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class of the community, many of whom are possessed of good understanding, of learning and imagination, and cannot, without a great breach of charity, be supposed to be actuated by worldliness or hypocrisy.—It is in the nature of man to delight in representations of passion and character. Children, savages, learned and unlearned of every nation, have with more avidity received instruction in this form than in any other, whether offered to them as a mimic show before their eyes, or a supposed story, enlivened by dialogue and addressed to the imagination alone. The blessed Founder of our religion, who knew what was in man, did not contradict nor thwart this propensity of our nature, but, with that sweetness and graciousness which peculiarly belonged to his divine character, made use of it for the instruction of the multitude, as his incomparable parables so beautifully testify. The sins and faults which he reproved were not those that are allied to fancy and imagination, the active assistants of all intellectual improvement, but worldliness, uncharitableness, selfish luxury, spiritual pride, and hypocrisy. In those days, the representation of Greek dramas prevailed in large cities through the whole Roman empire; yet the Apostles only forbade their converts to feast in the temples