o that every listener would know
something of geology, something of astronomy, so that every member
could tell the manner in which they find the distance of a star--
how much better that would be than the old talk about Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, and quotations from Haggai and Zephaniah, and
all this eternal talk about the fall of man and the Garden of Eden,
and the flood, and the atonement, and the wonders of Revelation!
Even if the religious scheme be true, it can be told and understood
as well in one day as in a hundred years. The church says, "He
that hath ears to hear let him hear." I say: "He that hath brains
to think, let him think." So, too, the pulpit is being displaced
by what we call places of amusement, which are really places where
men go because they find there is something which satisfies in a
greater or less degree the hunger of the brain. Never before was
the theatre as popular as it is now. Never before was so much
money lavished upon the stage as now. Very few men having their
choice would go to hear a sermon, especially of the orthodox kind,
when they had a chance to see a great actor.

The man must be a curious combination who would prefer an orthodox
sermon, we will say, to a concert given by Theodore Thomas. And
I may say in passing that I have great respect for Theodore Thomas,
because it was he who first of all opened to the American people
the golden gates of music. He made the American people acquainted
with the great masters, and especially with Wagner, and it is a
debt that we shall always owe him. In this day the opera--that is
to say, music in every form--is tending to displace the pulpit.
The pulpits have to go in partnership with music now. Hundreds of
people have excused themselves to me for going to church, saying
they have splendid music. Long ago the Catholic Church was forced
to go into partnership not only with music, but with painting and
with architecture. The Protestant Church for a long time thought
it could do without these beggarly elements, and the Protestant
Church was simply a dry-goods box with a small steeple on top of
it, its walls as bleak and bare and unpromising as the creed. But
even Protestants have been forced to hire a choir of ungodly people
who happen to have beautiful voices, and they, too, have appealed
to the organ. Music is taking the place of creed, and there is
more real devotional feeling summoned from the temple of the mind
by great mus