at works of genius,
presenting the height of both esthetic and ethical perfection, has
caused, and is causing, great injury to men.

This injury is twofold: first, the fall of the drama, and the
replacement of this important weapon of progress by an empty and immoral
amusement; and secondly, the direct depravation of men by presenting to
them false models for imitation.

Human life is perfected only through the development of the religious
consciousness, the only element which permanently unites men. The
development of the religious consciousness of men is accomplished
through all the sides of man's spiritual activity. One direction of this
activity is in art. One section of art, perhaps the most influential, is
the drama.

Therefore the drama, in order to deserve the importance attributed to
it, should serve the development of religious consciousness. Such has
the drama always been, and such it was in the Christian world. But upon
the appearance of Protestantism in its broader sense, _i.e._, the
appearance of a new understanding of Christianity as of a teaching of
life, the dramatic art did not find a form corresponding to the new
understanding of Christianity, and the men of the Renaissance were
carried away by the imitation of classical art. This was most natural,
but the tendency was bound to pass, and art had to discover, as indeed
it is now beginning to do, its new form corresponding to the change in
the understanding of Christianity.

But the discovery of this new form was arrested by the teaching arising
among German writers at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the
nineteenth centuries--as to so-called objective art, _i.e._, art
indifferent to good or evil--and therein the exaggerated praise of
Shakespeare's dramas, which partly corresponded to the esthetic teaching
of the Germans, and partly served as material for it. If there had not
been exaggerated praise of Shakespeare's dramas, presenting them as the
most perfect models, the men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
would have had to understand that the drama, to have a right to exist
and to be a serious thing, must serve, as it always has served and can
not but do otherwise, the development of the religious consciousness.
And having understood this, they would have searched for a new form of
drama corresponding to their religious understanding.

But when it was decided that the height of perfection was Shakespeare's
drama, and that we