Large 12mo. Viewing the action as a slur cast on the whole theatrical profession, Mr. Henry E. Dixey, the well-known actor, offered to give one thousand dollars to charity if it could be shown that actors, man for man, were not as good as ministers of the gospel.
No champion of the cloth appearing to claim Mr. This second challenge was likewise ignored by the clergy and the association which had provoked it, but Mr. Dixey made a few inquiries as to the proportion of ministers to actors among convicts. His research, which was far short of being thorough, discovered 43 ministers and 19 actors in jail. The investigation, so far as the ministers were concerned, could have touched only the fringe of the matter, for in eight months of the year the publishers of this work counted more than seventy reported offenses of preachers for which they were or deserved to be imprisoned, and of course the count included only those cases reported in newspapers that reached the office through an agency which scans only the more important ones.
There had been nothing like a systematic reading of the press of the [ 6 ] country for these cases. Judged by , the clerical convicts in must have far exceeded the number developed by Mr. The clergy assume to be the teachers and guardians of morality, and assert not only that belief in their astonishing creeds is necessary to an upright life, but, by implication, that a profession of faith is in a sense a guarantee of morality.
Now, it is wholly legitimate that systems should be judged by the correspondence between the claims made for them and their actual performances.
When Mrs. Eddy, for an instance, rose up and asserted that Christian Science was the key to health, investigation into the health of persons professing and practicing Christian Science became at once a proper inquiry.
