SSA I Re err reer rity eS ay at ate wet = . aS A Ss IN = Fre Seneeers ae EN yA NE NTS SSE RS CN AF ERNEST SESE SS GERI RESETS THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY 11 Miem . ICBO Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. University of Illinois Library THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY 11 Mixem | ee) % Sale 4 7 x Eat MISTAKES OF [NGERSOLL. [NGERSOLL’S ANSWERS. vo | i VOL. 2. COMPLETE. MISTAKES OF Mea RSOLL AS SHOWN BY PROF. SWING, J. MONRO GIBSON, D.D., W. H. RYDER, D. D., RABBI WISE, BROOKE HERFORD, D.D., AND OTHERS. INCLUDING INGERSOLL’S LECTURE ON THE “MISTAKES OF MOSES.’’ EDITED BY J. B. M°CLURE. CHICAGO: RHODES & McCLURE, PUBLISHERS. ) 1880. Entered according toyAct of Congress, in the year 1879, by J. B. McCLurE & R. S. RHODES, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. Cc. nan a TE MEST TI TTT FLARED SAAS IR OAL Salas Soc nese elon Stereotyped and Printed BY OTraway & CoMPANY, DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY, Binders. FURS ae OND ale ee BE Seta dn ea 2S a >» 4 ee) in. oe OL 8 A religious taith at present so generally pervades the civilized world that it seems almost amazing that any one should dare speak as Mr. Ingersoll does in his several lec- tures about the Bible. It is this singularity, no doubt, rather than intrinsic worth, which gives any significance that may attach to his words. That the Bible is in the least endangered is out of the question. It is too late now for that. ‘The words herein compiled from. good and able men, who have made the great Book, in its early language, import and history, a careful study for long years, will show ‘how futile are Mr. Ingersoll’s efforts in parading what he ealls the “ Mistakes of Moses,” ete. Indeed, it would seem that, possibly Mr. I. is guilty of a mistaken identity, for he is severely accused of false assertions and misrepresentations concerning the real Moses. This reminds us of a “ mis- take” which was made on a certain occasion by the celebra- ted Archbishop of Dublin, the gifted author of the work so widely known, entitled “The Study of Words.” He was not in robust health at the time, and for many years had been apprehensive of paralysis. At a dinner in Dublin, given by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, his grace sat on the right of his hostess, the Duchess of Abercorn. In the midst of the dinner the company was startled by seeing the 4eye ie} GGTLTY 4 | ¢° \PREPACE,": > 2) eee - Archbishop rise from his seat, and still more Bes to hear by him exclaim in a dismal and sepulchral tone, “Tt has come! it has come! ” . : { “ What has come, your Grace?” eagerly cried half a dozen voices from different parts of the table. | * . ; ‘ | “What I have been expecting for twenty years,” solemnly “ ee answered the archbishop—“a stroke of paralysis. Ihave ° been pinching myself for the last twenty minutes, and find myself entirely without sensation.” | “Pardon me, my dear archbishop,” said the duchess, ea looking up at him with a somewhat quizzical smile—“ par- Bi don me for contradicting you, but it is L that you have been he : Beedle pinching: We iM aM Messrs. Gibson, Swing, Ryder and Herford, of Chieago, a and Rabbi Wise, of Cincinnati, whose replies are herein Se given, are too well known as scholars and divines, to require 4 i sg e ° e ° e " Cs any introduction to a reading public. Their words are q ; 2 \d , 2 mek 7 1 4 he hee wise and timely, and are puton record in this form to show fesse eae 8 es ie the weakness of modern infidelity and the stability of Divine oa os Truth. eae J. B. McCuure. — OCutcaco, April 22nd, 1879. “At a Aeros Pror. Swine’s Rerty : The Lawyer vs. The Philosopher — Ingersoll’ Pros fessional Proclivities in Making a Part Equal to the Whole : Seven Mistakes of Moses Ten One tn ineued to Hebrew History . Swing Puts Himself in rites Solis Plice aa8 At- | tacks the Seventeenth Century—How it Works Ingersoll’s Narrowness Shuts Out God, Heaven and Immortality—Infidel Dogmatism In the World’s Great Freedom of Choice, Tageresll is Counted Out . Feats : : : : Dr. Ryprr’s Repiy - Ingersoll’s Uniaienee Ati bntes to Moses State- ments not in the Bible His Temporary Insanity occasioned na Holey. Ratu _—Intellectually Submerged in the Deluge—Dam- aging Blunders—lIngersoll up the coe Moun- tain . Top-heavy—Too road a Benya eed on a Too Warrow:Base =. * . ay thas Ingersoll’s Inconsistency . , He Has No Poetry in His Soul; ergo, ete. Additional Misrepresentations Dr. Ryder Propounds a Question (5) Lape & si iy y) a f ) ‘ $ ms eyo Ye ny é mesa te , wiht Paw icf aM, Ral he i ‘ is \ y ae it A ri Ce % Se hd BY kee \ At > a ps a i ay 4 i ea if co : CONTENTS. Be pak . \ t re j “Ingersoll Admits His Sad Need of Inspiration. : The Deluge and its Difficulties—Not Universal— Ararat originally a District (alas! Ingersoll calls it a High Mountain)—Other Deluges . . Ha Faith in Jesus Christ the Essential Factor . ‘ - Gandor vs. Injustice—Dr. Gibson’s Pointed Sum- sea TET) Mela acho Sen Geter ee Incerso.i’s LEcTURE, Entitled “Tue Misraxres or Moszs,” Q PAGE PSpea Ingersoll’s “ Religion of Humanity” All paigiss Ex. a ee cept the Religion : . Le Dr. Ryder Tells a Little Story ee the Baie of Tilus- vad tration . : age By ie a Oe arias Dr. Hxrrorp’s Repry NE Oe Gee ae The Ingersoll Paradox Me RR Coe Ingersoll’s Exaggerations and False Assertions ._ ite Dr. Herford’s Story of Moses, with an Apt Illustra- re ele tion—The Germinal Power of the Pentateuch . aries. The Mosaic Religion of Humanity oe. ae i Tue JewisH Rassi’s Repry . : 4 " ‘ No Dr. Grson’sRerry. > salty de) ----sSIngersoll Betrays His Ignorance . ° ‘ ° | Harmony of Science and Genesis . : ; ; The Harmony of Genesis and Science Not the Result. of Guess-work, but of Inspiration x : God a aaa igaheae La Tie rr Pea sie Nature . ot mere re 5 a tees : Ms eM rs ‘Man , : ‘ , : ‘ Sea : Pld Woman .. a a 1, ean Mistakes Reweanas [ence a Death Corrected . 75 aa Waar Distineuisoep Men Say or tHE Brste = jC 85-96 TRE WIBRARY (gee OFTHE”. UBIVERSITY AF UALINGIR iS Yi Na yj yj lj SSS J y il <— ( OA . \ UNAS MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL AS SHOWN BY PROF. SWING, | J. MONRO GIBSON, D. D., W. H. RYDER, D. D., RABBI WISE, BROOKE HERFORD, D. D., | AND OTHERS. PROF. SWINGS REPLY. ae Tuts discourse is not spoken regarding the man, Robert G. Ingersoll, but regarding the addresses which he is deliv- ering and is otherwise publishing. The man Ingersoll is said to be, in- his private life, kind, neighborly, humane, and in many ways an example which might be imitated with great profit by thousands who represent themselves as holding the Pagan or the Christian religion. But, were this author and lecturer a mean, wicked man, [ should still be bound to consider his thoughts apart. from the thinker just as we deal with Bacon’s ideas apart from his moral qualities, and the politics of Alexander Hamilton apart from the infirmities of his moral sentiments. The intel- (7) 8 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. lect of such an individual as the one before us is a thinking machine. It makes a survey of the religious landscape. Objects strike it that escape you and me. His eyes are not those of a preacher, not. those of a bishop, nor those of an evangelist like Mr. Moody; not those of a moralist like Dymond or William Penn, nor those of Theodore Parker or Emerson, but they are a vision purely his own, and our task is limited to the inquiry what this peculiar sense dis- covers in our wide and varied world. The Lawyer vs. The Philosopher—Ingersoll’s Professional Proclivities in Making a Part equal to the Whole! We perceive at once that these addresses do not offer us any system of philosophy for woman, or child, or State, and therefore they cannot aspire to be any valuable Mentor to tell each young Telemachus how to live. ‘They are the speeches of a lawyer retained by one client of a large case. Men trained in a profession come by degrees into the pro- fession’s channel, and flow only in the one direction, and al- ways between the same banks. The master of a learned profession at last becomes its slave. He who follows faith- fully any calling wears at last a soul of that calling’s shape. You remember the death scene of the poor old schoolmas- - ter. He had assembled the boys and girls in the winter mornings and had dismissed them winter evenings after sundown, and had done this for fifty long years. One win- ter Monday he did not appear. Death had struck his old and feeble pulse; but, dying, his mind followed its beauti- ful but narrow river-bed, and his last words were: “It is growing dark—the school is dismissed—let the girls pass out first.” Very rarely does the man in the pulpit, or at the bar, or in statesmanship, escape this molding hand of his pursuit. We are all clay in the hands of that potter PROF. SWING’S REPLY. : gent which is called a pursuit. A pursuit is seldom an ocean of water; it is more commonly a canal. But if there be a class of men more modified than others in langnage and forms of speech, the lawyers compose such a class, for it is never their business to present both sides. It is their espe- cial duty so to arrange a part of the facts as that they shall seem to be the whole facts, and next to their power of pre- senting a cause must come their power to conceal all aspects unfavorable to their purpose. A philosopher must see and set forth at once both sides of all questions, but a lawyer must learn to see the one side of a case, for there is another man expressly employed to see the reverse of the shield. But few of us are philosophers. When we wish to exhibit something, we instantly cut off all light except that which will fall upon our goods. If we are to display only a yard of silk, we will veil the sun and move about to find the right position, and then light a little more gas, that the fields, and hills, and heavens may all withdraw, and permit us to see the fold of a bride’s dress. Thus all the profes- sions, honored by being ¢called learned, do more or less cut off the light from all things except the fabric that is being unfolded by their skillful fingers. Men of intense emotional power like Mr. Ingersoll, and men who, like him, have hearts as full of colors as a paint- er’s shop, are wont, beyond common, to pour their passion upon one object rather than diffuse it all over the world. These can awaken, and entertain, and shake, and unsettle, but then, after all is over, we all must seek for final guides men who are calmer and who spread gentler tints with their brush. I am, therefore, of the opinion that none of us should follow any one man, but rather all men; should seek that general impression, that wide-reaching common-sense, which knows little of ecstacy and little of despair. These 10 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. “A ddresses ” under notice are wonderful concentrations of wit, and fun, and tears, and logic, but concentrations upon minor points. They are severe upon a little group of men, upon literalists and old Popes, and old monks, but they do not weigh and measure fully the religion of such a being as Jesus Christ, nor touch the ideas and actions of the human race away from these fading forms of human nature. Seven Mistakes of Moses Left out!— Injustice to Hebrew History. These addresses do injustice to the Hebrew history. A lawyer has a right to be one-sided and narrow when he is presenting the cause of his client, but when he is addressing a public upon a religious, or political, or social question, narrowness in his discourse must be considered an infirmity, or else an act of injustice. These speeches ‘betray either unconscious narrowness or willfulinjustice. But Mr. Inger- soll is the embodiment of sincerity, according to those who enjoy his acquaintance, and therefore we must conclude that the cast of his mind is such that it is led hither and thither by that narrowness which belongs no more to a high Calvinist than to a high infidel. If the lecture upon “ Moses” had been more thoughtful, it would have con- fessed that there were several forms of the man ‘“ Moses,”— the historic ‘ Moses,” the Hebrew “ Moses,” and the Calvin- istic “* Moses; ” and then, after this concession, he might have assailed the “ Calvinistic Moses.” But if the addresses had been broad, an igus for that larger audience called humanity, they would have asked us to mark the mistakes of the Moses of Hebrew times and of common history. But they did not dream of this. Stand- ing in the presence of one of the grandest figures of Egyp- ® PROF. SWING’S REPLY. It tian and Hebrew antiquity, Mr. Ingersoll failed to see this personage, and permitted nothing to come upon his field of vision except those sixteenth century theologians who dis- torted alike the mission of Moses and of Christ, and even of the Almighty. To set forth the mistakes of the historic ** Moses” would -not be any easy task. One doing this would be compelled to ask us to mark the blunders of a leader who planned freedom for slaves; who bore complain- ings from an ignorant people until he won the fame of unu- sual meekness, one who did in reality what infidels only have dreamed of doing—living and dying for the people; the mistakes of one whose ten laws are still the fundamental ideas of a State, of one who organized a nation which lived and flourished for 1,500 years; the mistakes of one who divested the idea of God of bestiality and began to clothe it with the notions of wisdom and justice, and even tenderness; the follies of one who established industry and education, and a higher form of religion, and gave the nation holding these virtues such an impulse that in the hour of dissolving it produced a Jesus Christ and the twelve Apostles; and thus did more in its death than Atheism could achieve in all _ the eons of geology. Seven mistakes of Moses left out! There is, it is true, a time and a place for irony, but, after it has done its work amid the accidental of a time or a place, there remains yet much to be studied by the sober intellect and loved by the heart which really cares for the useful and the true. It is essentially a small matter that some poetic mind, some Froissart or some Herodotus, came along per- haps after the reigns of David and Solomon, and gathered up all the truths of old Hebrew tradition, and all the legends, too, and wove them together, for out of such entanglements the essential ideas generally rise up just as noble pine trees at last rise up above the brambles and thickets at their base, 12 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. and evermore stand in the full presence of rain, and air, and sun. Above the brambles and thorn of legend, at which the narrow eye may laugh, there rises up from the Mosaic soil a growth of moral truth that catches at last full sun- shine and full breeze; a growth that will long make a good shadow for the graves of Christian and infidel beneath. The errors of legend are so RE it that even a Divine Book may carry them. It will thus appear that the mera of the addresses is very defective. It is not a wide survey of a two-thousand- year period in human civilization, a period when the He- brews were making imperishable the good of the Egyptians who were dying from vices and despotism, but is only the ramble of a satirist having a sharp eye for defects and a most ready tongue. All the by-gone periods may be passed over in two manners. We may go forth for our laughter or for our pensiveness and wisdom. Juvenal saw old Rome full of dissolute men and women. Virgil saw it full of litera- ture. Tacitus found it not destitute of patriots and heroes; and when Juvenal found the husbands all debauchees, and the wives all hypocrites, there the most calm and elegant historians found the most excellent Agricola, and ‘found a wife of spotless fame in the daughter Domitia. Thus in the very generations in which the lampoons of Juvenal - found only vice, behold we see beauty and virtue in full bloom around the homes of Tacitus, and Agricola, and Pliny. Thus all the fields of human thought lie open to the invasion of those who wish to mock, and of those who wish to admire. And beyond doubt when Mr. Ingersoll shall have uttered his last thought over the Mistakes of Moses, some other form of intellect could glean in the same field, and leave covered with the truths of Moses, a nobler and larger tablet. PROF. SWING’S REPLY. 13: Swing Puts Himself in Ingersoll’s Place and Attacks the Seventeenth Century.—How it Works! Permit me now, in imitation of the style of these addresses, to ask you to look at the seventeenth century: Why, it all drips in blood! Horror upon horrors! The King of Persia put to death some of the Royal family and put out the eyes of all the rest—even the eyes of infants. Russia begins her cruel oppression of Poland. Prussia, the hope of Europe, is desolated by war, which never lifted its black cloud for thirty years. In this wretched century came the massacre of Prague and the forcible banishment of 30,000 Protestant families. Allowing five persons to a family, it will tlius ap- pear that 150,000 were driven from their homes and country. Further south, in France, a few years before, 700,000 Pro- testants had been murdered in twenty-four hours. After- ward came the licentious court of Louis XIV.; while over in England noble men and women were being beheaded or otherwise slain in dreadful numbers. The beautiful Queen Mary is beheaded just as the century begins, and Essex is beheaded in its full opening. And in its close France re- enters the scene, revokes the edict of Nantes, and sends into exile 800,000 of her best citizens. Thus dragged along the seventeenth century, as it would seem, bleeding, and weeping, and gasping in perpetual dying. Whata picture! Amazing indeed, but narrow and false! I have been thinking only of the “mistakes” of a time. Just look at that century again with a wider survey and a happier heart, and lo! we see in it a matchless line of immortal worthies. There flourished Gustavus, laying the foundations of our liberty; there lived Grotius, writing down the holiest principles of duty; there we see Galileo inventing the telescope, and beholding the starry sky; there 14 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. sits Kepler finding the highest laws of astronomy; near these are the French preachers, Bossuet, Fenelon, and Mas- silon, whose fame has not been equaled; there, too, Pascal and Corneille. But this is not all. It is not one-third the splendor of that one epoch, for, cross the Channel, and behold you meet Shakspeare, and Lord Bacon, and Milton,. and Locke, and while these divine minds are composing their books, Cromwell is overthrowing despots, and a Republic springs up as by enchantment. Thus the seven- teenth century, which awhile ago seemed only a period that a kind heart might wish stricken from history, now comes back to us as the sublime dawn of poetry, and science, and eloquence, and liberty. The truth is we must move through the present and the past with both eyes wide open, and a a mind willing to know all and to draw a conclusion from the whole combined cloud of witnesses. The author of the addresses does not do this. He does not make a wide survey nor draw conelu- sions from widely scattered facts; and hence, after he has spoken about the horrors of the Mosaic age, or of the church there remains that age or that church emptying rich treas- ures into the ggneral civilization, purifying the barbarous ages, awaking the intellect, stimulating the arts, inspiring good works, elevating the life of the living, by setting before man a God and a future existence. Our Christianity has a’ Hebrew origin. The sermon on the Mount was begun by Moses. The eloquence of Mr. Ingersoll is much like the art of Hogarth or John Leech,—an acute, and witty, and interest- ing art, but very limited in its range. Hogarth was with- out a rival in his ability to picture the “ mistakes” of mar- riage, and of a ‘ Rake’s Progress,” the peculiarity of “ Beer Lane” and “Gin Lane”; and his art was legitimate in its ay PROF. SWING’S REPLY. 15 field, but its field was narrow, and took no notice of the eternal beauty of things as painted by Rubens or Raphael. After Hogarth had said all he could see and believe about marriage, there stvod the holy relation in its historic great- ness, filling millions of homes with its peace and friend- ship, notwithstanding the mirth-provoking pencil. Thus the ideas of ‘“ Moses,” and “ Church,” and “ Heaven,” and “God” lie before Mr. Ingersoll to be pictured by his skill- ful derision, but after the artist has drawn his little Puritanic Hebrew and his absurd Heaven, and has painted his little gods, and has limned his own Papal Heaven and Hell, another scene opens and there untarnished are the deep things of right and wrong, the immortal hopes of man, and a Heavenly Father which cannot be placed upon a jester’s canvas. John Leech found the weak points in all English high and low life. The fashions, and sports, and entertainments, and the current politics, underwent for a generation the tor- ture of his pictures, his sketches, his cartoons,’ but the moment the laugh had ended, the homes of England, the happy social life of rich and poor, the learning and wisdom of her statesmen were back in their place just as the sun is in his place after a noisy thunderstorm has passed by. Ingersoll’s Narrowness Shuts out God, Heaven and Immor- tality—Infidel Dogmatism, This narrowness of survey which marks Mr. Ingersoll’s estimate of the Hebrew period and of the human Church, follows him in his thoughts about another life and the exist- ence of God. He denies that any regard whatever should be paid to a second life. Heaven deserves no consider- ation at our hands. He says in his lecture on the Gods: “Reason, observation and experience have taught us 2 bie chan Se Tae nO ka ely fo te \ i ah’ a U ‘ 3 | ” 3 16 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. | MRE is that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy > is now, and the way to be happy isto make others so. This = is enough for us. In this belief we are content toliveand = die.” Such assertions as these no broadly-reaching mind S 8A could make, for the broad mind, not knowing but that there | a may be a second life, having no positive information on that = point, is bound to admit all that uncertainty, and that hope aan is a most lawful element in that strange mingling which makes up the soul. As Mr. Ingersoll does not know whence bale S man came, so he knows not whither he goes, and therefore = he must himself stand and permit othersto stand inthe | presence of death as in the presence of a great mystery that, ee) at least, should silence all dogmatism of priest or infidel = The logic of the addresses may be fitted for the common ap jury, but they are too rude for man who is weeping his re way along b®tween birth and death. Rm In some better hour the lawyer forgets his petit jury and “i addresses the human soul. On the title page of a recent volume he says in substance that: “The dream ofimmor- — tal life has always existed in the heart of man, and will remain there in all its matchless charms, born not of any S book or creed, but out of human affection;” and being not born of reason and sense, he can but reject its hope; he is © personally above being molded in thought, or action, by © Nei ae such a fable of the heart. In calling such a dream a fable, — ae he is guilty of that very dogmatism which he so hates in Calvin and Edwards, for if Calvin was too certain that he; ce knew God’s will, Mr. Ingersoll is too certain that heknows God not to exist. It often happens that the dogmatism om of the bigot must await its exact parallel in the dogmatism | | r 2s a of the atheist. The ideas of a future life and a God are thus in these addresses rudely set aside as though this oe a author had shown the real origin and destiny of the Uni- ~ + verse, and had found out the secret of the grave. a te Re ies as se San 1 ati hi aM +} 4 Po) i ie ’ ie {s i Pie Ye eR f ri > Z bd ,* « mn . 