ers and actors?

_Answer_. We must remember that the stage presents an ideal life.
It is a world controlled by the imagination--a world in which the
justice delayed in real life may be done, and in which that may
happen which, according to the highest ideal, should happen. It
is a world, for the most part, in which evil does not succeed, in
which the vicious are foiled, in which the right, the honest, the
sincere, and the good prevail. It cultivates the imagination, and
in this respect is far better than the pulpit. The mission of the
pulpit is to narrow and shrivel the human mind. The pulpit denounces
the freedom of thought and of expression; but on the stage the mind
is free, and for thousands of years the poor, the oppressed, the
enslaved, have been permitted to witness plays wherein the slave
was freed, wherein the oppressed became the victor, and where the
downtrodden rose supreme.

And there is another thing. The stage has always laughed at the
spirit of caste. The low-born lass has loved the prince. All
human distinctions in this ideal world have for the moment vanished,
while honesty and love have triumphed. The stage lightens the
cares of life. The pulpit increases the tears and groans of man.
There is this difference: The pretence of honesty and the honesty
of pretence.

_Question_. How do you view the Episcopalian scheme of building
a six-million-dollar untaxed cathedral in this city for the purpose
of "uniting the sects," and, when that is accomplished, "unifying
the world in the love of Christ," and thereby abolishing misery?

_Answer_. I regard the building of an Episcopal cathedral simply
as a piece of religious folly. The world will never be converted
by Christian palaces and temples. Every dollar used in its
construction will be wasted. It will have no tendency to unite
the various sects; on the contrary, it will excite the envy and
jealousy of every other sect. It will widen the gulf between the
Episcopalian and the Methodist, between the Episcopalian and the
Presbyterian, and this hatred will continue until the other sects
build a cathedral just a little larger, and then the envy and the
hatred will be on the other side.

Religion will never unify the world, and never will give peace to
mankind. There has been more war in the last eighteen hundred
years than during any similar period within historic times. War
will be abolished, if it ever is abolished, not by religion, but