Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old
prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against
its adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical.
Jeremy Collier in his _Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of
the English Stage_ (1698) takes up quite a different position. This once
famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack
on certain specific qualities of the plays of his time--their indecency
of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism
of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by
the English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not
applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a
good word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's
loftier denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extended
to the whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a school
of concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and
purity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, and
therefore the most equivocal and untrustworthy of teachers. He appeals
to the fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried,
_Woe unto you that laugh_.[347] There is a fine austerity about
Bossuet's energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness,
and so severe without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generation
or two later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.

Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be
an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and not
conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant
menace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought
and idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter. His position is
this: that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary in
itself, while it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habit