him amuse. But if he does not amuse, or if he
wear out his welcome, away with him. In the history of our own
civilization, as our ideals go, there was one divine incarnation of
spiritual and intellectual life that struggled through the tears,
blood and dirt of existence without one stain upon the purity of his
nature. This essence was a beacon light that has shone steadily
through nearly two thousand years. And Him the officialism of human
nature, in exaltation of savage contempt, nailed upon a cross, and set
up for an ominous warning to the whole world. It had already marked
the noble Socrates, and, like Cleopatra to her slave, handed him a cup
of poison. It was afterward to compel Gallileo to swallow in shame and
agony his testimony to unalterable truth. Even in this year, under the
title of a great church, it has, with pitiless persistence, forced a
great student and educator, not to deny a historical fact that he had
discovered, but to humbly regret its promulgation. As if the
concealment of a truth for your advantage in moral controversy were
not a greater crime than the concealment of a murderer for pay!
Whenever this officialism has concluded to amuse itself with spiritual
inquiries in the name of religious controversies, it has conducted
them with fire and the sword, with thumbscrews and the boot, and all
manner of ingenious ferocity.

The officialism of public opinion has always been ready to serve the
demands of the base nature below. It was the great lawgiver, Lycurgus,
who taught Spartan youths the commercial economy of theft and the
virtue and advantage of lying. It was not only when Rome was in decay,
but when she was at the zenith of glory from the first Brutus to
Octavius, when Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, Horace, and the Plinys lived at
the seat of the knowledge, wealth, art and power of the world, that
women crowded the colosseums to feast their senses upon the ferocity
of tigers and give the death signal to the gladiator who charmed by
his fatal skill. It was while Shakespeare lived that English gentlemen
and mothers apprenticed their sons to the trade of piracy. In our own
century and country we have seen Abraham Lincoln, the liberator,
himself, enlist under the flag of official public opinion to strike a
blow in the extermination of red Indians who had committed the
unpardonable crime of owning their own land whereon we are assembled
to-day.

The fashions of lust and cruelty may change with the amuseme