your children on Sunday.

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