4 t ae ne c 4 Naa ; ay ON ; ty . A se Z ‘ y an ‘ ee Q : La te } ' 2 oe 4 i : ) 5 bi } ee bie atl 3 at ua Ps ’ r - 4 ve x id ‘ f { PROF. SWING’S REPLY. : 17 He would pay no attention to the idea of God. He would not be guilty of any worship in this life. He says: “If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to and independent of nature shall be demonstrated, there will be time enough to kneel. Until then let us stand erect.” In such language we find only a perfect overthrow of the method of the human soul; for the soul has never dared wait for any such certainty in any of the paths before it. It has always been compelled to build up before itself the largest possible motives and hopes, and then live for them and abide the consequences. It is wonderful that a man who will pluck a violet and draw delight from its tender color and still more delicate perfume, will sternly command the human race not to hold in its hands any flower of im- mortality, lest by chance its leaves may at last wither. If this idea of a future life should at last fail, which seems im- possible, the human heart will be all the purer and happier from having held all through these years a lily so sweet and so white. Logic cannot make such short work of the religious sen- timents. Mr. Ingersoll says: “ If you can ever find a God, just let me know, and I shall kneel. Until then I shall stand erect.” What injustice to that delicate form of rea- son, which has moved the world for perhaps 10,000 years! We do not propose to find God or a future life. What the world has found long since is the deep hope in a God,’and the measureless hope that the dying loved ones of this world will meet in a land that is better. Nobody has come to the human race to let it know that a God has been found, but many have come to it saying: ‘“ My dear children, let us trust that all this matchless universe came from a Creater, and that from him we also came.” So many and so holy were these voices, and so responsive was the heart, that upon 18 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. this trust the living and the dying have knelt and have told : their longings to the Invisible. The human race has not been haughty. It has been willing to kneel. Its heart has never been stone, nor its knees brass. It has stood erect in battle where liberty was to be won; it has been as erect as an infidel when a bosom was to be bared for arrows or bullets, or when the neck was to be unclothed for the fatal ax, but in moments of hope and longing it has bent willingly in ~ hope and prayer. The advice of the Addresses not to kneel until you have reached and handled the Creator, is advice that civilization has always spurned, for it has woven all its gorgeous fabrics out of delicate probabilities,—gossamer threads spun by the heart. Jame, and learning, and art, — and happiness are all simple possibilities before each youth. He does not dare say, Make me sure of results, and I will ~ gird myself for the present. He casts himself upon the bet-_ ter of two possibilities, and is borne along toward an un- known end. Thus has the human race dealt with the inti- mations of religion. It has cast itself upon the better hope, — and, being at perfect liberty to espouse Atheism, has always uh ee it as being a paralysis of the soul, fi a perfect reversal of the common logic of society. In the World’s Great Freedom of Choice, Ingersoll is Coun- ted out! % The world has always been perfectly free to use the form of reasoning which Mr. Ingersoll suggests. No Westmin-. ster Assembly, no Calvin corapelied the human family from Old Egypt to Greece to think the universe had a Creator. The world has always been free to suppose that | such seasons as day and night and spring and summer, such creatures as the nightingale and man, such a star as the sun, all came from mud and water and fire, mingling of their PROF. SWING’S REPLY. 19 owr accord; but the world has had no wide use for suck conclusions. Of its own free choice, it has avoided Atheism, and has never made up anywhere a civilization without dis- carding the idea of waiting for a demonstration, and with- out espousing the idea that all noble society reposes upon lofty hopes. Out of beautiful possibilities the soul’s gar- ments are woven. It thus appears that the Addresses are defective as guides for any man’s life or death. They constitute a bill of ex- ceptions against certain hard rulings in some local and igno- rant courts, but as pleadings in the great tribunal where the whole human family stands assembled, to get the wisest decisions about duty and happiness, and the possibility of there being a God and a second life, the possible value of a hope for the dying—they each and all fall far short. They see only the religion of some fanatic, and think it the religion of Jesus or of mankind. They see a God damning honest men, and conclude that is what is meant by Jehovah. They see a Heaven with some little sect in the midst of it, and speak as though they were what is meant by the immortality of man. They note the follies of the Puritans and Papists, and infer that if there were no religion in the world, there would be no bad judgment or bad passions. They fail, too, to mark the delicacy of man’s practical logic, which is not iron-like, waiting for the absolute end of all doubt, but which is bending and hopeful, and stands ready forever to found immense motives, and society, and church, and homes upon _ the greater and better of two probabilities that lie within this world of cloud. They assert the adequacy of earthly happi- ness as an end of being, and fail to mark that earthly hap- piness has always depended upon high morals, and father, and mother, and child, and social life, and all mental de- velopment have found their full meaning, until a warm and oS 20 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. broad religion has shed its cheering light. The human race cannot find its supreme good in having a few acres of ground, and in seeing the grass grow, and in hearing the birds sing. These make some days delightful indeed, but man, with his retinue of art, and statesmanship, and morals, and tempta- tions, and virtues, and joys, and sorrows, and partings, and death, demands the assumption of a God, and the expecta- tions of a resurrection from the dust. Under such a temple as society, the foundation must be deep. To those who read or hear these addresses of Mr. Inger- soll, let me say: Hear them, read them if you wish, for they will show you what a sad caricature of Christianity was that which came down to us from the Dark Ages; but, having thus been taught by an enemy, then dismiss the laughter, and look at religion in the widest forms of its doctrine and experience. We are now warned daily not to follow parti- sans in politics, because they will eclipse a country by a little chair in office—they will make a village outweigh a continent. These addresses of a talented lawyer warn us equally against trusting the partisans in religion—the dim- eyed zeal which makes a Deity as small as their own hearts, a Bible as cold and as hard as adamant; but now, having ~ been taught to shun partisans in politics and in Christi- anity, let us learn to resist one more form of partisan—the partisan of an atheism and a hopeless grave. Let us at I times laugh with him, let us admire his acuteness, let us confess the honesty of his life, but for our guides or ideas in the world spiritual let us seek: some mountain of thought where the survey is broader, and tenderer, and more just, from which height no good lies concealed; but looking from which we can see the great landscape of the soul, some of it bathed in light, some of it lying in shadow, but all of it. instructive and full of impressiveness. ge eee > i ‘ ‘ See Fa 4h ors Pane ae ee See i S sy DR. RYDER’S REPLY. 21 DR. RYDER’S REPLY. In the commencement of this review of Mr. Ingersoll’s lecture upon “The Mistakes of Moses,” I wish two things distinctly understood: First, that my controversy is not with the man, but with his address; and, second, that he has the same right to advocate his views as I have to advo- eate mine. On the question of religious liberty we are as one. Furthermore, I do not wonder that certain minds, having passed through peculiar experiences, become thoroughly disgusted with particular forms of theological thought.. My only surprise is that more are not. Such material ideas of the Deity as are sometimes put forth in the name of Chris- tianity; such offensive literalizing as is sometimes applied to the future life, and such thoroughly untenable positions as are sometimes taken as to what the Scriptures actually are, has long been a frnitful cause of infidelity, and will continue to be so as long as they receive the indorsement of any branch of the Christian Church. But intensity of conviction may degenerate into preju- dice, and this prejudice practically unfits one to discuss the subject to which it relates. From what the distinguished lecturer says of himself, of his determination in every ad- dress he makes, no matter what the topic, to denounce cer- tain views, and from the specimen of his work now brought 22 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. under review, I conclude that Col. Ingersoll occupies just this position. While, then, the right to speak one’s honest thought is thus frankly conceded, and the provocation to employ strong language in reference to certain theological opinions is also conceded, it will be admitted by all candid minds that cer- tain subjects from their very nature, and from interest which © ‘they involve, are to be treated with seriousness and fairness. If not so treated, the influence of the discussion is almost certain to be harmful. The lecture under notice, though nominally on the errors of a particular character in the Old Testament, is virtually an assault upon all revealed religion, and especially that contained in the Bible. Ingersoll’s Unfairness—Attributes to Moses Statements not in the Bible. Now, my first position is this: Whoever publicly attacks the sacred books of the Christian world, and attempts to destroy faith in them, should treat the subject fairly. I re- gret to say that the lecture does not seem to me so to treat its great theme, but is, on the contrary, a conspicuous illus- tration of prejudice and unfairness. No small portion of the lecture is unworthy areply. There is nothing to reply to. Of fair argument there is a lamentable lack,—no incon- siderable portion of the time seems to have been spent in knocking over a man of straw of his own manufacture. If his lecture be regarded simply as an entertainment, it is a success, for the Colonel knows how to amuse an andience as well as the best; but if it were intended to bea fair and able discussion of an important subject, it is not simply a failure, but a failure so obvious as to leave no room for any other opinion. In proof of my statement that the lecture does not treat the topic which it professes to discuss fairly, I offer these specimens as evidence: DR. RYDER'’S REPLY. 23 The first specimen is: Attributing to Moses language and statements not to be found in any of his writings. Speaking of Moses, he says: ‘The gentleman who wrote it (Genesis) begins by telling us that God made it (the world) out of nothing.” And then he proceeds to ridicule the idea. But Moses says neither that nor anything like it. The lecturer thus misrepresents the very first sentence in the Pentateuch. What Moses says is, that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” What he created them out of, or when “in the beginning” was, he does not say. The simple thought is that the heavens and the earth were not self-evolved, but were created by the Omnipotent Jehovah. “You recollect,” he says, “that the gods came down and made love to the daughters of men,” etc. Where does Moses say that? Plenty of that kind of talk is Grecian and Roman mythology, but what has that to do with “The Mistakes of Moses?” “'They built a tower (Babel) to reach the heavens and climb into the abodes of the gods.” Another of the Colonel’s mistakes. The Tower of Babel was not built for any such purpose. From the frequent references of this kind to the gods in connection with the religion of Moses, it looks as if the lecturer was not aware that the Jews were not particularly in favor of idolatry. Again he says: “There is not one word in the Old Testament about woman except words of shame and humiliation. It did not take the pains to record the death of the mother of usall. I have no respect for any book that does not treat woman as the equal of man.” It is true that Moses does not record the death “of the mother of us all;” but it is also true that the first account of the burial of any person in the book of Genesis is that of a woman, Sarah, the wife of Abraham. Moses simply 24 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. says of Adam: “The father of us all,” “And he died;” and in a similar summary manner are all the other men dis- posed of; but.when it comes to this woman Sarah, a special lot has to be purchased for her, and secured to the family, so that her remains might not be disturbed; and even now in remembrance of the cave of the field in which she was buried, a certain part of our modern cemeteries is called Machpelah. By the side of this fact how does the declara- tion look that “there is not one word in the Old Testament about women, except words of shame and humiliation?” Suppose I turn the tables upon the lecturer, and say, I have no respect for any book that does not treat man as the equal of woman. My words, if applied to the Bible, would be hardly less libelous than his. His Temporary Insanity Occasioned by Heavy Rains— Intellectually Submerged in the Deluge—Damaging Blunders—Ingersoll up the Wrong Mountain. My second specification is that he not only makes Moses say what he does not say, but he frequently misrepresents what he does say. Iname these particulars: First, in speak- ing of the flood, he gives the impression that, according to the Scriptural account, all the water that covered the earth and inundated it came ont of the clouds in the form of rain. He says: “And then it began to rain, and it kept on rain- ing until the water went twenty-nine feet over the highest mountains. How deep were these waters? About five and a half miles. How long did-it rain? Forty days. How much did it have to raina day? About 800 feet.” Now what are the facts? In the verse which precedes the one which says, “And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights,”’ we have this record,—Gen., vii., iii— In the 600th year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the 17th day of DR. RYDER’S REPLY. 25 the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” Why did not the lecturer mention this statement of the “breaking up of the fountains of the great deep,” which is generally supposed to refer to the upheaval or subsidance of some large body or bodies of land, perhaps to portions of this western continent, and is considered to have been the principal cause of the deluge? Why omit the supposed principal cause of the deluge, unless it was his purpose to make out a case without regard to the facts? Furthermore, what authority has he for saying that the ark rested on the top of a mountain seventeen thousand feet high, and that the water upon the earth was “five and a half miles deep?” Has he committed the ignorant blunder of confounding Agri-Dagh with the hilly district to which the name was formerly applied? The lofty peak that now bears the name of Ararat has no such designation in Bib- lical history, and it is the name given to it in compara-_ tively modern times. The Bible record is: “Fifteen cubits upwards did the waters prevail.” The Hebrew cubit is about twenty-two inches. If we may trust the conclusions of science, deluges have been no unusual events in the his- tory of this globe. Most of the land, if not all of it, no matter how high at present, has been at some time sub- merged. Whatever one may think about the accuracy of the narrative in reference to the building of the ark and the uses to which it was put, there is certainly no physical improbability in the statement that that part of the earth which was then above water was thoroughly inundated. Again, the gentleman makes merry over what he calls the “rib story,” and imagines two persons before the bar of God, one believing the “rib story ” and the other denying it. The believer of it is accepted by the Judge as belonging 26 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. in Heaven, and the denier of it as belonging in Hell. And this he puts before the public as Bible doctrine—as if any man of common sense, whether Jew or Gentile, ever defended so ridiculousa theory. Asa further specimen of this unfair- ness, I present you this: ‘“ Do you believe the real God— if there is one—ever killed a man for making hair oil? And yet you find in the Pentateuch that God gave Moses a receipt for making hair oil to grease Aaron’s beard; and - said if anybody made the same hair oil he would be killed.” There could hardly be written a more complete misrepre- sentation and perfect caricature of the whole subject than this. The reference in Scripture is to an anointing oil, to be applied, not simply to the persons of the priests, but to the sacred vessels as well; and, thus anointed, they were set apart for what they regarded as holy uses. But if this cus- tom which Mr. Ingersoll seeks to hold up to ridicule, was simply Jewish, there would be some show or plausibility for talking about it as he does; but he has not even that to jus- tify his attack. Tor this custom of using anointing oils in connection with religious services, and sacred persons, and utensils, was common among the idolatrous nations, and even conspicuous among the rites of the Romans. And even now one often meets with the spirit of the same cus- tom. Ido not know whether the Colonel is a member of the Masonic fraternity, but he must have seen representa- tives of that ancient Order pour out anointing oil upon the corner-stone of some building which they were engaged in laying. Why not ridicule that, and why not also ridicule: the beautiful custom of that Order of dropping upon the uncovered coffin of a deceased member the little sprigs of evergreen that the brethren bear in their hands as they march around his open grave? It is easy to see that with reference to every such custom, however sacred, one who Ee ; a ™ = * y ' * : Pasha of - rt r Ne So IR a phe me ee SEY DR. RYDER’S REPLY. 