_Question_. What is your opinion of the progress of the drama in educating the artistic sense of the community as compared with the progress of the church as an educator of the moral sentiment?
_Answer_. Of course, the stage is not all good, nor is--and I say this with becoming modesty--the pulpit all bad. There have been bad actors and there have been good preachers. There has been no improvement in plays since Shakespeare wrote. There has been great improvement in theatres, and the tendency seems to me be toward higher artistic excellence in the presentation of plays. As we become slowly civilized we will constantly demand more artistic excellence. There will always be a class satisfied with the lowest form of dramatic presentation, with coarse wit, with stupid but apparent jokes, and there will always be a class satisfied with almost anything; but the class demanding the highest, the best, will constantly increase in numbers, and the other classes will, in all probability, correspondingly decrease. The church has ceased to be an educator. In an artistic direction it never did anything except in architecture, and that ceased long ago. The followers of to-day are poor copyists. The church has been compelled to be a friend of, or rather to call in the assistance of, music. As a moral teacher, the church always has been and always will be a failure. The pulpit, to use the language of Frederick Douglass, has always "echoed the cry of the street." Take our own history. The church was the friend of slavery. That institution was defended in nearly every pulpit. The Bible was the auction-block on which the slave-mother stood while her child was sold from her arms. The church, for hundreds of years, was the friend and defender of the slave-trade. I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or another. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless. The church preaches the doctrine of forgiveness. This doctrine sells crime on credit. The idea that there is a God who rewards and punishes, and who can reward, if he so wishes, the meanest and vilest of the human race, so that he will be eternally happy, and can punish the best of the human race, so that he will be eternally miserable, is subversive of all morality. Happiness ought to be the result of good actions. Happiness ought to spring from the seed a man sows himself. It ought not to be a reward, it ought to be a consequence, and there ought to be no idea that there is any being who can step between action and consequence. To preach that a man can abuse his wife and children, rob his neighbors, slander his fellow-citizens, and yet, a moment or two before he dies, by repentance become a glorified angel is, in my judgment, immoral. And to preach that a man can be a good man, kind to his wife and children, an honest man, paying his debts, and yet, for the lack of a certain belief, the moment after he is dead, be sent to an eternal prison, is also immoral. So that, according to my opinion, while the church teaches men many good things, it also teaches doctrines subversive of morality. If there were not in the whole world a church, the morality of man, in my judgment, would be the gainer.