The idea that there is any God that hates to hear a child laugh! Let
your children play games on Sunday. Here is a poor man that hasn't
money enough to go to a big church and he has too much independence to
go to a little church that the big church built for charity. He
doesn't want to slide into Heaven that way. I tell you don't come to
church, but go to the woods and take your family and a lunch with you,
and sit down upon the old log and let the children gather flowers and
hear the leaves whispering poems like memories of long ago, and when
the sun is about going down, kissing the summits of far hills, go home
with your hearts filled with throbs of joy. There is more recreation
and joy in that than going to a dry goods box with a steeple on top of
it and hearing a man tell you that your chances are about ninety-nine
to one for being eternally damned. Let us make this Sunday a day of
splendid pleasure, not to excess, but to everything that makes man
purer and grander and nobler. I would like to see now something like
this: Instead of so many churches, a vast cathedral that would hold
twenty or thirty thousands of people, and I would like to see an opera
produced in it that would make the souls of men have higher and grander
and nobler aims. I would like to see the walls covered with pictures
and the niches rich with statuary; I would like to see something put
there that you could use in this world now, and I do not believe in
sacrificing the present to the future; I do not believe in drinking
skimmed milk here with the promise of butter beyond the clouds. Space
or time can not be holy any more than a vacuum can be pious. Not a
bit, not a bit; and no day can be so holy but what the laugh of a child
will make it holier still.
Strike with hand of fire, on, weird musician, thy harp, strung with
Apollo's golden hair! Fill the vast cathedral aisles with symphonies
sweet and dim, deft toucher of the organ's keys; blow, bugler, blow
until thy silver notes do touch and kiss the moonlit waves, and charm
the lovers wandering 'mid the vine-clad hills. But know your sweetest
strains are discords all compared with childhood's happy laugh--the
laugh that fills the eyes with light and every heart with joy! O,
rippling river of laughter, thou art the blessed boundary line between
the beasts and men, and every wayward wave of thine doth drown some
fretful fiend of care. O Laughter, rose lipped daughter of joy, there
are dimples enough in thy cheeks to catch and hold and glorify all the
tears of grief.
Don't plant your children in long, straight rows like posts. Let them
have light and air and let them grow beautiful as palms. When I was a
little boy children went to bed when they were not sleepy, and always
got up when they were. I would like to see that changed, but they say
we are too poor, some of us, to do it. Well, all right. It is as easy
to wake a child with a kiss as with a blow; with kindness as with
curse. And, another thing; let the children eat what they want to. Let
them commence at whichever end of the dinner they desire. That is my
doctrine. They know what they want much better than you do. Nature is
a great deal smarter than you ever were.
All the advance that has been made in the science of medicine, has been
made by the recklessness of patients. I can recollect when they
wouldn't give a man water in a fever--not a drop. Now and then some
fellow would get so thirsty he would say "Well, I'll die any way, so
I'll drink it," and thereupon he would drink a gallon of water, and
thereupon he would burst into a generous perspiration, and get
well--and the next morning when the doctor would come to see him they
would tell him about the man drinking the water, and he would say:
"How much?"
"Well, he swallowed two pitchers full."
"Is he alive?"
"Yes."
So they would go into the room and the doctor would feel his pulse and
ask him:
"Did you drink two pitchers of water?"
"Yes."
"My God! what a constitution you have got."
I tell you there is something splendid in man that will not always
mind. Why, if we had done as the kings told us five hundred years ago,
we would all have been slaves. If we had done as the priests told us
we would all have been idiots. If we had done as the doctors told us
we would all have been dead. We have been saved by disobedience. We
have been saved by that splendid thing called independence, and I want
to see more of it, day after day, and I want to see children raised so
they will have it. That is my doctrine. Give the children a chance.
Be perfectly honor bright with them, and they will be your friends when
you are old. Don't try to teach them something they can never learn.
Don't insist upon their pursuing some calling they have no sort of
faculty for. Don't make that poor girl play ten years on a piano when
she has no ear for music, and when she has practiced until she can play
"Bonaparte crossing the Alps," and you can't tell after she has played
it whether Bonaparte ever got across or not. Men are oaks, women are
vines, children are flowers, and if there is any Heaven in this world,
it is in the family. It is where the wife loves the husband, and the
husband loves the wife, and where the dimpled arms of children are
about the necks of both. That is Heaven, if there is any--and I do not
want any better Heaven in another world than that, and if in another
world I can not live with the ones I loved here, then I would rather
not be there. I would rather resign.
