If that doctrine be true, every one should regard time as a kind of dock, a pier running out into the ocean of eternity, on which you sit on your trunk and wait for the ship of death--solemn, lugubrious, melancholy to the last degree. And that is why I have said joy is Pagan. It comes from a love of nature, from a love of this world, from a love of this life. According to the idea of some good people, life is a kind of green-room, where you are getting ready for a "play" in some other country. You all remember the story of "Great Expectations," and I presume you have all had them. That is another thing about this profession of acting that I like--you do not know how it is coming out--and there is this delightful uncertainty. You have all read the book called "Great Expectations," written, in my judgment, by the greatest novelist that ever wrote the English language--the man who created a vast realm of joy. I love the joy-makers--not the solemn, mournful wretches. And when I think of the church asking something of the theatre, I remember that story of "Great Expectations." You remember Miss Haversham--she was to have been married some fifty or sixty years before that time--sitting there in the darkness, in all of her wedding finery, the laces having turned yellow by time, the old wedding cake crumbled, various insects having made it their palatial residence--you remember that she sent for that poor little boy Pip, and when he got there in the midst of all these horrors, she looked at him and said, "Pip, play!" And if their doctrine be true, every actor is in that situation. I have always loved the theatre--loved the stage, simply because it has added to the happiness of this life. "Oh, but," they say, "is it moral?" A superstitious man suspects everything that is pleasant. It seems inbred in his nature, and in the nature of most people. You let such a man pull up a little weed and taste it, and if it is sweet and good, he says, "I'll bet it is poison." But if it tastes awful, so that his face becomes a mask of disgust, he says, "I'll bet you that it is good medicine." Now, I believe that everything in the world that tends to make man happy, is moral. That is my definition of morality. Anything that bursts into bud and blossom, and bears the fruit of joy, is moral. Some people expect to make the world good by destroying desire--by a kind of pious petrifaction, feeling that if you do not want anything, you will not want anything bad. In other words, you will be good and moral if you will only stop growing, stop wishing, turn all your energies in the direction of repression, and if from the tree of life you pull every leaf, and then every bud--and if an apple happens to get ripe in spite of you, don't touch it--snakes!