27 takes the naked fact apart from its associations, may find abundant material for ridicule. But whether a fair-minded man will allow himself to treat any serious subject in that manner, is a question upon which there is no occasion that I should pronounce judgment. Mr. Ingersoll makes a sim- ilar blunder in what he says about the custom of sacrificing doves for the use of priests, since the practice did not exist among the Hebrews until hundreds of years after the event which he seeks to ridicule. Top-Heavy—Too Broad a Structure Reared on a Too Nar- row Base. My third specification is, that he treats a particular inter- pretation of the Bible as the undisputed word of God. He assumes that this or that is Bible doctrine because some- body may at some time have taught it, and then denounces the whole Bible as unworthy the respect of mankind. This feature of the address runs (through the whole of it. But, in this respect, candor compels me to say his method is that of Thomas Paine in his “Age of Reason,” and of a certain class, but not the better class, of so-called infidel writers. Mr. Paine reproved the world for believing what he showed to be unreasonable doctrines, and called upon the people to throw away their Bibles for teaching such sentiments; but it was Mr. Paine, and not the Bible that was in fault, for the doctrines which he shed so much ink to condemn are not taught in the Bible. Mr. Ingersoll’s method is precisely the same. If he wishes to hold up to ‘the contempt of mankind certain doctrines that some sect may have believed, or even does believe, let him announce his subject, keep to his text, and go ahead; but to go from place to place, exhorting the people everywhere to throw away their Bibles, under the pretense that these representa- 28 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. tions of his are the undisputed word of God, is simply an outrage upon the Christian public, and unworthy any man who claims to be fair-minded. Mr. Ingersoll’s references to the clergy disappoint me. He speaks of them as if they were a set of fools, and does not add that they are all graduates of prisons, and a pack of scoundrels generally. To which gentlemanly references we need only say, that in this slanderous speech he is guilty of the same offense against fairness and good breeding that is committed by any nominal Christian who, either through blindless or perversity, can see nothing good in the services of the distinguished infidels of history, and who, to preju- dice the public against them, resort to the mean subterfuge of misrepresenting their positions, and telling falsehoods about them. If any man, in an address before this com- munity, should treat the writings of Voltaire as shabbily as Mr. Ingersoll has treated the writings of Moses,—and as to that, the entire Bible,—the Colonel would have to go out- side the Psalms of David to find imprecations to express his contempt. His references to Andover have, of course,» nothing to do with “The Mistakes of Moses,” but they relate to an important subject, and are a pertinent illustra- tion of the eminent unfairness of the general address. This is what he says: ‘They have in Massachusetts, at a place called Andover, a kind of minister factory; and every Pro- fessor in that factory takes an oath in every five years that, so help him God, he will not during the next five years intellectually advance; and probably there is no oath he could easier keep. They believe the same creed they first taught when the foundation stone was laid,'and now, when they send out a minister they brand him, as hardware from Birmingham and Sheffield. And every man who knows where he was educated knows his creed, knows every argn- ment of his creed, every book that he has read, and just DR. RYDER’S REPLY. 29 what he amounts to intellectually, and knows that he will shrink and shrivel and become more and more stupid day after day until he meets with death.” _ My personal sympathy with the Andover Theological School is not, as you may suppose, very deep and ardent., I respect the generosity and self-sacrifice of the five noble minds—one of whom was a woman—that founded the insti- tution in 1807, and theaid which it has given to liberal and exactscholarship. On the whole, Ido not like the rule to which Mr. Ingersoll refers. Probably many of those in charge of the institution do not. I understand it to be a custom con- tingent upon certain endowments made long ago, and which is observed as a matter of form. But the rule is not fairly open to the objection that Mr. Ingersoll makes against it. First, it simply relates to the theological professors, and does not concern the students. Second, it compels no man to take it who does not wish to. The University says, in effect, we believe in certain doctrines; we desire the instruc- tion of this institution to be in accordance with these ideas. Can you conscientiously teach them? If so, we wish you; if not, we do not wish you. Butif you come to us, you are not compelled to remain, but can go where you will, and when you will, and teach what you please; but so long as you remain in the service of this institution we expect you to carry out the purposes of its founders. What is there in ° this that is particularly narrow and dementing? But the Colonel repudiates his own positions. Hesays: “The com- mon school is the bread of life, but there should be nothing taught in the school except what somebody knows; any- thing else should not be maintained by a system of general taxation.” Ingersoll’s Inconsistency ! But, let us inquire, who is to decide “what somebody knows?” Practically, the answer is, the people, or their 30 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. representatives, in school boards, committees, ete. They select the text-books, and they expect instructors whom they engage to follow them, for the text-books are assumed to embody what is true on the subjects to which they relate. What would the lecturer say ofa teacher in one of our publie schools who should to-day teach the rejected doctrine that the sun revolves about the earth? What, but this: turn him out and put some one in his place who teaches the truth—which, being interpreted, means, teaches according to the authorized text-books. Why, on the very occasion of the lecture itself, after the Colonel had denounced Andover for pledging loyalty to certain doctrines, and which act he characterizes as so harmful to freedom of thought, he him- self demands of the people whom he is addressing that they will never support a certain form of doctrine, nor give money to aid in bnilding any church in which they are, taught. His language is: “I would have every one who hears me swear that he will never contribute another dollar to build another church in which is taught such infamous lies.” Mark you, not simply a pledge for five years, but they are never to change their views. My friends, is there no such thing as consistency in belief? Is one a bigot because he says, This is what I believe, and this, therefore, I defend? Are these men to be ridiculed and assailed, and only those - who shirk such responsibility to be held up as patterns and guides? Brethren, I am not speaking of some sophomoric oration, but about the deliberate thought of a man who has . made himself famous in this line of labor, and of whom our townsman who gracefully introduced him said, “a man who does his own thinking, and who thinks before he says.” Now, of every such man it is safe to say, he knows that organization is essential to the welfare of* society, and is perfectly consistent with liberty of thought. The free- thinkers of this country are organized as well as others; DR. RYDER’S REPLY. 31 and it is their right to be if they have anything to teach or defend. A Christian combination, against which some peo- ple hurl their anathemas, is simply the grouping together of those who have a similar mind and purpose, the better to do this work which they have in common. Of course there has been in connection with some of these denominations a fearful amount of bigotry. When we come to that topic we are quite at home. Bigotry is no friend of ours: we owe him no service. The denomination which this church rep- resents has received from the dominant sects about us a pretty large share of persecution and abuse. But,. for all that, we do not propose to follow the lecturer’s example and call our brethren hard names, simply because they apply such epithets to us. He Has no Poetry in His Soul; Ergo, etc. My fourth specification is, that he misrepresents the wri- tings of Moses, and, as to that, the entire Bible, by treating its metaphoric language as literal statements. Think of a man, in this age of light, speaking of the pic- tured representation of the Old ‘estament in this way: “They believed that an angel could take a lever, raise a window, and let out the desired quantity of moisture. I find out in the Psalms that he bowed the heavens and came down.” I wonder if the gentleman can see anything but mere literalism in this passage? “As the mountains round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about His people from henceforth, even forever.” Like other nations, the Hebrews have their patriotic, descriptive, didactic, and lyrical poems in the same varieties as other nations; but with them, unlike other nations, whatever may be the form of their poetry, it always possesses the characteristic of religion. Even their patriotic songs are a part of their religion. The Jews have taught the world its devotional poetry. If there is to be 3 32 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. found anywhere conceptions of the Deity and of the universe more remarkable for their sublimity and grandeur than are met with in the sacred books of the Jews, I know not where to look for them. Certainly when they are compared with the religious poems of other countries, most nearly contem- poraneous, as those of Homer and Hesiod, they are so vastly superior as to lead to the belief that, if the poets of idola- trous Greece drew their inspiration from human genius and learning, those of Judea had a higher illumination. Additional Misrepresentations. My fifth specification is, that the representation given in the lecture of the Hebrews as a people, is almost wholly in- correct, both as to the work undertaken by them and the effect of that work upon mankind. We have no disposition to shut our eyes to the ignorance, cruelty and superstition of the Hebrew race in the early periods of their history. There was but little in them that gave the promise of a great nation when Moses led them out of Egypt. They were low in the scale of civilization. Many of the things done by them we cannot justify, and we are not required to do so. But what arrests our atten- tion is, that almost from the first they show a gradual im- provement in their condition, and finally reach that proud pre-eminence when Jerusalem became the Athens of its day. There are two points of view from which to judge of the early history of any people: one is, to compare it with that of contemporary nations, and the other is, to compare it with our own time. It is manifest that the former is the proper basis of judgment. Consider, then, as already inti- mated, who the people were that Moses thus led out of Egypt. Reflect that they were but children in intelligence, — and that the higher forms of thought had but little influence over them; and that if they were held to the law of duty, DR. RYDER’S REPLY. 83 and organized into a nation, it must be by such material forms and simple customs as they could comprehend. Re- flect, furthermore, that these people had been brought up in the midst of idolatry, and that in leaving Egypt they did not get away from its influences, but that, wherever they went, they were assailed by it; that idolatry was almost the universal form of worship, and that it was a mighty task to educate these people in the doctrine of the one only living and true God, and hold them to it. Reflect, furthermore, that to secure this end much might then be done which, ' under the circumstances, would be at least excusable, that should not be done now. [fairness requires that we con- sider whether the custom originated with the Jews them- selves, and what was its spirit and purpose. Prominent mention is made in the lecture of polygamy in connection with the Jews, and one would infer from what he says that the custom of plurality of wives originated with them, and that it was a custom peculiar to them. This is his language: “Is there a woman here who believes in the institution of polygamy? Is there a man here who believes in that infamy? You say ‘no, we do not.’ Then you are better than your God was 4,000 years ago. Four thousand years ago he believed in it, taught it, and upheld it.” The facts appear to be these: Polygamy has existed from time immemorial. Even in the Homeric age of the Greeks it prevailed to some extent, and, though not known in republican Rome, it practically prevailed under the Empire, owing to the prevalence of divorce; but in what we call the Eastern nations the custom has been almost universal, being sanctioned by all religions, including that of Mohammedanism. In this regard the Hebrews, to a cer- tain extent, followed the prevalent custom viz: the law of Moses did not forbid it, but did contain many provisions against its worst abuses, and such as were intended to 84 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. restrict it within narrow limits; and, as the spirit of the Hebrew religion advanced the civilization of the nation, the practice more and more fell into disuse, until it finally died out; and in the giimpses of Jewish life which the New Testament gives us, there are no traces of it discernible. Since the Hebrew race the world over, for some 2,000 years, has as much as any other people discountenanced such practices, though still firmly believing in Moses as the prophet of God, it is clear that they do not consider polyg- amy any part of the Jewish system, but a custom permit- ted for a season because so universally practiced by the surrounding nations. Doctor Ryder Propounds a Question. But just here comes in a question of high importance. If there is nothing in Judaism to exalt woman—and every reference to her in their sacred books is one of “ humiliation and shame ”’—how happens it that the Jews discarded the custom of polygamy some two thousand years ago, while the practice still prevails among the nations of the East, and notably in Mohammedanism, which, in so many respects, takes the external form of Judaism? The truth is, that great injustice has been done to the real religion of the Hebrews, by both Christians and unbelievers. We have judged it too exclusively by the Mosaic law, and the mere letter of it at that. Real Judaism is not the Old Testament, but that which has come out of it—the result of its growth, and the expansion of its inherent forces. Lopg before the advent of our Lord the Mosaic law had virtually given way to the Jewish religion, and it is that religion, the spirit of which in the beginning so largely came from the great law-giver himself that has had three thousand years of existence to certify its right to live, and which to-day assigns it a most honorable place among the religions of humanity. And in DR. RYDER'S PEPLY. 35 dismissing this branch of our subject, it seems pertinent to inquire, where did Moses obtain his religious ideas? The Egyptians had reached high advancement in the arts and sciences in the time of Moses, but their degradation in refer- ence to religion is unmistakable. It is said of Moses that he “was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds;” and he was no doubt greatly aided by what he had learned from them, but it seems too evident to admit of discussion that he did not get his religious ideas from that source. Whence came they? But, whatever may be our answer to this question, there can be, it seems to me, but one opinion as to the respect due to the illustrious religious leader who has made upon | the race so profound an impression for good. The five specifications now before you cover the evidence we offer of the correctness of our general proposition, viz.: that the address upon “ The Mistakes of Moses,” is a con- spicuous illustration of prejudice and unfairness. Ingersoll Admits His Sad Need of Inspiration. Col. Ingersoll! uses this language: “ Nothing needs inspir- ation but a falsehood or a mistake. A fact never went into partnership with a miracle.” ‘A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether or not it is a fact.” Suppuse we testthisrule. How about good and evil, truth and error, the mysterious and the evi- dent, divine sovereignty and human freedom, heat and cold, art and asceticism, economy and benevolence, government and freedom, each of which is an undisputed fact, but each two facts that we thus group together no more fit each other than the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which, acting in opposite directions, hold the universe together? My friends, there is a recognizable distinction between the knowable and unknowable. But the line that separates the two is 36 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. not sharply defined. The border land between them seems sometimes near and at other times very far away. The realm beyond the knowable is the realm of mystery, and out of it come some of the most potential forces that sway our lives. What we call the knowable is those things that ean be demonstrated—can be proved to be true by a prac- tical method. But consider how small a portion of our real life is covered by any such form of real evidence. For neither our affections, nor our tastes, nor our judgments, nor our beliefs, nor our ambitions, nor the higher expres- sions of our moral natures, can be thus demonstrated. They do not in any way depend upon the classification of facts in nature, but are cognizable by our consciousness, and are so widely operative in our daily life, that it almost seems as if what we call the knowable never touches us at all. Science has nothing to say about, or to do with, either morals, religion, benevolence, duty, or inspiration. The sources of life, the cause of thought, of affection, passion, hope, and love, are all incomprehensible to science, and will remain so till the end of time. “There is no science of the soul, any more than there is a prayer in mathematics.” How utterly, then, does one misapprehend and misstate the real facts of human experience, who teaches that “nothing needs inspiration but a falsehood, or a mistake,” and that one is to accept nothing as true which cannot be demonstrated. How — much wiser and how much better are the words of St. Au- gustine, when he says: “God exists more truly than he can be thought of; He can be thought of more truly than he can be spoken of.” For myself, I reverently believe that the Bible contains a revelation from God. I say contains a revelation from God, not that it is in itself such a revela- tion, for the Bible, as such, was not revealed. ‘The inspira- tion that breathes through its pages is of some of the things written, but not of all; the inspiration is rather of the DR. RYDER’S REPLY. 37 thought, purpose, the leadings of God, than of the letter in which they are expressed. ‘There is, tomy mind, no appeal from the words of Christ once satisfied that he uttered the sayings which are attributed to Him in the Gospels, and they are, to me at least, infallibly true, and literally “the words of eternal life.” Ingersoll’s ‘‘ Religion of Humanity” All Right Except the Religion. The influence of such an address is to completely destroy the religious faith which the people now have, and give them nothing.in return. It is true Mr. Ingersoll commends to his hearers “ the religion of humanity.” But what does he mean by it? The answer is, he means simply Atheism, which is virtually the rejection of all religion, since it is the denial of the being of God himself. Now with God dethroned, the name religion has no further use. - What, then, is the religion of humanity to those who deny the existence of God, and leave everything either to chance or in- exorable law? One might infer from the assumption of these Atheistic teachers that free-thinkers are the only people who have any religion of humanity, or who practice it. The general impression made by the Colonel’s lecture is that Christians are a bad lot—mean, hypocritical, demented kind of folks; and that bright and progressive people, such as “have brains” (though it does not require a large supply of that article to qualify one to ridicule another person’s religion) and “do their own thinking,” reject all such absurdities as revealed religion, and are governed by some sort of a higher law. Now that this view of human nature, so complimentary and congenial, withal, is “ quite taking” is very likely true. One likes to be patted on the back in this way, and be ealled “ progressive,” and not hide-bound like those old 38 MISTAKES OF. INGERSOLL. fogies, and stupid theological graduates, and owlish minis- ters, and such sort of folks. But somehow it does not seem to stay upon the public stomach after it is taken. For this *is just the kind of talk in which noisy infidels have indulged for the past 300 years. ‘Christianity is virtually extinct,” they say, “and now we are to have a new order of things.” But, for some reason, Christianity does not die, iand the world moves forward in much the old way.” The truth is, some things seem very well as declamation that utterly elude you when you attempt to embody them in vital forms. As theories they look well, but in practice they are worthless. They are as beautiful as foam and just as substantial. Where are the monuments of free religion? In the struggle for religious liberty in France I recognize the powerful influence of Voltaire; and an advocacy of a true democracy in this country, very few, if any, did more by their pen than Thomas Paine; but, aside from these general benefits to society, where are the testimonies of the work they wrought? What did they do for the more per- fect organization of society, and for the elevation and purity of the public morals? I repeat, where are the mon- uments of this free religion? Has it nothing to show inits own behalf but slanderous assertions? And has its most distinguished advocate in this country degenerated into a jesting scoffer? Who built the institutions of learning throughout the Christian world, and who supports them? Who organized the institutions of charity, and who sustains them? I repeat, this “religion of humanity,” whatever that may be, does well enough to talk about, but, somehow, when there is solid work to be done nobody wants it, and somehow, nobody seems to do or pay much towards sup- porting it. The leading universities in Germany that did so much forty years ago in disseminating Rationalism are now comparatively empty, while those of the religious DR. RYDER’S REPLY. 39 schools are patronized. To-day every prominent university in Germany except that. in Heidelberg is controlled in the interests of revealed religion, and Heidelberg has but very few theological students left. And, if one may judge of the effects of teaching by the deportment of those taught, it will be, I think, nearly the unanimous opinion of travelers that they are very badly instructed, for a prominent part of the business of the students of that institution seems to be to get up quarrels with each other and with the public, and fight duels. The truth is, that the sober second thought of the thinking world has shut its “ colossal shears” upon the theories of Bauer, Strauss, and Renan, and no wisdom of man will ever reunite the dissevered fragments. Dr. Ryder tells a Little Story for the Sake of Illustration. _ How strange it is that nearly all the world should be such simpletons, and that human nature persists in exploding all these fine theories that have no real religion in them. But then, you know, some people are wise in their own conceits. © Let me relate an incident: “An eminent lawyer had in court a very clear case. After presenting an array of testi- mony, law, and precedents that he thought was unanswer- able, he submitted his case. To his utter astonishment, the Judge, who was bigotedly and dogmatically on the opposite side in prejudice, decided every point of the case against him. After he had recovered from his amazement, he arose and proceeded to read Blackstone and leading jurists, the statute law, and judicial decisions, flatly contradicting the decision of the Court. The Judge pompously interrupted him with: ‘That will do you no good; the mind of the court is made up; cannot change it.’ The lawyer replied: ‘J have no expectation of changing the opinion of the court. Ido not question the infallibility and the infallible accuracy of its decision. I only want to show what consum- 40 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL, mate fools Blackstone, Kent, and all jurists, our legislators, and all the judges, except the judge of this court, must have been.’ ” | Friends of humanity, lovers of the truth as it is in Jesus, can we afford to trifle with such a momentous issue as this? Is there nothing sacred, nothing but the mere husk of things ~ in which it is safe for us to placeour faith? Is there no per- manent joy this side the grave, and only the blackness of darkness beyond? Is the religion in which so many millions trust simply a delusion, and the God whom we adore merely amyth? If so, why are we in this world, and what is this world? What is anything for but to lure us into disap- pointment? | Nay, we believe in God, the Father everlasting, and in Jesus Christ, His Son. In the love which They awaken, we desire to live; and in the trust which They inspire, we hope to die. DR. HERFORD’S REPLY. 4] DR. HERFORD’S REPLY. (eee eee Att through my life I have felt a very deep sympathy for those who have become alienated from Christianity by the irrational and unworthy things often taught in its name. It seems such a miserable, gratuitous loss, as if there was not enough to make even the purest faith often dim and doubtful without it being made more so by the follies of those who should strengthen men in it! Butso itis. And of course one cannot expect men in that strong reaction to be very discriminating in what they attack. But there are limits! A man’is not absolved from the duty of thinking and speaking fairly by having come to reject the popular Opinions of society. Now it seems to me that this recent lecture of Col. Ingersoll’s overpasses all just limits. I frankly own its brilliant eloquence, its irresistible humor, and the passionate impulses of tender human sympathy which flash out in it. I can quite understand many being carried along by these. But afterward has to come the sober thinking and the honest questioning. What does it amount to? Are its positions true? Are its arguments fair? It seems to me that they are glaringly the opposite. The whole test that he applies to his subject is a mistake; the way in which he applies it is not even moderately just; its representations are one-sided; its illustrations are carica- ture. And the worst of all is that there is no sign even of any desire or attempt to be fair! 42 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. The Ingersoll Paradox. The first of Col. Ingersoll’s mistakes, is in the whole point of view in which he places the Bible in order to make it the easier target for his wit. He starts by repudiating any idea of its having been written by God’s inspiration; and yet all through talks as if God were responsible for it—as if God had said this and threatened that—and becomes quite heroic in his declaration that God may damn him, but he won’t believe such things! ‘When once inspiration is put aside, such declarations are mere clap-trap! When you look through all this, you find that in reality he simply regards the Bible as the work, the ideas of men. Very well; then take it so, and judge it fairly in that light! Ifthe book of Genesis is, as Col. Ingersoll believes, the writings and the ideas of ancient men, then do not attack it because the ideas are not those of men to-day. But that is what he is con- stantly doing. He is very fond of saying, ‘‘The question is not, is it inspired, but isit true?” That sotinds very plaus- ible, but you know, as applied to any ancient book, it is simply nonsense. It is a test which you don’t apply to any other ancient book in the world. You do not try Homer’s — “Tliad ” by the. test of whether it is true. When a clay tablet is dug up at Nineveh, or a papyrus is found in some mummy-wrappings, you don’t ask, Is it true? and if not, throw it away. The question about all such things is not, “ Are they true?” but “Are they genuine relics and repre- sentations of the thought of the ancient world?” By-and- by indeed will come the question, how far any records or statements in such ancient writings can be taken to throw light on actual history—how far their statements are alle- gorical or poetical, or mere ancient tradition? Well and - good. And by all means let those questions be applied to Genesis; apply them just as you would to any other ancient ‘ yiteas aD. HERFORD'S REPLY. 43 writings; but in the name of common fairness don’t pick it to pieces by a minute verbal criticism, and a strainéd liber- ality which would only be justifiable on the ground of its being verbally inspired. That is a mistake which may be merely a mental confusion, but a graver one lies beyond. Ingersoll’s Exaggerations and False Assertions. Mr. Ingersoll not only applies a kind of test to the book of Genesis which he would not think of applying to any other book, but he does not even apply his own test fairly. He stands upon the very letter, but he constantly misrep- resents and twists the letter. He exaggerates, makes things worse than they are; if he can make a bad meaning anyhow he does so. He says: “The gentleman that wrote Genesis begins by telling us that God made the universe ont of nothing.” It does not say so. It simply says: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” A little further on he makes great fun of the grass being created on the second day, while the sun was not created till the third day, so that the grass was growing without having “ ever been touched by a gleam of light.” Yet right before him were these words, at the beginning of all: ‘“‘ And God said, . let there be light, and there was light.” Of course, the whole idea is that of the world’s childhood, but why strain a point to make it ridiculous? It is a far worse perversion where he says: “ You will find by reading the second chap- ter that God tried to palm off on Adam a beast as his help- meet.” Now there is absolutely no justification for such a representation. The whole thing is a gratuitious invention of his own. ‘These are small verbal matters, but they show the utter unscrupulousness with which those ancient tradi- tions are exaggerated and distorted to make better point for his ridicule. And then, even in larger things, he cannot be decently 44 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. — fair, though the explaining truth may lie on the very sur- face. He quotes the first part of the command against mak- ing any graven image, and then goes off into one of its tirades about that being a law which was “the death of all art” among the Jews. Nota word about the closing part of the command—really the essence of it: ‘Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them!” Why, even if it were as he implies, that Moses utterly prohibited all the art of sculpture, the making of idols being merely one part, still, which was of most importance to the world—that the Jews should have cultivated art alittle more, or that they should, even at the cost of art altogether, be kept from idolatry? But then Mr. Ingersoll is not even true in his fact. The command was only understood as a command against idol- making, not against other forms of sculpture, and the best proof of this is that they did have other forms of sculpture even in Moses’ time, and later had art of no ignoble kind. Even there in the wilderness we read how the sacred ark was by Moses’ command shadowed over by the images of two cherubim, with outstretched wings made of pure gold, and the candlestick was made with branches which were shaped like almonds, alternately a bud and a flower. And later, when Solomon built the temple, we not only read of two similar cherubim, but of colossal size, extending their wings over the shrine, but also that “he carved all the walls of the house round about with carved figures of cherubim and palm- trees and open flowers; ” while in his own palace we read of sculptured pillars, with pomegranate capitals, and images of oxen and lions, round the great brazen “laver.” Or, take his representation of Christians thinking of Heaven as a place where their happiness will be enhanced by seeing the tortures of the damned. Here he rises to the height of his most fiery indignation. And it is a horrible idea. But then, who holds it—who preaches it? Itis an ok * el o lane DR. HERFORD'S REPLY. 45 idea of Heaven that was prevalent among one sect of Cliris- tians acentury ago. But even they have not preached it fora century. And yet he says, without a word of limita- tion, ‘This is the Christian view of Heaven,” and makes a powerful appeal to his hearers not to give a “dollar to any man to preach that falsehood.” Why, there is not a church in all the land where he could find a man preaching that to give his dollar to; no, not even if the person were only a stump politician, turned preacher in the slack season be- tween campaigns. And the same of his representation of the attitude of Christianity toward those who do not believe in the early traditions of Genesis. He represents Christianity as teach- ing that any man who does not believe the “ rib story ” will go to Hell, however good he was in other respects. Is that an honest representation? Why, even if’ all orthodoxy preached that, orthodoxy is not all of Christianity. Has Col. Ingersoll ever heard of Channing and Parker and Starr King? Are the bodies of the Unitarian church, the U 1i- versalists, the Christians, the Quakers, not worth a passing word? Did he not know when he put that champion joke about the “rib story ” that he was representing as the teach- ing of the churches what many entire churches, and the best men in all churches, never lave held, nor preached, nor countenanced in any way? Yet he comes rampaging into the field, with a whoop and a yell, brandishing his shillelah, defying Christianity, calling ministers “owls ” and “ idiots,” and swooping round as if he were the first who had found out a little common sense about the Bible! But after ali, the real matter at issue is not as to this or that exaggerated or unfair criticism of the Old Testament, but has it any real, substantial worth? It has. It gives us the origin of the world’s noblest religious faith; it shows us the purest faith of to-day in its first roots in the far-off ancient world; : em 46 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. and so I think it strengthens our conviction that that faith is not a temporary or isolated thing that may be mistaken, but part of that long development of man which surely corresponds to the truth and fact of the universe. Dr. Herford’s Story of Moses, with an Apt Illustration— The Germinal Power of the Pentateuch. When I hear people treating the Pentateuch as something they would like to see done away, I cannot help wishing that it could be dug up afresh in these days of curious research into the past. Why, suppose that the Jews had no such books; and had not known anything of their origin except a vague tradition of some sort of migration under one Moses, and curiously fitting to this the Egyptian tradi- tion—which is, you know, that some thirteen hundred years before Christ a great multitude of people had gone out of Egypt led by an Egyptian priest, who taught them many things contrary to the Egyptian religion, and afterward changed his name to Moses. Well, supposing then these books of the Pentateuch should be discovered somewhere —why, the world would go wild overthem. What would it matter whether it could be settled that Moses did or did not write them—or that pcssibly they were really not writ- ten till centuries after, and only preserved what was believed about him at that later date—still the fact would remain that they take us by traditions, at any rate, so much further back into the past, and show us there one of the very noblest stories of the world;—for that is what the story of Moses is. Take off all the discount you will for exaggeration—I dare say the numbers are immensely exaggerated—suppose the idea of his having been led by God speaking to him to have been only his own intense consciousness of what was best, ascribed to God; suppose the idea of his having been helped by miracles to have been only his own reverent Dk. HEPFORD’S REPLY. 47 impression, ascribing every trouble that came on Egypt, and every favoring circumstance to his own people, to some purposed and direct help from God; all that does not touch the essence of the story of Moses! There it stands—how those Hebrews through many generations had sunk into the Pariah and Helot class of that great rich Egyptian civiliz- ation; and how at last this Moses rose up, to rally them to a mighty effort to get right away into some other land. He had been somehow brought up among the Egyptians, trained in the sacred city, educated among the priests—an adopted son of Pharaoh’s danghter—but he had given it all up, identified himself with his down-trodden people, and at last won for them the liberty to go/ And they went out—out into the great desert waste. What does it matter that the tradition of their numbers got perhaps enormously exagger- ated? If there were only a hundredth part—thirty thousand instead of three millions in all—there were quite enough to task their leader’s fortitude to its utmost; and through those books we have at least very living glimpses of him, in his efforts to keep them from grumbling and getting disheart- ened; in his efforts to keep them true to his simple teach- ing of the one Almighty God; in his lonely hours when he was listening for the eternal word, and shaping his best thoughts which he believed came to him from God, into laws for his people. And there is the great fact, you know— however he did it—he dzd guide and lead them through that long migration, and at last brought them to the land from which their fathers had gone out long before, and bade them go in and possess it! And that multitude whom he led out of Egypt a race of slaves, servile with long oppression, at every difficulty talking of going back, he had in that forty years knit into a brave, hardy, fierce race—who did go in and possess the land and became the progenitors of one of the world’s noblest races. That is the story of Moses 4 48 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. —just the barest skeleton of it—taking one, the largest, most unmistakable features; and I say again there is no finer story in history. And what will you say of a man who will make fun of it? Why, what would you think of a man who would go around the country, making fierce fun of Abraham Lincoln, holding up his gaunt, lank figure to ridicule, burlesquing his speeches, denouncing as lies some of those quaint little anecdotes, and holding him up as a fool and an idiot? And yet that glorious work that makes Lincoln’s name dear—not to’ Americans only but to the lovers of freedom and of man in every nation—that work of his was only the modern counterpart of what Moses did in the morning of the world! But the Pentateuch is most valuable, not for the light it throws upon the origin of a people, but for the hght it throws upon the origin of ideas. In the teachings of Moses, in the religion of that little migrating tribe, by-and-by fighting for its foothold in Palestine, we have the begin- ings of those thoughts from which have sprung the three greatest, most living religions of the world—Judaism, Christianity and Mahommedanism. Granted, the begin- nings are only rude, is that any reason for making fun of them? What would you think of a man who should take one of those rude urns that they dig out of the mound build- er’s graves and put it side by side with some beautiful porce- lain of to-day, and scoff and sneer at those early dwellers on the earth because the best decoration they could make was a few rude scratches in the clay with their flint-knives? Already, even so far off, the idea of one Almighty God, that which the priests of Egypt held as a sacred mystery— if they did hold it—that leader of the Hebrews taught his ‘peopie as the truth for all, and the truth to be kept ever- more before them. Already, too, in the old world, where every race shaped out its thought of God in some idol form, * DR. HERFORD’S REPLY. 49 that leader was giving them as the second of his great com- mands that they should make no idol images at all to wor- ship. Already, too, they had that idea of a God of Right- eousness! ‘True, their idea of righteousness was not yet very high, but the best they knew they ascribed to God. Where in all the ancient world will you find such a description of Deity as that which Moses brought with him out of the solli- tudes of Sinai?—“ The Lord; the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, bearing with iniquity, transgression and sin, but that will by no means clear the guilty.” The Mosaic Religion of Humanity. Nor is this divine side of that old Hebrew religion all. Mr. Ingersoll is very strong on the religion of humanity. Indeed, that is the only real religion, he says. Well, where did the religion of humanity begin? Why, it began there —among those same old Hebrews. The religion of a truer thought of God and of a better thought of man went to- gether even in their beginnings, as they did afterward when they both reached their culmination together in Christ, with His great teaching of love to God and love to man. Mr. Ingersoll, however, has nothing but the bitterest contempt for the morality of the Pentateuch, because it is behind the morality of to-day! ‘See, you are better than your God,” he cries; “for four thousand years ago He be- Heved in polygamy, and you don’t!” The truth of which simply is that four thousand years ago polygamy existed among the Jews, as everywhere else on earth then, and even their prophets do not come to the idea of its being wrong. But what is there to be indignant about in that? Simply men—whom Mr. Ingersoll regards, in other lectures, as having come up from the brutes—had then got only so far 50 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. in their ideas of marriage. But if their religion is a good one, what do you expect to find it doing? Altogether al- tering, even so early, the marriage relation, or purifying and elevating it? Surely this is all we can look for, and this we find. I know that Mr. Ingersoll says: ‘There is not one word about woman in the Old Testament, except the words of shame and humiliation.” Well, though he says he has read the Bible over again this year, I can only conclude he has read it very hurriedly and slightly, for not only are there such passages as that of Naomi and Ruth, the Shunamite woman, Hannah, the mother of Samuel, and that most beautiful picture at the close of the book of Prov- erbs of a good wife, but I think that throughout woman is spoken of in the Bible, not as the slave, but as the compan- ion and the helpmate. The “wise-hearted women” share the work of making that goodliest of the tents which was in the desert wanderings to be the tabernacle; Miriam, the sister of Moses, holds the place of a praphetess, and other prophet- esses we read of; and the whole law of marriage in the Penta- teuch, with its stern punishment of death for adultery, either on the part of man as well as woman, shows the process of elevation towards that higher law of one wife and one husband which had become universal by the time of Christ. Or take the slavery question again. Slavery was univer- sal in the ancient world. Men had not come anywhere toa sense of any inherent wrongfulness in it for a thousand years or two after the time of Moses. But mark where this finer humanity of the Mosaic religion comes in; it al- ready brings glimpses of the idea of an inalienable right to liberty—though not a perfect sight of it. The law of the Pentateuch abounds with laws about the relation of master and slave, which, as compared with what we know of slavery, é.g., among the Greeks and Romans a thousand years later, were simply a marvel of noble humanized thought. DR. HERFORD'S REPLY. 51 And then as to the general tone and character of that Mosaic law. Mr. Ingersoll pooh-poohs the Ten Command- ments as merely what men knew before; knew all along. But such a law as this: “Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small; but thou shalt have a perfect and just weight—a perfect and just measure shalt thou have—for all that do such things, and all that do un- righteously, are an abomination unto the Lord thy God;” and this: “If aman shall steal an ox or a sheep he shall restore five oxen for an ox and four sheep for a sheep; ” and this: ‘Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger as for one of your own country, for I am the Lord your God;” and this: “Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy—whether he be of thy breth- " ren, or of the strangers that are in the land; at his day thou shalt give him his hire; neither shall the sun go down upon it, for he is poor and setteth his heart upon it.” Thereis a good deal of the religion of humanity about these, isn’t there? | And other laws come in here and there with such a kind consideration for poverty and need. When a man har- vested he must not reap the corners of his field, nor gather up the gleanings, and if he forgot a sheaf and left it.in the field he must not go again and fetch it. ‘Thou shalt leave them for the poorand the stranger.” Andthis: “Whena man hath taken a new wife he shall not go out to war neither shall he be charged with any business; but he shall be free at home one year and shall cheer up his wife whom he hath taken.” And even in regard to war—in which cer- tainly they were fierce enough—what a gleam of kindness comes in in that command that when they were besieging a city they must not cut down the fruit trees about it for their war purposes, but only trees that they knew were not for fruit. Why, I might go on for an hour quoting these 52 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. more merciful laws and showing you the large, grand thoughts of duty that pervade that whole system which the Jews believed had been given to them by Moses. But there is nothing really to fear. For the moment many may be led to throw the Bible away, and to give up religion as the weak nonsense he so scornfully proclaims it. Religion will abide in the heart of man. And the Bible will stand because in it we have the accumulated utterance of religion in its best beginnings and along its noblest line of development. THE JEWISH RABBIS REPLY. 