th 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