The subject of this sermon in action was born in Dublin in 1854. His father was a wealthy baronet, a physician who was accustomed to seduce his women-patients; his mother was an excessively vain society poetess. The son was burdened with the label Oscar Fingal O’Flahartie Wills Wilde, and received the usual public school and Oxford education. In these so-called “public” schools, which are ruling class boarding-schools, the boys live semi-monastic lives, entirely withdrawn from woman’s influence; they are fed upon Greek literature and art, which glorifies homosexuality, and therefore English upper-class life is rotten with this odious vice. Frank Harris narrates that at the time of Wilde’s trial, when general exposures on this subject were threatened, great numbers of London’s prominent club members suddenly discovered that they had important business on the Continent. Oscar Wilde had extraordinary gifts; a vivid imagination, a flow of eloquence, and charming wit. He was the perfect fine flower of leisure-class art, a gentleman about town, a literary dandy who learned the lesson that it pays to advertise, and made himself the most talked about man in London by dressing in knee breeches and silk hose, carrying a large sunflower in his hand, and greeting men and women with sweet impertinences. There is a satiric portrait of this elegant “esthete” in Robert Hichens’ novel, “The Green Carnation.” Oscar wrote comedies dealing with the London world of fashion in which he lived. These plays delighted that world, and still delight audiences of the fashionable. Frank Harris regards them as imperishable classics; and all I can do is to record the fact that they put me to sleep. Nearly twenty years ago I saw “The Importance of Being Earnest” in New York, and cannot recall that I was ever more bored in a theater. The interest of the play is supposed to lie in its “smart” dialogue, and the formula for that smartness is one which anyone can learn in two minutes. Take any statement involving the simple common sense of mankind, the moral heritage of the race for countless ages; and then make an epigram proclaiming the opposite, and you have a “line” for a society play. “Charity creates a multitude of sins.... It is better to be good-looking than to be good.... All charming people are spoiled.... A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.... It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.... The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish.... Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.... There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.... The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.”