53 THE JEWISH RABBIS REPLY. od WE need not pray for Col. Robert Ingersoll’s soul, for he says he has none; and in this instance we are bound to be- lieve him, as he is judge, jury and witness in the case; and there may be men without souls, as there are some without conscience, others without reason, and quite a number with- out principle. The first man of whom the Bible says that he prayed, was Abraham. He prayed for Abimelech. But Col. Ingersoll, we suspect, is not smitten with that disease. He prayed for the wicked people of Sodom and Gomorrah, to which class belongs no American citizen, of course, as “ Mitchell’s Geography” substantially proves. Jacob prayed when his brother Esau approached him with an armed force; and the Colonel has come to us unarmed, and without any force except a few harmless agents of the Boston Lecture Bureau, who take the money, show the show, and depart in peace. Moses prayed for his sister Miriam when she was leprous, but Mr. Ingersoll is no woman, and his excellent exterior betokens no leprosy. Joshua prayed to make the sun and moon stand still, but Mr. Ingersoll is neither the greater nor the lesser light, and to the best of our knowledge nobody wants him to stand still at any place. Speaking of imagination, it reminds me that Col. Inger- soll said he could not imagine the existence of a God. Im- agine God! Any professor of philosophy would faint if he was told that illogical expression. How can God be im- b4 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. agined? Perhaps one of Mr. Ingersoll’s manufactured gods could be imagined in a disorderly imagination, as only phys- ical objects of nature or combinations thereof could be im- agined—nothing else. What kind of a god would that be which could be submitted to the imagination of a man with- out asoul? It must be the miniature or pocket edition of an idol, made by man, such as Col. Ingersoll purchases and exhibits to amuse tall babies. It must be that sort of far- cical gods which he describes in his burlesques. He is not the first quack who would not take his own medicines, although he is certainly among reasoners the first who would imagine Deity, for none tries to imagine that which reason only can grasp; none will permit himse.f to be led astray by imagination where pure reflection only can reach the aim. The perversion of ideas springs from a mistake about Moses. A god or gods have been fabricated at the expense of Moses, until each little priest had his own snug little god that could be used as the Crusader’s emblem or the license of the auto-da-fe, to massacre and glut in human gore, or the frail woman’s last resort of love to make honest men out of rogues, pure souls out of the dregs of hell. The god or gods variously depicted, miscellaneously described, and promiscuously applied become objects of imagination, hence also of the farce. The mistake is that Moses was charged with all the follies of theological jugglers and sophistical bummers. The God whom Moses taught is emphatically the God whom no man ean see and live,—the Great I Am, who is the I, the Ego, the Subject of the Universe, the law, the life, the love and the intellect of the cosmos, the Eternal Jehovah, essence itself, and the absolute substance, in whom all things are as all objects of a man’s tender love are in his soul, of whom all things came and into whom all return. This is not a God fabricated by man, hence He could not THE JEWISH RABBI’S REPLY. 59 be :magined by man, as no man can imagine a bemg supe- rior to himself. This is the God taught by Moses; the other gods may be subjected to farce and ribaldry, while the true — Deity is too sublime even for the pyrotechnical displays of Mr. Ingersoll’s disentangled humor. It is a mistake about Moses which feeds his boiler to tweedle the rusted think- apparatus of twaddlers. The God of Moses is too great for Mr. Ingersoll; he only deals in gods which can be imag- ined, and in speaking of mistakes of Moses he reverently passes by the God of Moses. The man is not as bad as his - reputation. I maintain that Col. Robert Ingersoll is not half as bad as his reputation. The man was persecuted by his country- men, was defeated in his political aspirations by church- members, and thinks the Presbyterians have done it. He is aman of prominent talents, belonging to the better class; all on account of the Presbyterians, he was teased, perse- cuted, and wounded in his pride, and so he became a public lecturer. But business is business; if one wants to make money he must know how. He could imagine that people go to the circus to see the clown, to the theater to laugh over the comedian. People want fun to be amused, alcohol to force the blood to the brain, to fill up the vacuum. He could see that earnest men who reason on principles would not take with the masses. Aware of his own talents as a humorist and an orator, of the scarcity of humorists in this country, and the plenitude of slang, low comedy, and uncul- tivated taste, he could only choose the career which he did choose—a career of ribaldry, to laugh over everything holy, to sneer alike at human follies, frailties, virtue and piety; and as a business man he has chosen well—he makes plenty of money and hurts nobody. A moral effect he will never have upon anybody, because there is no moral force in his burlesque. He is no Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, no 06 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. Voltaire, Strauss, Feuerbach, or even a Heinrich Heine, because he lacks the research, the erudition, the systematical learning, and the moral backbone of either of them. He wili not set [tome on fire in order to sing from his balcony the destruction of Troy; he lacks the fire and the torch. It is all pyrotechnical ribaldry, which sweeps away many a con- sumptive superstition: and laughs many a prejudice out of existence; but truth takes care of itself. Let the man alone; he is better than his reputation. You think, perhaps, I ought to be very angry, because the gentleman spoke of the mistakes of Moses, and ridiculed the great lawgiver of the Jews. Let me tell you first, any- thing over which you laugh leaves no particular impression behind. That which goes not though the avenues of reason or the depth of the moral sentiment in a short time proves effectless. Scorn is a terrible weapon to achieve moment- ary success, but it is worse than worthless after a second sober thought or a healthy action of the feelings. Then let me say, the theology of Moses is certainly beyond the reach of Col. Ingersoll, for he is no reasoner; he can spit, but he could not think with philosophical minds. He never studied through or even read any of the philosophical systems of Germany, England, or France; nor has he the ability todo it. He is no naturalist of any description, has never troubled himself about any specialty thereof, and so he talks about matters and things in general as is the American custom, what the Germans call Wurst-philosophie, good enough as jokes or for beer-house reasonings. When he speaks of the infinite he becomes too ludicrous for any- thing, especially for men of thought to make anything out of it. He will not upset the theology of Moses. The law of Moses is also secured against the Colonel’s possible attacks. He will commence no trouble with his Blackstone or Hugo Grotius, or the other writers on law THE JEWISH RABBI'’S REPLY. 57 who maintain that all law rests upon the Mosaic legisla- Lion. Thirty-five hundred years of history, and the common consent of the civilized world at this end of the nineteenth century, are a little too much for any man to upset. He says he could write a better Decalogue than Moses did, but that is said only—he is not going to do it; he will not even add a category of law to the ten. Well, then, if he is not the man to attack successfully the theology or jurisprudence of Moses, I have no cause to ob- ject to his lectures. He ridicules Bible stories, but that concerns literalists only, not us. If all the stories of the Pentateuch be ridiculed, denied, or otherwise disposed of, it . does not change an iota in the jurisprudence or theology of Moses. Let the literalists take up that part; it does not concern us so very much. — Here, again, is a point which makes me feel bad and badly disposed to the eloquent humorist. Why does he continu- ally repeat that which others have said often before him; why does he not hit upon something original? He re- hearses old rags in new shoddy, and that is unworthy of a man who has any pride about him. He does sometimes worse than that; he ignores his opponents, which no honest man must do. He speaks a long yarn about the history of creation, always assuming an air of originality, without having the honesty of mentioning even Dr. J. W. Dawson’s work, “The Origin of the World,” which upsets his whole Benda. It is dishonest to Hake people believe that a thing said is indisputable, when it has been completely upset. He appeals to the apotheosis of labor to impeach Moses, because it said in the Genesis that God cursed man. “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread;” and labor is a blessmg to man. Did all Socialists clap hands? If not, 58 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. some must have thought this is the language of a dema- gogue, who is either a hypocrite or a self-deluded man. La- bor and hard labor are two different things, and the “sweat of thy brow” points to hard labor, which rests like a curse upon the poor man, and is the severest punishment imposed on the criminal condemned to hard labor. He talks about the creation of woman like an ignorant — man who has not the remotest idea of the difficulties among biologists, considering the differentiation of man and the origin of sexes. So he talks about the littleness of the ark and smites Charles Darwin in the face, instead of saying this proves Darwin’s theory on the origin of species. He scoffs at the God who destroyed His own children and undertakes to teach the Colonel of Peoria how he should educate his. It all depends upon what kind of children one wishes to bring up. Usually every parent brings up his own kind. God wanted them to bring up God-like children, and when they would not do it, he got them out of the way in preference to destroying human freedom or perpetuating wickedness. If it is only to bring up such children as Rob- ert Ingersoll, of Peoria, IlI., no such stringency is necessary. Musquashes grow spontaneously in abundance. Then he speaks about 600 pigeons a day for three priests, and does not know that there were no pigeons in the wilderness, and the Mosaic sacrificial polity was not introduced till Joshua had taken the Land of Canaan, and then there were more priests than there are to-day humorists in America, for Joshua gave them quite a number of cities, and I would not be astonished if those American humorists could eat more pigeons than they can do good in this world. But what is the use to speak of the mistakes of Moses? Speak of the mistakes about Moses. Did Moses write the Genesis? Says Col. Ingersoll, “I do not know;” and he does not know a great many other things. Did Moses write e 4 THE JEWISH RABBIS REPLY. 59 the historical portions of the Pentateuch? Says the Illinois Colonel again, “I do not know.” If he has written all that, did the translators and commentators which the Colonel read represent correctly the ideas of Moses? “ Do n’t know,” says the Colonel. If those writers do represent the matter correctly, have those points which the Colonel ridicules _never been discussed and refuted? “Don’t know,” says the Colonel; and decent men must not curse; still they are permitted to say, “ Why do you talk of matters of which you know so preciously little? That is all excusable, however, In this case. The humorous and eloquent gentleman is out on a lecture tour, and wants to succeed. This can be done by reckless ribaldry only. It makes no difference whether Hell or gods, Devil or Moses, Pope or Presbyterian church anything that will pay must be pressed into the service. The Colonel’s field is small; he has no great choice of sub- jects, and he must take the first best to ridicule it and make it pay. He has that particular talent, and could not do the same work in another field. Tle cannot criticise Aristotle and Emanuel Kant and make it pay, because he cannot read them. He cannot ridicule Carlyle or Stuart Mill, because he cannot understand them. So he picks up some small stories which the children know, and dishes them up in his own humoristic way for the amusement of big babies. The man understands his business to the T. I tell you, he is not as bad as his reputation. I beg a thou- sand pardons of Col. Robert Ingersoll if I have wronged him. I did not mean to make fun of him any way. THE UBRART. Pea OTHE oe WnIVERSITY AF WKINOIS Zep \\\ \\\\\ [ Photographed by Mosher.] DR. GIBSON’S REPLY, 61 DR. GIBSON’S REPLY.* Unuaprrizy, the attention of Bible students has been al- most exclusively directed to certain difficulties. These dif- ficulties all arise, as it seems to me, from three sources, and the Bible is not to blame for any of them. First source: treating the passage as if it were history, whereas it is apoc- alypse. Second source: taking it as intended to teach sci- ence, especially astronomical and geological science. Third source of difficulty: the mistakes of translators. For exam- ple, the unfortunate word firmament continually comes to the front as one of the “ mistakes of Moses.” Strange that a Latin word should be a mistake of Moses! Did Moses know Latin? Did he ever write the letters f, i, r, m, etc.? Not only is the word “firmament” not in the Hebrew Bible, but it does not represent the Hebrew word at all. The word firmament means something strong, solid. The Hebrew word for which it is an unfortunate translation, signifies something that is very thin, extended, spread out; just the best word that could be chosen to signify the at- mosphere. Then there is the word “whales,” that Professor Huxley made so merry over a year ago. But the Hebrew does not say whales. The Hebrew word refers to great sea monsters, and is just the very best word the Hebrew language affords to describe such animals as the plesiosaurus and ichthyo- saurus and other creatures that abounded in the time prob- *Portions of this reply recently apneared in the daily press signed ‘‘CANDOR;” other portions were selected by the Editor from his new work, ust published by Randolph & Uo., New York, entitied ''The Ages Befure Moses,” ran ei? - P 4 aie Rae) > 5 > Pa aa | a > a i ray : yo Swe 2 - , a 4 ; go TT. Jahan " h ee hy ny + “ \ ‘ Hat a i ee - td = 6 ] a Me / ? 62 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. ably referred to there. Let us only guard against these three sources of error, and we shall not find many diffi- culties. If we would only avoid the mistakes of Moses’ critics, we would not show our ignorance by talking about the mistakes of Moses. We have said that almost everybody knows about the difficulties, but how few are there comparatively that know about the wonderful harmonies? So much is said and writ- ten about the difficulties, that many have the idea that the narrative is full of difficulties—nothing but difficulties in it —nothing that agrees with science as we know it now; whereas, when we look at it, we find the correspondencies most wonderful all the way through. Let us look at a few of them. And first, the absence of dates. The fact is very noteworthy that there is such abundance of space left for the long periods, not till quite recently demanded by science. And this does not depend on any theory of day-periods; for those who still hold to the literal days, find all the room re- quired before the first day is mentioned. Not six thousand years ago, but “in the beginning.” How grand and how true in its vagueness. Another negative characteristic worth noticing here is the absence of details where none are needed. For example, there is almost nothing said in detail about the heavens. What is said about the heavens in addition to the bare fact . of creation, is only in reference to the earth, as, for exam- ple, when the sun and moon are treated of, not as separate worlds, but only in their relation to this earth as giving. light to it and affording measurements of time. There is no attempt to drag in the spectroscope! Ingersoll Betrays His Ignorance. A certain infidel lately seemed to think he had made a point against the Bible by remarking that the author of it eo, --_ DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 63 had compressed the astronomy of the universe into five words. Just think of the ignorance this betrays. It pro- ceeds on the assumption that the author of this apocalypse intended to teach the world the astronomy of the universe; and then, of course, it would have been avery foolish thing for him to discuss the whole subject in five words. Whereas, in this very reticence we have a note of truth. If this work had been the work of some mere cosmogonist, some theo- rist as to the origin of the universe, he would have been sure to have given us a great deal of information about the stars. But a prophet of the Lord has nothing to do with astrono- my as such. All that he has to do with the stars is to make it clear that the most distant orbs of light are included in the domain of the Great Supreme, and this he can do as well in five words as in five thousand; and so, wisely avoiding all detail, he simply says, ‘‘ He made the stars also.” There was danger that men might suppose some power resident in these distant stars distinct from the power that ruled the earth. He would have them to understand that the same God that rules over this little earth, rules to the uttermost bounds of the great universe. And this great truth he lays on immovable foundations by the sublimely simple words, “‘He made the stars also.” But passing from that which is merely negative, see how many positive harmonies there are. Harmony of Science and Genesis. First, there is the fact of a beginning. The old infidel objection used to be that ‘all things have continued as they were from the beginning of the creation.” Nobody pre- tends to take that position now that science points so clearly to beginnings of everything. You can trace back man to his beginning in the geological cycles. You can trace back mammals to their beginning; birds, fishes, insects to their beginnings; vegetation to its beginning; rocks to their 5 64 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. beginning. The general fact of a genesis is immovably established by science. Secondly, “The heavens and the earth.” Note the order Though almost nothing is said about the heavens, yet what is said is not at all in conflict with what we now know about them.’ We know now that the earth is not the center of the universe. Look forward to Genesis iv. 2, and you will find the transition to the reverse order—quite appropriate there, as we shall see in the next lecture; but here, where the genesis of all things, the origin of the universe, is the subject, it is not the earth and the heavens, but “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Thirdly, there is the original chaos. “ The earth was without form and void.” ‘Turn to the early pages of .any good modern scientific book, that attempts to set forth the genesis of the earth from a scientific standpoint, and you will find just this condition described. Observe, too; in passing, how carefully the statement is limited to the earth. The universe was not chaotic then. ‘ Fourthly, the work of creation is not a simultaneous, but an extended one. If the author had been guessing or theorizing, he would have been much more likely to hit on the idea of simultaneous, than successive creation. Butthe idea of successive creation is now proved by science to be true. Fifthly, there is a progressive development, and yet not a continuous progression without any drawbacks. There are evenings and mornings; just what. science tells us of the ages of the past: Here it is worth while perhaps to notice the careful use of the word “ created.” An objec- tion has been made to the want of continuity in the so-called orthodox doctrine of creation, the orthodox doctrine being supposed to be that of fresh creation at every point. But the Bible is not responsible for many “fresh ereations.” — DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 65 The word “created ” is only used three times in the record. First, as applied to the original creation of the universe, possibly in the most embryonic state. