men must come to us; actors and such are obstacles to moral progress.”  Pray look at the thing reasonably a moment, laying aside all biases of education and custom.  If a common public impression is fair evidence of a thing then this minister’s legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people calmly, coldly, and in stiff, written sentences, from the pulpit, to go and do right, be just, be merciful, be charitable.  And his congregation forget it all between church and home.  But for fifty years it was George Holland’s business on the stage to make his audience go and do right, and be just, merciful, and charitable—­because by his living, breathing, feeling pictures he showed them what it was to do these things, and how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward!  Is it not a singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman who is so poorly informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban, and say, “I do not think it teaches moral lessons”?  Where was ever a sermon preached that could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of “King Lear”?  Or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy as the sinful play of “Othello”?  And where are there ten preachers who can stand in the pulpit preaching heroism, unselfish devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of five hundred William Tells that can be raised upon five hundred stages in the land at a day’s notice?  It is almost fair and just to aver (although it is profanity) that nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the American people today got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and not from the drowsy pulpit.

All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of Jesus Christ, and many creatures, and of divers sorts, were doubtless appointed to disseminate it; and let us believe that this seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the sower’s garment; and that whosoever, in his way and according to his opportunity, sows the one and produces the other, has done high service and worthy.  And further, let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever old simple-hearted George Holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men’s hearts, it was just as acceptable before the Throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable Sabine himself.

Am I saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating the marrow, the meat of the gospel of Christ? (For we are not talking of ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of what is pretty often only a specter.)