human being on an equality, to sweep away the clouds of
superstition, to make people think more of what happens today than what
somebody said happened 3,000 years ago. This is all I want: To do
what little I can to clutch one-seventh of our time from superstition,
to give our Sundays to rest and recreation. I want a day of enjoyment,
a day to read old books, to meet old friends, and get acquainted with
one's wife and children. I want a day to gather strength to meet the
toils of the next. I want to get that day away from the church, away
from superstition and the contemplation of hell, to be the best and
sweetest and brightest of all the days in the week. The best way to
make a day sacred is to fill it up with useful labor. That day is best
on which most good is done for the human race. I hope to see the time
when we'll have a day for the opera, the play--good plays--for they do
good. You never saw the villain foiled in a play where the audience
did not applaud. You never saw them applaud when the rascal was
successful in his villainy. If you could go to a theater and see put
upon the stage the scenes of the old testament, with its butcheries and
rapes and deeds of violence, you would detest it all the days of your
life. I'd like to have every horror of the old testament set on this
stage, to have somebody represent the being as he is represented there,
giving his brutal orders, and let the orthodox see their God as he
really is.

I want to have us all do what little we can to secularize this
government--take it from the control of savagery and give it to
science, take it from the government of the past and give it to the
enlightened present, and in this government let us uphold every man and
woman in their rights, that everyone, after he or she comes to the age
of discretion, may have a choice in the affairs of the nation.

Do this, and we'll grow in grandeur and splendor every day, and the
time will come when every man and every woman shall have the same
rights as every other man and every other woman has. I believe, we are
growing better. I don't believe the wail of want shall be heard
forever; that the prison and gallows will always curse the ground. The
time will come when liberty and law and love, like the rings of Saturn,
will surround the world; when the world will cease making these
mistakes; when every man will be judged according to his worth and
intelligence. I want to do all I can to hasten