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Next, in connec- tion with the introduction of life (v. 2), and last, in refer- ence to the creation of man (v. 27). In no other place is anything said about direct creation. It is rather making, appointing, ordering, saying “ Let there be.” “Let the waters bring forth,” etc. Now, is it not a significant fact that these three points where, and where alone, the idea of absolute creation is introduced, are just the three points at which the great apostles of continuity find it impossible to make their connections? You will not find any one that is able to show any other origin for the spirit of man than the Creator Himself. You cannot find any one that is able te show any other origin of animal life than the Creator Him- self. ‘There have been very strenuous efforts made a great many times to show that the living may originate from the not-living; but all these efforts have failed. And the origin of matter is just as mysterious as the origin of life. No other origin can be even conceived of the primal matter of _ the universe than the fiat of the great Creator. Thus we find the word “creation” used just at the times when modern science tells us it is most appropriate. Sixthly, the progression is from the lower to the higher. An inventor would have been much more likely to guess that man was created first, and afterward the other creatures subordinate to him. But the record begins at the bottom of the scale and goes up, step by step, to the top: again, just what geology tells us. All these are great general correspondencies; but we might, Seventhly, go into details and find harmonies even there, all the way through. Take the fact of light appearing on the first day. The Hebrew word for “ light ” is wide enough 66 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. to cover the associated phenomena of heat and electricity, and are not these the primal forces of the universe? Again, it used to be a standard difficulty with sceptics that light was said to exist before the sun was visible from the earth. Science here has come to the rescue; and who doubts it now? It is very interesting to see a distinguished geologist like Dana using this very fact that light is said to have existed before the sun shone upon the earth as a proof of the divine © origin of this document, on the ground that no one would have guessed what must have seemed so unlikely then. So much for the progress coward the Bible which science has made since the day when a sceptical writer said of the Mosaic narrative, “ It would still be correct enough in great principles were it not for one individual oversight and one unlucky blunder! ”—the oversight being the solid firmament (whose oversight?), and the blunder, light apart from the sun (whose blunder’). . I have spoken already about the words “created” and “made,” in relation to the discriminating use of them. This word ragia, too, how admirable it is to express the tenuity of our atmosphere, especially as contrasted with the clumsy words used by the enlightened Greeks (stereoma) the noble Romans (firmamentum), and even by learned Englishmen of the nineteenth century (firmament)! And not to dwell on mere words, as we well might, look at the general order of creation: vegetation before animal life, birds and fishes before mammals, and all the lower animals before man. Is not that just the order you find in geology? More particularly, while man is last he is not created on a separate day. He comes in on the sixth day along with the higher animals, yet not in the beginning, but toward the close of the period. Again, just what geology tells us. DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 67 The Harmony of Genesis and Science, not the Result of Guess Work, but of Inspiration. These are only some of the many wonderful harmonies between this old revelation and modern science. I would like to see the doctrine of chances applied to this problem, to determine what probability there would be of a mere guesser or inventor hitting upon so many things that cor- ‘respond with what modern science reveals. I don’t believe there would be one chance in a million! Is it not far harder for a sensible man to believe that this wonderful apocalypse is the fruit of ignorance and guess-work, than that it is the product of inspiration? It is simply absurd to imagine that an ignorant man could have guessed so hap- pily. Nay, more. Let any of the scientific men of to-day set themselves down to write out a history of creation in a space no larger than that occupied by the first chapter of Genesis and I do not believe they could improve onit at all. And if they did succeed in producing anything that would pass for the present, in all probability in ten years it would be out of date. Our apocalypse of creation is not only bet- ter than could be expected of an uninspired man in the days of the world’s ignorance, but it is better than Tyndall, or Huxley, or Haeckel could do yet. If they think not, let them take a single sheet of paper and try! ....-Itisof great importance to remember that the sym- bolism attaches to the form, and not to the substance of the history. To call this whole story of the Fall a mere alle- gory, is to take away from it all historical reality. Let us distinguish carefully between the reality of the history, which is a very important thing, and the literality of it, which is of minor importance. It is very unfortunate that so much time is often spent upon the mere letter, regardless of the warning of the great apostle: “The letter killeth, 68 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. but the spirit giveth life. This accounts for nine-tenths of the difficulties people have about it. Suppose a person, seeing a cocoanut for the first time, and being told it was good for food, should spend all his time gnawing away at the shell, and never get at the kernel. No wonder of his verdict should be, it is not fit to eat. So you will find that most of the people who have insuperable difficulties with the Bible are those who are busying themselves all the time about the shell and never get hold of the kernel. If they could only seize the kernel they would so readily see the beauty and enjoy the taste, and find the use of it; and then, perhaps, they would begin to see some beauty and some usefulness in the shell too. “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.” A very good illustration of this is found in the fifteenth verse of the third chapter, where we read about “ the seed of the woman bruising the head of the serpent.” The liter- alists get nothing more out of it than a declaration that in time to come serpents will annoy the descendants of Eve by biting at their heels, and on the other hand, the descendants of Eve will destroy serpents by crushing their heads! The mere shell of the thing manifestly. The reality, as pictured there, is of a great conflict to go on throughout all these ages of development; a great conflict between the forces of good on the one hand, and the forces of evil on the other. Of this conflict the issue is not doubtful. There is to be serious trouble all the while from the forces of evil, but in the end these forces will be crushed. There is One coming —a descendant of this same woman, called here “the seed of the woman”—who will at last “bruise the head of the. serpent,” and gain the victory, and bring in that glorious era when sin and suffering and pain and death shall have all rolled away into the past. There is a great deal more than this in that wonderful verse—more than we would DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 69 have time to tell though we spent a whole hour on it. We only refer to it now as an illustration. And now, what matters it whether you take the “ser- pent” that tempted Eve to be a real and literal serpent, or the mere (phenomenal) form of a serpent assumed by the Spirit of Evil for the purpose? or even whether the serpent form is connected with the old style of pictorial representa- tion? All that is minor and subordinate. There is no use of wasting time onit. All we want to be sure of is the truth, that there was a tempter, an evil spirit, that in a seductive form tempted our first parents and they fell. Let us by all means beware of allowing our time to be frittered away by mere trivial questions of the letter, instead of mak- ing it our great aim to see and to seize the great spiritual truths set forth in this old and simple record. There are many who represent this book of the Genera- tions as a second edition of the Genesis, or separate account of the creation; and of course they find difficulty in compar- ing the two. All their difficulty, as we shall see, comes from their not understanding the passage as a whole, their not perceiving what it was intended toteach. It will help us to meet this difficulty if we follow the same order of ideas as in the exposition of Genesis i., viz.: God, Nature, Man. In all we shall find marked differences. But these differences, in- stead of presenting any difficulty, will have their reason made abundantly manifest. God. First, then, there is a different name for God introduced here. All through the Genesis it has been “God said,” “God made,” “ God created.” Now it is invariably, “Je- hovah God ” (Lorp God in our version). And this is the only continuous passage in the Bible where the combination is used. How is this explained? Very easily. In the 70 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. apocalypse of the Genesis, God makes Himself known sim- ply as Creator. Sin has not yet entered, and so the idea of salvation has no place. In this passage sin is coming in, and along with it the promise of salvation. Now the name Jehovah is always connected with the idea of salvation. It is the covenant name. It is the name which indicates God’s special relation to His people, as their Saviour and Redeemer. This name is introduced now, because God is about to make Himself known in anew character. He ap- peared in Genesis simply as Creator. He appears now in the book of the Generations as Redeemer; and so we get the name Jehovah in place of the name God. But lest any one should suppose from the change of name that there is any change in the person; lest any one suppose that He who is to redeem us from sin and death, is a different being from Him who created the heavens and the earth, the two names are now combined—Jehovah God. The combination is retained throughout the entire narrative of the Fall to make the identification sure. ‘Thereafter either name is. used by itself without danger of error. Nature. Look next at the way in which Nature is spoken of here. When you look at it aright, you find there is no repetition. Nature in the Genesis is universal nature. God created all things. But here, nature comes in, as it has to do immedi- ately with Adam. Now see the effect of this. It at once removes difficulties, which many speak of as of great mag- nitude. In the first place, it is not the whole earth that is now spoken of, but a very limited district. Our attention is. narrowed down to Eden, and the environs of Eden, a limi- ted district in a particular part of the earth. Hence the _ difficulty about there not being rain in the district (“earth”) DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 71 disappears. Let me here remind you once or all that the Hebrew word for earth and for land or district is the same. See Gen. xii., 1., where the word is twice used, translated “country ” and “ land.” Again, it is not the vegetable kingdom as a whole that is referred to in the fifth verse, but only the agricultural and horticultural products. The words “plant,” “field” and “orew” (v. 5) are new words, not found in the creation record.* In Gen. i. the vegetable kingdom as a whole was spoken of. Now, it is simply the cereals and garden herbs, and things of that sort; and here instead of coming into col- lision with the previous narrative, we have something that corresponds with what botanists tell us, that field and gar- den products are sharply distinguished in the history of nature from the old flora of the geological epochs. In the same way it is not the whole animal kingdom that is referred to inverse nineteen, but only the domestic ani- mals, those with which man was to be especially associated, and to which he was very much more intimately related than to the wild beasts of the field. It may be easy to make this narrative look ridiculous, by bringing the wild beasts in array before Adam, as if any companionship with them were conceivable. But when we bear in mind that reference is made here to the domestic animals, there is nothing at all inappropriate in noticing that while there is a certain degree of companionship possible between man and some of those animals, as the horse and dog, yet none of these was the companion he needed. In the first chapter of Genesis, nature is the great theme. Weare carried over universal nature, and the great truth is there set forth, that God has created all things. In the sec- ond chapter of Genesis, man is the great theme, and conse- * The correct translation of the fifth verse is: ‘‘ Now no plant of the field was yet in the land, and no herb of the field was growing.”’ 72 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. quently nature is treated of only as it circles around him, | and is related to him. This sufficiently accounts for the difference between the two. Man. Passing now from nature to Man, we find again a marked difference. In Gen. i. we are told, “God created man in His own image; in the image of God created He him.” And here: “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.” (ii. 7.) Some people tell as there is a contra- diction here. ‘Zs there any contradiction, let me ask? Are not both of them true? Is there not something that tells you that there is more than dust in your composition? Is there not something in-you that tells you, you are related to God the Creator? When you hear the statement that “God made man in His own image, is there not a response awakened in you—something in you that rises up and says, It is true? On the other hand, we know that man’s body is formed of the dust of the earth. We find it to be true in a more literal sense than was formerly supposed, now that chemistry discloses the fact that the same elements enter into the composition of man’s body, as are found by analysis in the “dust of the ground.” | And not only are both these statements true, but each is appropriate inits place. In the first account, when man’s place in universal nature was to be set forth—man as he issued from his Maker’s hand—was it not appropriate that his higher nature should occupy the foreground? His lower relations are not entirely out of sight even there, for he is introduced along with a whole group of animals created on the sixth day. But while his connection with them is sug- gested, that to which emphasis is given in the Genesis is his relation to his Maker. But now that we are going to hear about his fall, about his shame and degradation, is it 2 : Wao ‘ te DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 73 not appropriate that the lower rather than the higher part of his nature should be brought into the foreground, inas- much as it is there that the danger lies? It was to that part of his nature that the temptation was addressed; and so we read here, “God formed man of the dust of the ground.” Yet here, too, there isa hint of his higher nature, for it is added, “‘ He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” or as we have itin another passage, “The inspiration of the Almighty gave him understanding.” In this connection it is worth while to notice the use of the words “created” and “formed.” “God created man in His own image.” So far as man’s spiritual and immor- tal nature was concerned it was a new creation. On the other hand, “God formed man out of the dust of the ground.” We are not told He created man’s body out of nothing. We are told, and the sciences of to-day confirm it, that it was formed out of existing materials. Woman. Then, in relation to Woman, there is the same appropri- ateness in the two narratives. In the former her relations to God are prominent: “God created man in His own im- age. In the image of God created He him; male and fe- male created He them ”—man in His image; woman in His image. In the latter, it is not the relation of woman to her Maker that is brought forward, but the relation of wo- man to her husband. Hence the specific reference to her organic connection with her husband. Here, again, it is very easy for one that deals in literali- ties to raise difficulties, forgetting that there is no intention here to detail scientifically the process of woman’s forma- tion, but simply to indicate that she is organically connected ‘with her husband. It is here proper to remark that the ren- dering “rib” is probably too specific. The word is more 74 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. frequently used in the general sense of “side.” As an ev- idence that there is no intention to give here any physio- logical information as to the origin of woman, we may refer to the words of Adam: ‘‘ This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.” And now, is there anything irra- tional in the idea that woman should be formed out of man? Is there anything more mysterious or inconceivable in the formation of woman out of man, than in the original form- ation of man out of dust? Let us conceive of our origin in any way we choose, it is full of mystery. Though there may be mystery connected with what is said in the Bible, there will be just as much mystery connected with any other account you try to give of it. Matthew Henry, in his quaint and half-humorous way, really gets nearer to the true spirit of the narrative than any physiological inter- preter can, when he makes the remark that some of you may be familiar with, “that woman was taken out of man, not out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled underfoot; but out of his side to be equal to him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.” Another remark of his is worth quoting. Re- ferring to the fact of Adam’s being first formed and then Eve, and the claim of priority and consequent superiority, as made on his behalf by the apostle Paul, he says: “If man is the head, she is the crown—a crown to her husband, the crown of the visible creation. The man was dust re- fined, but the woman was dust double-refined—one remove further from the earth.” But, Matthew Henry apart, one thing is certain, that this old Bible narrative, while it has not done that which it was never intended to do, while it has given no scientific expla- nation of either man’s origin or woman’s origin, has never- ° theless accomplished its great object. It has given woman DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 15 her true place in the world. It is only in Bible lands that woman has her true place; and it is only there that marriage has its proper sacredness. Here as everywhere else, we see the practical power of the Bible. It was not written to satisfy curiosity, but to save and to bless; and most salutary and most blessed has been the influence of these earliest words about woman, setting forth her true relation to man and to God, to her earthly husband and her heavenly Father. Mistakes Respecting Labor and Death, Corrected. . . . The Bible has been charged with representing labor asacurse. Thecharge isnot true. On the contrary, we are told that Adam was appointed in Eden to dress the garden and keep it. ‘The law of labor came in among the blessings of Eden, along with the law of obedience and the marriage law. It is a slander on the Bible to say that it represents labor asa curse. It is not the labor that is thecurse. It is the thorns and the thistles. It is the hardness of the labor. “In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread.” Labor would have been easy and pleasant otherwise. Then in regard to death. There are those who represent the Bible as if it taught that death was unknown in the world until after the Fall. And then they point us to the reign of death throughout the epochs of geology as contra- dicting the Bible. Now, the Bible teaches nothing of the kind. On the contrary, there seems rather to be a suggestion that death was in existence among the lower animals all the way through. Not to speak of the probability that one of the divisions of animals, mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis, corresponds with the carnivora, is there not some- thing in the way the subject of death is introduced, which rather suggests the idea that it was already known? It was anew thing to Adam. It was not a new thing to animal life. Man had been created with relations to mortality 76 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. below him, but with relations also to immortality above him. Had he not fallen, his immortal nature would have ruled his destiny; but now that he has separated himself from God by his sin, his lower relations, his mortal relations, must rule his destiny. Instead of having as his destiny the prospect of being associated with God in a» happy immor- tality, he is degraded from that position, and is henceforth associated with the animals in their mortality. Weare told that “death passed upon all men, because all have sinned.” But you do not find a passage in the Bible asserting that death passed upon the animals because of man’s sin. The Deluge and its Difficulties — Not Universal —- Ararat pas pued a District (Alas! Ingersoll Calls it a High Mountain )—Other Deluges. | . . We must here touch a little on the difficulties con- nected with the story of the flood. These difficulties are almost all founded upon the idea that the deluge was univer- sal; that it covered the highest tops of the Himalayas in India, the Rocky Mountains here, and all the mountains over all the earth. It is but reasonable, then, to ask if there is good reason for insisting that it was universal? I know of only three strong reasons that are given for this position. The first is the use of the term “ earth ” continu- ally throughout the narrative, which only proves that those who translated the Bible into English, believed the flood to have been universal. As we have had occasion already to prove, the word “earth ” in Hebrew means just as readily a limited district. Why do not those who insist so strongly on the wide signification of “earth” here, not insist upon the same interpretation in such a passage as