The theatre forbidden--because injurious to the happiness of man by disqualifying him for the pleasures of religion--this effect arises from its tendency to accustom individuals to light thoughts--to injure their moral feelings--to occasion an extraordinary excitement of the mind--and from the very nature of the enjoyments which it produces._ As the Quakers consider the theatre to have an injurious effect on the morality of man, so they consider it to have an injurious effect on his happiness.

They believe that amusements of this sort, but particularly the comic, unfit the mind for the practical performance of the christian duties, and that as the most pure and substantial happiness, that man can experience, is derived from a fulfilment of these, so they deprive him of the highest enjoyment of which his nature is capable, that is, of the pleasures of religion.
If a man were asked, on entering the door of the theatre, if he went there to learn the moral duties, he would laugh at the absurdity of the question; and if he would consent to give a fair and direct answer, he would either reply, that he went there for amusement, or to dissipate gloom, or to be made merry.

Some one of these expressions would probably characterise his errand there.

Now this answer would comprise the effect, which the Quakers attach to the comic performances of the stage.
They consider them as drawing the mind from serious reflection, and disposing it to levity.