It allows no man to pretend to be what he is not.

And it requires great circumspection of its followers with respect to what they may utter, because it makes every man accountable for his idle words.
The Quakers therefore are of opinion, that they cannot as men, either professing christian tenets, or christian love, encourage others to assume false characters, or to [5] personate those which are not their own.
[Footnote 5: Rousseau condemns the stage upon the same principle.

"It is, says he, the art of dissimulation--of assuming a foreign character, and of appearing differently from what a man really is--of flying into a passion without a cause, and of saying what he does not think, as naturally as if he really did--in a word of forgetting himself to personate others."] They object also to the manner of the drama, even where it professes to be a school for morals.

For where it teaches morality, it inculcates rather the refined virtue of heathenism, than the strict, though mild discipline of the gospel.

And where it attempts to extirpate vice, it does it rather by making it ridiculous, than by making men shun it for the love of virtue.