Genesis, xii. 1, and make it an article of faith that Abraham left the world altogether and went to another, when he left Ur of the Chaldees and went to Canaan? The second argument for * DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 11 universality is found in universal expressions, the strongest of which is Gen. vii. 19: “And the waters prevailed ex- ceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered.” Now remember that this is the account of an eye-witness, vividly describing just what he saw, water on every side, water all around, nothing but water—even the mountains to the farthest verge of the horizon covered over with water. When, in the book of Job, we read of the lightning flashing over the whole heaven, the meaning surely can not be that a lightning flash starts at a certain degree of latitude and longitude, and makes a journey right round the world to the point where it started. ‘The whole heavens” is evidently bounded by the horizon. ‘The third reason which has led people to sup- pose the whole earth was covered with water, is found in the tradition that the ark rested on Mount Ararat. The tradition, we say, for that is all the authority there is for the idea. In Gen. vii. 4, we are told that the ark rested on the mountains or highlands of “ Ararat.” ‘The word “ Ararat” only occurs other two times in the bible, and in neither place does it refer to what was only long afterward called Mt. Ararat. In Old Testament times Ararat was not a mountain at all, but a district, on some of the highlands of which the ark rested. A moment’s thought will show that it could not be on the top of Ararat. It would require one of the hardiest mountaineers to perform such a feat as the climbing of Ararat. It would be the most inconvenient place you could think of for the ark to rest on. When you look fairly at these three arguments that are urged in sup- port of a universal deluge, you will find that none of them really demand it. On the other hand, there are things that seem to point the other way. In the eieventh verse of the seventh chap- ter we are told that “in the second month, the seventeenth 78 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. day of the month, were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” There is no indication there of the sudden creation of such a body of water as would cover the earth to the depth of 30,000 feet above the old sea-level. ‘The causes that are as- signed are just such as could be most readily and naturally used. It may be worth while to notice here in passing, an attempt which has been made recently to cast ridicule upon the story of the flood, by representing the Bible as if it attributed the deluge to nothing else than a long, heavy rain, whereas the first importance is given to an entirely different cause: “the fountains of the great deep were bro- ken up.” That is just what would appear to one who was | describing such a scene as we imagine this to be. Suppose there had been some great submergence of the land there, as has taken place in other parts of the world. There would be a rushing up of water from below, from “the fountains of the great deep.” Again, in the first verse of the eighth chapter, natural agency is made use of: “God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged.” There is no reason why we should suppose a greater miracle performed than was necessary. Still further; turn to the tenth verse of the ninth chapter, where God says: “I establish my covenant with you, and with every living creature that is with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth.” What were those beasts of the earth thus distinguished from those going out of the ark? Probably they were those that came from the area of land not covered by the flood. Then again, attention is called to thé purpose of the flood, which was simply to destroy the race of men, and it is not to be supposed they had traveled a great distance by this time from their original place of abode. The extent of the flood need not have been any greater than was necessary to submerge that area. m X rf o a Steg Bice = = ee En ee ee nr Dk. GIBSON’S REPLY. 79 Further, when we take this view, not only do yeological and other difficulties disappear, but there is decided confir- mation from modern scientific research. There is no evi- dence in geology that there was in any period of the earth’s history, a flood great enough to overtop the Rocky Moun- tains, but there are evidences of floods as great as this one must have been, for the purpose of destroying the race. I do not know how it is in the immediate region where the flood is supposed to have been. I do not know whether geologists have explored it sufficiently; but this is certain, that there are evidences of similar floods in other parts of the world. Some of our own geologists have discovered evidences of them in this very neighborhood. You have not to go very far from Chicago to find such traces of sudden, powerful, and transient diluvial action. Then, finally, this view of the deluge removes, of course, all difficulty about the number of animals in the ark, because all that was necessary was, that the species more nearly connected with man, those found in the region that was submerged, should be represented in the ark. But after all, the question of extent is of quite minor importance so long as it is conceded that it was universal in the sense of destroying all but the family of Noah. The reality of the judgment is the great thing, and of this we have abundant confirmation from tradition. We find legends of a flood everywhere. We find them among the Semitic and Aryan and Turanian races. We find them east and west, and north and south; in savage nations and civilized nations; on continents and in islands; in the old world and in the © new. And if Egypt is a solitary exception, which is very doubtful, but if it is, the exception is accounted for by the simple fact that in that country they have floods every year. Here again, as in the traditions of the Fall, there is difference enough to show which is the original and true. — 80 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. Other traditions of the flood are polytheistic, whereas here we have the one living and true God. Those are full of mythological elements, whereas here is a plain narrative, with the impressive scene vividly, but quite simply, depicted. In heathen traditions, too, you find many grotesque items ~ and exaggerations, as for instance, when the ark is described as three-fourths of a mile long, and drops of rain the size of a bull’s head; and,. generally speaking, a conspicuous ab- sence of that moral purpose which is so impressive and all- pervading in the narrative before us. Faith in Jesus Christ the Hssential Factor. There are those in our day who find a stumbling- block at the very threshold of the Christian life, in the fancy, that what is required of them in order to salvation, is the cred- iting of all the details of a long history extending from the first man to the last man, from Adam to the consummation of all things; and long accustomed to that sceptical attitude of mind which questions all things, they think it would take them a life-time (as indeed it would) to verify every statement that is made from Genesis to Revelation, and clear them from all possible objections; and so they do not venture at all. But remember, it is never said: ‘ Believe everything that is in the Bible and you will be saved.” Ah, there have been many who believed everything in the Bible, who never thought of questioning a sentence in it, who will find themselves none the better for their easy acquiescence in the statements of a book which they had been taught to accept as inspired. There is no such word written as, “Believe the Bible and you will be saved.” No. It is “ Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” Do not trouble yourselves in the first instance about questions connected with the book of Genesis, or difficulties suggested by the book of Revelation. Let the wars of the ~ roe - SS ar Shee =. DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 81 Jews alone in the meantime, and dismiss Jonah from your mind. Look to Jesus; get acquainted with Him; listen to His word; believe in Him; trust Him; obey Him. That is all that is asked of you in the first instance. After you have believed on Christ and taken Him as your Saviour, your Master, your Model, you will not be slow to find out that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine and for reproof, and for correction, and for instruction in righteousness.” You may never have all your difficulties solved, or all your objections met; but though difficulties may still remain, and interrogation points be scattered here and there over the wide Bible-field, you will be sure of your foundation; you will feel that your feet are planted on the “ Rock of Ages,” even on Him of whom God, by the mouth of the prophet Isaiah, said: “ Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation, a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner-stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.” Candor v. Injustice—Dr, Gibson’s Pointed Summary. The prevailing feeling among intelligent readers of the Bible in reference to the profane and coarse assaults made on it by Mr. Robert Ingersoll, is that few people are so ignorant as to be imposed upon by his vulgar witticisms. But, inasmuch as there are not a few who accept without inquiry his account of what is in the Bible, it may be well to give a few illustrations of his unscrupulousness in put- ting “mistakes” into the Bible which he either knows or ought to know, are not there. He asserts positively that Moses must have understood by firmament something solid, though every one who has studied the subject knows, and the fact has been published again and again, that the Hebrew word means something 82 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. exceedingly attenuated, being the very best word in the language to designate the atmosphere; while the mistake found in the English word “ firmament,” is due to the sc1- ence of Alexandria, where in the third century before Christ, the ‘ expanse ” of Moses was translated “ stereoma” (firmament) to suit the advanced astronomy of the time. When, in speaking of the vegetation of the third day, he says, “Not a blade of grass had even been touched by a single gleam of light,” is he dealing fairly with a narrative that makes light its first creation ? When he accuses Moses of compressing the astronomy of the universe into five words, is he dealing fairly with a narrative that does not profess to give any astronomy at all, but, after a general reference to the heavens and the earth as created in the beginning, restricts itself to the earth and its “environment?’? Any intelligent person can see that this is the reason why sun, moon and stars are referred to only in their relations to the earth. When he represents the first and second chapters of Gen- esis aS a varying repetition of the same story, is it fair to withhold all reference to the different purport and object of — the two narratives, which fully and satisfactorily explains the variation ? Is it fair to speak of the deluge to represent it as ascribed to nothing but rain, when the Bible expressly says, “All the fountains of the great deep were broken up,” evidently pointing to such a subsidence of the land as is familiar to any one acquainted with geology. Is it fair to make the Bible responsible for the Armenian tradition that the ark rested on the top of Mount Ararat, 17,000 feet high, when the Bible nowhere, from Genesis to Revelation, makes any such statement? The district of Ararat on the mountains or highlands of which the ark rested is not the “ Agri-Dagh” to which the name Ararat DR. GIBSON’S REPLY. 83 has in modern times been given; and Mr. Ingersoll’s ignorant mistake about it is of the same kind as that of the bumpkin who should inquire for the Coliseum in Rome, N. Y., or seek the tomb of Leonidas in Sparta, Wisconsin. It will be at once seen that with this childlike ignorance is connected the Ingersoll nonsense that the water was five and a half miles deep. So says the ignorant critic, while the simple and reasonable statement of the Bible is: “Tifteen cubits upwards did the water prevail.” As for the submersion of even the hills to the. utmost verge of the horizon, the subsidence of the land was quite sufficient to accomplish it without resorting to the supposition of any unreasonable quantity of water. Is it fair, when Mr. Ingersoll wishes to render ridiculous the rate of increase among the Israelites in Egypt, to rep- resent the length of their stay there as 215 years, when Moses says (Exodus, x1r., 40): “ Now the sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was 430 years.” The only other place in the Pentateuch where the length of their stay is referred to is in the prediction concerning itin . Genesis xv., where it is put in round numbers at 400 years. To do Mr. Ingersoll justice, it is admitted that certain theologians, on the strength of one or two passages in the New Testament and some genealogical difficulties, have favored shortening the period, but the subject was not the mistakes of Moses, but of theologians; and again we ask, Was it fair, without a word of apology or explanation, to deduct more than two centuries from the time Moses gives, and then make all his coarse, not to say indecent, ridicule turn on the shortness of the time? One hardly knows how to characterize the infamy of such a passage as that about the bird-eating priests during the time of rapid increase, in view of the fact that there were no priests at all, and no such rule as he refers to during the 4: m i : i sa r as ed , J ei tes eh cant ; 4, ingle a ! sk TW 5 Neti og POLS. Leh Ue uk De aay anc Hes ae > ; a “ b ; me 101 103 107 146 147 148 150 = 4 SS SS S SN \ Y MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL AS SHOWN BY W. F. CRAFTS, CHAPLAIN McCABE, ARTHUR SWAZEY, D. D. ROBERT COLLYER, D. D. F. P. POWERS, BISHOP CHENEY, AND OTHERS. ALSO INCLUDING IncrRsoLi’s LectuRE IN FULL on “SKULLS,” AND HIS RE- pLigs TO Pror. Swine, W. H. Ryprer, Brooxr HERFORD, AND OTHER ORITIOS. W. F. CRAFTS’ REPLY. Ingersollism Outlined—*Ten Points” instead of “Five ”—Infidel Protoplasm. “J war with principles, not with men ”—the motto of Webster in political debates—should be the law in all con- flicts of ideas, especially in the realm of religion.. It is not of the person, Mr. Ingersoll, that I speak, but rather of the principles of which he is the most popular spokes- man, and which make up that shallowest, but loudest, Jericho book of infidelity’s bitter waters which begins in a few tears of pretended martyrdom to love of truth; spat- ters the mud of epithets upon Christians, while condemn- ing that very vice in a part of the Church in less advanced i! 8 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. ages; babbles shallowly along its little channel about law as an almighty executive, as if the rails that give direction to a train took the place of the engine that draws it; winds very crookedly through the Old Testament, avoiding every passage except those few that can be used for ridicule; plows still more crookedly through church history, shun- ning every part except the unchristian swamps of bigotry and superstition; keeps up the same snaky crookedness in its passage through religion of to-day, hurrying noisily among only the few rocky and marshy places, where it can find the reptiles of superstition and error; passes with great dash of spray along the audacious theory that Christian civilization is the result of anti-Christian forces; plunges with loud roar of waters down its claim that infidelity is the only liberator of man, woman, and child; and still flow- ing within its narrow little channel babbles of itself as an emancipated ocean of untrammeled thought. These characteristics of the brook are the ten points of Ingersollism. I have read and re-read, carefully, the nine published lectures of Mr. Ingersoll on religious themes, besides hearing the one entitled ‘ Skulls,”’ and every one of them has something on each of these ten points of his fixed and unchanging creed, and not one or all has anything — beyond these ten “ doctrines ’’—for he often uses the words, “That is my doctrine.” While attacking creeds of the Church he holds and urges all to believe his own unformu- lated but distinct creed, offering in place of the “five points of Calvinism” the ten points of Ingersollism, the latter — occurring as regularly in every one of his lectures in. this age as the former did a century ago in the sermons of Cal- vinists, which he ridicules for their sameness. What is this frightful monster that we call “a creed?” Simply a statement of what one believes. Every man, unless he is an idiot, has a creed in which he agrees W. Ff. CRAFTS’ REPLY. 9 with somebody. The only question is to find by “reason, observation, and experience,” which is the best. It would hardly be considered bigotry for a scientist to believe a few things as a creed of fixed scientific truths which no progress can ever erase, for instance, the rotund- ity and revolution of the earth, the attraction of the planets upon each other, and scores of other things which every scientist has held for many years unchanged, and is. sure are unchangeable because proved conclusively. There are some certainties in the science of religion, such as are referred to in the Apostles’ Creed, which may, without any greater bigotry, be considered as proved and established: The Christian Church of to-day does not generally insist upon anything further than these few concrete facts of the Apostles’ Creed “as essentials ” in Christian belief. When Evangelical churches shout their watchword, “ In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity,” it is as if a company of scientists should say, “ On#proved facts we will all agree, but in the realms of hypothesis and opinion, we will agree to disagree.” But the special point we wish to notice is, that Mr. Ingersoll attacks creed with creed. He is as bigoted a par- tisan of his own creed as ever called hard names. The very heart of his creed seems to be the belief that his mission is to destroy the creed of everybody else. It is a suggestive fact that the naturally-gifted mind of Mr. Ingersoll, who declares that godless and soulless mate- rialism is the emancipator and inspirer of thought, should be able, in all the years which these ten lectures represent, to produce but ten ideas, the same ten ideas which made up his earliest lecture, years ago, appearing successively in each of the succeeding lectures, including that of to-day, there being no change save in the cap and bells of his jokes. Reading these ten ideas over and over for as many 10 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. hours in going through these lectures, brought back a ludicrous scene in our college burial of mathematies when fifteen notes of Pleyel’s hymn were played dolefully over and over again for nearly an hour, as marching music. In reading these lectures, which are but ten combinations and permutations of ten ideas, one is reminded also of the lecturer’s own illustration of the boarding house keeper, who, for years, had no change of diet from hash, for every lecture is the same hash of ten ideas, changed only in the name and in the order of putting in the ten elements. ARTICLE If. First Point in the Ten—Sepulchral Hoots of the Ingersoll Owl— A Theological Rip Van Winkle. As in the beet hash of New England the blood red beet predominates and gives color to the whole, so the principal element in these lectures against Christianity is the blood of past persecutions by a corrupt part of the Church, for which true Christianity has no more responsibility than a loyal colonel in our war of 1776, or 1861, for the robberies and crimes of camp-followers or traitors. In every published lecture on religion, Mr. Ingersoll deliberately cites the acts of the Benedict Arnolds of the Christian army as repre- senting the Washingtons and Grants. He describes past. counterfeits of religion as specimens of its accepted cur- rency. It is asif one should attack present astronomers by relating ridiculous stories of the old astrologers, or assail present physicians by quoting the strange practices of the ancient alchemists. In one lecture—a fair representative of all in this respect. —I found that in forty-three pages only two did not con- tain these stale references to past persecutions, except a few pages given to the trial of Professor Swing, which were equally stale as assailing chiefly abandoned features of W. Ff. CRAFTS’ REPLY. 