Well, my friends, I have some excuses to make for the race to which I
belong. In the first place, this world is not very well adapted to
raising good men and good women. It is three times better adapted to
the cultivation of fish than of people. There is one little narrow
belt running zigzag around the world, in which men and women of genius
can be raised, and that is all. It is with man as it is with
vegetation. In the valley you find the oak and elm tossing their
branches defiantly to the storm, and as you advance up the mountain
side the hemlock, the pine, the birch, the spruce, the fir, and finally
you come to little dwarfed trees, that look like other trees seen
through a telescope reversed--every limb twisted as through
pain--getting a scanty subsistence from the miserly crevices of the
rocks. You go on and on, until at last the highest crag is freckled
with a kind of moss, and vegetation ends. You might as well try to
raise oaks and elms where the mosses grow, as to raise great men and
women where their surroundings are unfavorable. You must have the
proper climate and soil. There never has been a man or woman of genius
from the southern hemisphere, because the Lord didn't allow the right
climate to fall upon the land. It falls upon the water. There never
was much civilization except where there has been snow, and ordinarily
decent Winter. You can't have civilization without it. Where man
needs no bedclothes but clouds, revolution is the normal condition of
such a people. It is the Winter that gives us the home; it is the
Winter that gives us the fireside and the family relation and all the
beautiful flowers of love that adorn that relation. Civilization,
liberty, justice, charity and intellectual advancement are all flowers
that bloom in the drifted snow. You can't have them anywhere else, and
that is the reason we of the north are civilized, and that is the
reason that civilization has always been with Winter. That is the
reason that philosophy has been here, and, in spite of all our
superstitions, we have advanced beyond some of the other races, because
we have had this assistance of nature, that drove us into the family
relation, that made us prudent; that made us lay up at one time for
another season of the year. So there is one excuse I have for my race.
I have got another. I think we came from the lower animals. I am not
dead sure of it, but think so. When I first read about it I didn't
like it. My heart was filled with sympathy for those people who have
nothing to be proud of except ancestors. I thought how terrible it
will be upon the nobility of the old world. Think of their being
forced to trace their ancestry back to the Duke Orang-Outang or to the
Princess Chimpanzee. After thinking it all over I came to the
conclusion that I liked that doctrine. I became convinced in spite of
myself. I read about rudimentary bones and muscles. I was told that
everybody had rudimentary muscles extending from the ear into the
cheek. I asked: "What are they?" I was told: "They are the remains of
muscles; that they became rudimentary from the lack of use." They went
into bankruptcy. They are the muscles with which your ancestors used
to flap their ears. Well, at first, I was greatly astonished, and
afterward I was more astonished to find they had become rudimentary.
How can you account for John Calvin unless we came up from the lower
animals? How could you account for a man that would use the extremes
of torture unless you admit that there is in man the elements of a
snake, of a vulture, a hyena, and a jackal? How can you account for the
religious creeds of today? How can you account for that infamous
doctrine of Hell, except with an animal origin? How can you account
for your conception of a God that would sell women and babes into
slavery?
Well, I thought that thing over and I began to like it after a while,
and I said: "It is not so much difference who my father was as who his
son is." And I finally said I would rather belong to a race that
commenced with the skull-less vertebrates in the dim Laurentian seas,
that wriggled without knowing why they wriggled, swimming without
knowing where they were going, that come along up by degrees through
millions of ages, through all that crawls, and swims, and floats, and
runs, and growls, and barks, and howls, until it struck this fellow in
the dug-out. And then that fellow in the dugout getting a little
grander, and each one below calling every one above him a heretic,
calling every one who had made a little advance an infidel or an
atheist, and finally the heads getting a little higher and looming up a
little grander and more splendidly, and finally produced Shakespeare,
who harvested all the field of dramatic thought and from whose day
until now there have been none but gleaners of chaff and straw.
Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched all the
shores of human thought, within which were all the tides and currents
and pulses upon which lay all the lights and shadows, and over which
brooded all the calms, and swept all the storms and tempests of which
the soul is capable. I would rather belong to that race that commenced
with that skull-less vertebrate; that produced Shakespeare, a race that
has before it an infinite future, with the angel of progress leaning
from the far horizon, beckoning men forward and upward forever. I
would rather belong to that race than to have descended from a perfect
pair upon which the Lord has lost money every moment from that day to
this.
Now, my crime has been this: I have insisted that the Bible is not the
word of God. I have insisted that we should not whip our children. I
have insisted that we should treat our wives as loving equals. I have
denied that God--if there is any God--ever upheld polygamy and slavery.
I have denied that that God ever told his generals to kill innocent
babes and tear and rip open women with the sword of war. I have denied
that and for that I have been assailed by the clergy of the United
States. They tell me I have misquoted; and I owe it to you, and maybe
I owe it to myself, to read one or two words to you upon this subject.
In order to do that I shall have to put on my glasses; and that brings
me back to where I started--that man has advanced just in proportion as
his thought has mingled with his labor. If man's eyes hadn't failed he
would never have made any spectacles, he would never have had the
telescope, and he would never have been able to read the leaves of
Heaven.