Do you know we are improving all the time? Do you know that the most orthodox people in this town today, three hundred years ago would have been burned for heresy? Do you know some ministers who denounce me would have been in the Inquisition themselves two hundred years ago? Do you know where once burned and blazed the bivouac fires of the army of progress, the altars of the church glow today? Do you know that the church today occupies about the same ground that unbelievers did one hundred years ago? Do you know that while they have followed this army of progress, protesting and denouncing, they have had to keep within protesting and denouncing distance, but they have followed it? They have been the men, let me say, in the valley; the men in swamps, shouting to and cursing the pioneers on the hills; the men upon whose forehead was the light of the coming dawn, the coming day--but they have advanced. In spite of themselves, they have advanced! If they had not, I would not speak here to night. If they had not, not a solitary one of you could have expressed your real and honest thought. But we are advancing, and we are beginning to hold all kinds of slavery in utter contempt; do you know that? And we are beginning to question wealth and power; we are questioning all creeds and all dogmas; and we are not bowing down, as we used to, to a man simply because he is in the robe of a clergyman, and we are not bowing down to a man now simply because he is a king. No! We are not bowing down simply because he is rich. We used to worship the golden calves, but we do not now. The worst you can say of an American, is, he worships the gold of the calf, not the calf; and even the calves are beginning to see this distinction.