# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1898_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1898. 35

and reprehensible. For the theater is not a thing that would subsist by itself, but is in every case something going on concretely, and one must look at what is going on there when a play is performed. We know by now roughly what is wont to go on nowadays when plays are performed. We need only look at the pictures, life-size, that blaze on the board fences in our large cities. One must not say here: That is simply exaggerated; it is not as bad as it looks there. No, it is much worse; for where the play is performed there come in addition the bewitching music, the words and speeches of the actors and actresses, their facial play and their gestures, so that the performance of a play so announced is a far more abominable thing than its announcement, and than it must appear through this announcement. The stage of our time is for the most part an abomination not only before God but also before respectable, decent people, in whom the feeling has not yet been dulled to the point that they no longer sense the morally offensive element which forms the main attraction in these plays. Experience teaches that the so-called decent play is not the rule. People have indeed tried to set up so-called classical theaters, but the attempt has regularly ended in bankruptcy. A business which, through the circumstances regularly attending it, becomes as a rule reprehensible because it violates love toward God and the neighbor is also that of a tavern keeper, a saloon keeper, as it is customarily carried on in this country and in our time as a trade. That one person pours and hands to another, when he is thirsty, a glass of beer is just as little wrong and just as little reprehensible as handing a glass of water, insofar as it is the giving of a drink to someone thirsty. But the business of a saloon keeper nowadays is not as a rule and exclusively the giving of drinks to those who are in need of a drink, but is as a rule, if not in all cases, then still unavoidably in many cases, the giving of a poison to someone who drinks himself to death on it. For when one gives to a drunkard that by whose immoderate enjoyment he is a drunkard, one hands him poison. One must not say: Wine and beer is everywhere wine and beer. No! Coffee is indeed everywhere coffee; but coffee in a cup is a drink, and coffee poured on a white shirt is dirt. For this reason this distinction is surely entirely justified, that we let wine and beer and other spirituous drinks, used according to God's order, count as God's gifts and must seek to keep them from those, in other cases, as a dangerous poison harmful to body and soul, who drink damage, death and damnation upon themselves from them. This distinction, however, a saloon keeper cannot as a rule carry through in his trade. The