all the time? Do you know that the most
orthodox people in this town today, three hundred years ago would have
been burned for heresy? Do you know some ministers who denounce me
would have been in the Inquisition themselves two hundred years ago?
Do you know where once burned and blazed the bivouac fires of the army
of progress, the altars of the church glow today? Do you know that the
church today occupies about the same ground that unbelievers did one
hundred years ago? Do you know that while they have followed this army
of progress, protesting and denouncing, they have had to keep within
protesting and denouncing distance, but they have followed it? They
have been the men, let me say, in the valley; the men in swamps,
shouting to and cursing the pioneers on the hills; the men upon whose
forehead was the light of the coming dawn, the coming day--but they
have advanced. In spite of themselves, they have advanced! If they had
not, I would not speak here to night. If they had not, not a solitary
one of you could have expressed your real and honest thought. But we
are advancing, and we are beginning to hold all kinds of slavery in
utter contempt; do you know that? And we are beginning to question
wealth and power; we are questioning all creeds and all dogmas; and we
are not bowing down, as we used to, to a man simply because he is in
the robe of a clergyman, and we are not bowing down to a man now simply
because he is a king. No! We are not bowing down simply because he is
rich. We used to worship the golden calves, but we do not now. The
worst you can say of an American, is, he worships the gold of the calf,
not the calf; and even the calves are beginning to see this distinction.

It no longer fills the ambition of a man to be emperor or king. The
last Napoleon was not satisfied with being Emperor of the French; he
was not satisfied with having a circlet of gold about his head; he
wanted some evidence that he had something within his head, so he wrote
the life of Julius Caesar, that he might become a member of the French
Academy. Compare, for instance, in the German Empire, King William and
Bismarck. King William is the one anointed of the most high, as they
claim--the one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of
authority. Compare him with Bismarck, who towers, an intellectual
Colossus, above this man. Go into England and compare George Eliot
with Queen Victoria--Queen Victoria, clothed in th