11 human Calvinism. Past errors and follies of the human Calvinism, human Catholicism, and heathen religions are constantly spoken of as if vital elements of Christianity. Mr. Ingersoll ought to have a hymn to sing at the open- ing and close of his lectures, made on the pattern of that one whose first verse is: Go on, go on, go on, go on, Go on, go on, go on, Go on, go on, go on, go on, Go on, go on, go on, with forty-two verses more of the same, substituting “ past persecutions,” instead of “ go on,” whichis too progressive for a “ go-back”’ lecture. Mr. Ingersoll is a Rip Van Winkle in theology, who ‘seems to have slept ever since the days of persecution. He is a Sancho Panza who assails imaginary foes of his own making, and thinks he has captured the golden helmet of Christianity when he has only secured the abandoned brass kettle of old traditions and discarded superstitions. He is a Falstaff killing the dead Percy of past follies. His lectures bustle with the antiquated and misused words “ priests,” “ dark ages,” “witches,” “ fagots,” “religious wars,” “church fathers,” “damned infants,” ‘“‘ martyrs,” “gods,” ete., as if he were speaking in a heathen land, and also in some dead century. And he uses the past tense so exclusively in his “progressive” lectures that one would suppose English as well as Hebrew had no present tense. It must have been Mr. Ingersoll, in his boyhood, that came from his first hunt crying, “I’ve shot a cherub,” having mistaken an owl for a cherub, because of the wretched pictures of the latter on the old grave stones. Mr. Ingersoll logically destroys some Church owl of the dark ages, and because it corresponds with his own carica- ture of the Church thinks he has dethroned Christianity 12 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. itself. Like Poe’s “ raven ” who had but one word, “ Never- more,” Mr. Ingersoll is continually crying in the ears of the present that worn-out strain about abuses which we all condemn, ‘ Galileo-Servetus, Galileo-Servetus.” This ten-idea champion of popular materialism, while talking of progress and condemning those who hold fast to things of the past, is nevertheless so largely devoted to showing his carefully preserved martyr-mummies from the long-past ages of persecution, that we find Mark Twain’s question constantly arising at each new charge against Christianity: “Is he—is he dead?” and we are also tempted to cry out for a “fresh corpse” in place of these very dry and dead mummies of past abuses. To paraphrase the lecturer’s own words, we want one pres- ent fact. We pass our hats through the lectures in vain for some present facts against pure Christianity, which he assumes to assail and overthrow. There is far more excuse for Thomas Paine, in an age when the old Calvinistic errors were largely held, and for Voltaire, surrounded by the superstitions of Romanism, misunderstanding Christianity, than for this modern lecturer, who very well knows that the caricatures which he represents as Christianity are very old pictures of its ancient camp-followers. ARTICLE II, Ingersoll Mistakes a Part for the Whole—Gross Misrepresen- tations. Article Second of Ingersollism, like unto the first, but with present instead of past tense, is about as follows: Christianity to-day is proved to be false by the present errors and abuses that are found in some of the churches. ° Romish superstitions and the errors of those who have grossly misinterpreted the Bible as a support of slavery, polygamy, etc., are continually used by this champion of ow be W. F CRAFTS’ REPLY. j Q7 and readers that the circle of law bounds on every side the privileges or liberty, that one has liberty only within the range of propriety, and that all beyond that is license. He also forgets the very evident fact that the prevailing ideas of personal liberty in the world are due to the general dissem- ination, by Christianity, of the truth thata man is a soul as well as a body. Wherever men are regarded as mere phys- ical beings, with no life deeper than the bodily life, the stronger will enslave the weaker—woman, child and captive. When the idea that each man is an immortal soul takes hold upon man, with it there comes the idea of individual rights. If Ingersollism should ever persuade a civilized people that man has no soul, this form of bondage of the weaker to the stronger will be resumed. Notsoil, but soul, is the secret of liberty. | Even Mr. Frothingham recently declared that the Bible is a democratic book, arid that we get out of it our ideas of equality. He remembered what Mr. Ingersoll seems to for- get, that all through the Bible, theidea of personal and relig- ious liberty is found, especially in those words of the Apostles to the rulers who attempted to tyrannize over their con- sciences, ‘‘ We ought to obey God rather than man,” which has fitly been termed the concisest of all statements of the principles of personal liberty. We may show this relation of religion to liberty in the words of the greatest modern writer upon such questions, De Tocqueville, who says, “ Bible Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.” ARTICLE VIII. Woman—Ingersoll’s Theory at Variance with F'acts. The eighth article of Ingersollism, is in regard to woman, and is as follows: “As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. 28 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. The Bible was not written by a woman. Within its lids © there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her.” You have all doubtless observed that in heathen coun- tries, where the Bible has not yet come with its enslaving (?) influence woman has (?) liberty and honor, and educa- tion, and opportunities of public activity and benevolence ¢?), but in Christian lands she is veiled, degraded, shut out of sight and restrained from education (?). I have always observed, as a pastor, that it is the religious, and church- going husbands that tyrannize over their wives as “ bosses,” and deny them their liberties of conscience, and other rights. (7%) You smile at the absurd statement, knowing that the ‘heathen at home,” who as husbands are harsh and brutal to the wives they have promised to cherish, are frequently ardent believers in Ingersollism, and seldom in any, way connected with even nominal Christianity, while every school boy is familiar with the fact that woman, in all except Christian lands, is hardly better than a slave, nota- bly so, in that land where Ingersollism under the name of Buddhism has the controlling influence. Mr. Ingersoll utters many true sentiments about the family, but all of — these he learned of Christianity, not from China, or Egypt. ARTICLE IX. Ingersoll’s Theory of Childhood—Some of His Little Stories—The . Whole Subject Carefully Hxamined—Significant Incident in the Life of Abraham Lincoln. The ninth article of Ingersollism is a theory of child- nood which attacks the principles of sound government and health even more than religion: ‘ Do not have it in your mind that youmust govern them; that they (children) must obey. Let your children eat what they desire. They know what they wish to eat. Let them begin at which end of the dinner they please.” W. fF. ORAFTS RHPLY. 29 Such a theory is worthy of nothing more than the smile with which you hear it. Itis all answered in the following representative fact of childhood: A little bit of a girl wanted more and more buttered toast, till she was told that too much would make her sick. _ Looking wistfully at the dish for a moment, she thought she saw a way out of her difficulty, and exclaimed, “ Well, give me annuzer piece, and send for the doctor!” 3 Mr. Ingersoll, in connection with his theory of child- hood, often refers to the fact, that he leaves his pocket- beok around where his children can help themselves to whatever they wish, and urges the same course upon all parents. It is said that one of the lecturer’s admirers, being convinced that this was the correct theory, determined to give up punishing his child, and try the new plan. Accord- ingly, he said to his boy, “John, Iam convinced I have been taking the wrong course to try to make you a better boy. I am going to trust you more, and give up whip- pings. Jam going away for a few days, and I have left my pocket-book in the top drawer of the bureau. Help yourself to money whenever you need it.” After a few days the father returned to his home, late at night. As he opened the door he stumbled over a large canoe in the entry, and was then attacked by a large bull-dog that his boy had bought. Entering the boy’s room, he found it _ hung round with guns, and fishing poles, and daggers, with another canoe, and several small dogs—his pocket-book lying empty on the top of the bureau. He is now less enthusi- astic in regard to Ingersoll’s knowledge of domestic gov- ernment. The leading point which Mr. Ingersoll endeavors to make in connection with his lecture on Thomas Paine is that the Bible shocks a child, and, therefore, can’t be true. You have all observed how much children are shocked as 30 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. they gather about the mother’s knees in the twilight, and hear her tell the stories of Jesus, and Joseph, and Moses, and Samuel, and Daniel (?). As to the relation .of the - Bible to childhood and home life, let me quote the opinion of several eminent men, mostly skeptics, for whom even Mr. Ingersoll cherishes the highest regard: Thomas Jefferson, speaking of the Bible and home life, says: “I have always said, and always will say, that the studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.” John Quincy Adams says: ‘So great is my veneration for the Bible, that the earlier my children begin to read it, the more confident will be my hopes that they will prove useful citizens to their country and respectable members of society.” Theodore Parker says: “ There is not a boy on the hills - of New England, not a girl born in the filthiest cellar which disgraces a capital in Europe, and cries to God against the barbarism of modern civilization; not a boy nor a girl all Christendom through, but their lot is made better by that great book.” Diderot, the French philosopher and skeptic, was wont . to make this confession: ‘“ No better lessons than those of the Bible can I teach my child.” Huxley, in an address upon education, says: “I have always been strongly in favor of secular education, in the sense of education without theology; but I must confess I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essen- tial basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the use of the Bible. The pagan moralists lack life and color, and even the noble stoic, Marcus Aurelius, is too high and refined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as 2 W. F. CRAFTS’ REPLY. 31 whole, make the severest deductions which fair criticism ean dictate, and there still remains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. By the study of what other book could children be so humanized? If Bible reading is not accompanied by constraint and solem- nity, I do not believe there is anything in which children take more pleasure.” What would “shock the mind of a child’ would be to hear Mr. Ingersoll excuse them for telling a lie, in order to escape a whipping. What would shock a child would be ” hear Mr. Desa Beane Bran thy What ould shock ihe mind of a child en be tt hear Mr. Ingersoll telling to a crowded audience with a smile of approval the story of a boy’s oath. Speaking of swearing reminds me of that incident of Abraham Lincoln, whom Mr. Ingersoll calls “ the grandest man ever President of the United States,” who said to a person sent to him by one of the Senators, and who, in conversation, uttered an oath, “I thought the Sen- ator had sent me a gentleman; I see I was mistaken. There is the door, and I bid you good-day.” I hold in my hand the last report of the New York Society for the. Pre- vention of Cruelty to Children. Of course, the bruised and beaten little ones, here described, were the victims of cruelty in Christian homes (?). Their fathers and mothers had taken too much religion (?), had become brutalized by reading the Bible (?), and hence abused the children by their own fireside until the law was compelled to interfere for their defense (?). 32 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. In my work as a member of the Citizen’s League for the suppression of the sale of liquors to minors, I have noticed that this supreme cruelty to children—selling them in their immature years the liquors that make them self-destroyers, violators of the public peace, and candidates for drunkards’ graves—is perpetrated by Christian men, not by the infidels who applaud so lustily at Mr. Ingersoll’s lectures (?). Here I am reminded of the published report, which seems well authenticated, that Mr. Ingersoll in his childhood lived in one of those exceptional homes where nominal Christianity was combined with harshness, cruelty and bigotry. If so, this would be some slight excuse for his present conduct, were it not for the fact that maturer years have given him abundant opportunity to see the bright and sunny side of — Christian gentleness in other homes. And there are no true homes that do not owe their existence to the influence of Christianity upon the family relation. Having myself made childhood a special study for several years, I find that the degree of recognition given to the opinions and importance of childhood in various ages and countries, is exactly in proportion to the degree of Chris- tianity there, children being scarcely noticed ‘in heathen lands, either in poetry, or history, or ethics, while the Bible religion has always given childhood an exceedingly prom- inent place.’ All the attention given to the education and development of the little ones is but the starlight that shines down upon us from the manger of the God-child. ARTICLE X. Ingersoll Says Christianity Fetters Thought—The Bible and a Host of Distinguished Men Say Otherwise. The tenth article of Ingersoilism is the frequent asser- tion that Christianity fetters thought, while infidelity emancipates it, in such passages as these: ‘In all ages, W. Ff. CRAFTS’ REPLY. 33 reason has been regarded as the enemy of religion.” “The gods dreaded education and knowledge then (in the time of the Garden of Eden) just as they do now.” “For ages a deadly conflict has been waged by a few brave men of thought and genius, on the one side, and the great, ignorant, religious mass, on the other. The few have said: ‘Think.’ The many have said: ‘ Believe.’ ”’ In order to ascertain what freedom and power of thought materialism had given to the mind of Mr. Ingersoll, I made special examination of the logic in the lecture on “The Gods,” and found there, in a very short time, one or more specimens of all the fallacies laid down in the text- books of logic. ‘ Waiter,” said John Randolph, at a cer- tain hotel, “if this is coffee, bring me tea; if this is tea, bring me coffee.” And so we say, if this is the “ power of thought,” give us weakness. Instead of the Bible forbidding us to think, as Inger- sollism so often declares, it is full of ringing appeals to “reason,” “think,” ‘consider,’ “ponder.” “prove all things.” Prov. 26:16: ‘The sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render areason.”’ Eccl. 7:25: ‘‘I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness.” Isa. 1:18: ‘Come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” Matt. 22:42: “ What think ye of Christ?’ Acts 17:2: ‘“ Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three Sabbath days reasoned with them out of the Scriptures.” Acts 18:4: “He reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and per- suaded the Jews and the Greeks.” Acts 18:19: ‘And he came to Ephesus, and left them there; but He himself entered into the synagogue and reasoned with the Jews.” Acts 24:25: ‘‘And.as he reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trembled.” € 3 34 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. Rom. 12:1: ‘“Ibeseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Phil. 4:8: ‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatso- ever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” 1 Thess. 5:21: ‘“ Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” Let us look into biography, and make a practical test of this theory that the Bible fetters thought. If so, those who believe and love it will not be strong and leading thinkers. Let us apply the test in the ranks of science. A Cloud of Witnesses. Professor Benjamin Pierce, of Harvard College, has recently completed a very remarkable course of lectures at the Lowell Institute, Boston, on “Ideality in Science.” Professor Pierce, who is now in his seventieth year, is, perhaps, the most eminent mathematical scholar in this country, and the author of some of the most profound investigations and speculations that have been made in the realm of astronomical science. This man of mighty thought must have been emancipated and inspired by infidelity (‘%). This scholar, whose mind may be supposed to feed on fact, - » holds an unquestioning faith in a personal God and the immortal life. The late Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian Institute, was one of the broadest and best of scientific thinkers because infidelity gave him freedom of thought(?). No, he was a sweet-spirited Christian in his daily life. Sir David Brewster, another eminent scientist, said of his Christian experience: “I have had this light for many years, and oh! how bright it is to me.” Professor Silliman, who is unsurpassed in his scientific We PSCRAMTS? BHPLY: 30 department, must also be classed under the head of “the ignorant religious mass,” for he was another of the very many Christian scientists, whom the world has ignorantly(‘?) supposed a thinker, in spite of Mr. Ingersoll’s theory of faith as being a mental bondage. He says: “I can truly declare that, in the study and exhibition of science to my pupils and fellow men, I have never forgotten to give all honer and glory to the infinite Creator—happy if I might be the honored interpreter of a portion of his works, and of the beautiful structure and beneficent laws discovered therein by the labors of many illustrious predecessors.” We might add scores of others in each department of sci- ence, who have found no discord between the Word and world of God. Who are the four greatest thinkers in the realm of states- manship of this century? Daniel Webster, Gladstone, Thiers, and Bismarck. All of them, of course, are enabled to be thus broad and prominent as national thinkers by the power of infidelity (?). No, each one of them is most posi- tive in his Christian belief. Webster declares the grandest thought which ever entered his mind was that of “ personal accountability to God.” Gladstone gives much of time and attention to religious _ writing. Thiers says, in his last days: “I often invoke that God in whom I am happy to believe, who is denied by fools and ignorant people, but in whom the enlightened man finds his consolation and hope.” Bismarck is called, in derision, “the God-fearing man,” in reference to his well-known religious principles. (Busch’s Bismarck, p. 200). We might add to these Charles Sumner, wie called Christianity the “truereligion”’ and “ our faith,” and whose speeches constantly recognize God and Christianity. 36 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. Who are the leading literary characters of the century? Victor Hugo, what of him? Did you ever read his chapter on prayer in Les Miserables, and his grand tribute to immortality, uttered as a rebuke to a company of French physicians, a few years ago? Moore—have you read his “ Paradise and the Peri,” the Gospel of repentance, and do you know him as the author of the hymn, “ Come, ye Dis- — consolate?’? Walter Scott—have you read his translation of “ Dies Ire,” uttered so devoutly in his last days: “Oh! in that day, that dreadful day, When Heaven and earth shall pass away, Be Thou, oh Christ, the sinner’s stay, When Heaven and earth shall pass away.” And Shakspeare, whom Mr. Ingersoli accounts one of the grandest of human minds, was great enough to believe in the Bible. And so Thackeray, Whittier, Dickens, Gold- smith, Longfellow, and Irving were intellectual believers in . Christianity. The following men, also lacking the freedom and power of thought that comes by materialism (?) became mentally so weak (?) that they declared, in varying terms, after read- ing largely in all departments of literature, that the Bible is the best book in the world: Sir Walter Scott, Sir Wil- liam Jones, George Gilfillan, Milton, Pollok, Coleridge, Collins, Bacon, John Adams, Napoleon, James Freeman Clarke, Lange, Kitto, Robertson. And Channing put the Gospels where these others place the whole Bible—above all other literature. The following persons strongly commend the Bible as a whole: Dr. Samuel Johnson, Carlyle, Dryden, Young, Cowper, Locke, Newton, Seward, Dawson, Franklin, John Quincy Adams, Bellows, Bartol, Theodore Parker, Rous- seau, Guizot, Bunsen, Story, Webster, Diderot, Matthew Arnold, and Huxley. W. F. CRAPTS’ RHPLY. 37 The following persons among many others declare that they found in the Bible, not fetters for thought, but their strongest inspiration to thought: Daniel Webster, Fisher Ames, Mitchell, the Astronomer, Ruskin and Goethe. It is evident that very many others might truly have said the same, including Theodore Parker and Mr. Froth- ingham and other skeptics, whose writings show plainly that they owe their beauties of style to a familiarity with the Bible. Jesus Christ. With these great men who have commended the Bible should be mentioned one who is confessed by Christians and skeptics the greatest and best of men, Jesus Curist, who used the Psalms as His prayer and hymn book, and always spoke of the whole Old Testament as the Eternal Law Book of humanity. There is not time, nor is it necessary now to answer in detail all the hard questions that can be asked about single Bible passages. But these great men and Christ saw all these points of difficulty, and yet accepted the Bible as the pre-eminent book, commending it to the perusal of all as the source of the mind’s grandest inspira- tions. Side by side with these scores of the world’s fore- most men who declare the Bible the best of books, or strongly commend it, or point to it as the source of their grandest thoughts, put the opinion of that more learned (‘%), more profound (?), more unprejudiced (4) scholar and phi- losopher, Colonel Ingersoll, who stands almost alone among educated men in strongly condemning the Bible, which his bigotry prints with a small “b” in spite of the rules of grammar, and describes it as about the worst book of the world, in these words among others: “If men will read the Bible as they read other books, they will be amazed that they ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom to be the author of such ignorance and of such 38 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. atrocity. The Bible burned heretics, built dungeons, founded the inquisition, and trampled upon all the liberties of men. All the philosophy of the Bible would not make one scene in Hamlet. I could write a better book than the Bible, which is full of barbarism.” Amazing Ignorance of Infidels Concerning the Scriptures—Hume’s Ignorance of the New Testament— Tom Paine | Without a Bible. ‘‘ But some one asks, Are there not other eminent men who have despised and condemned the Bible? Most cer- tainly, as there are those who have entered their protest against almost any and everything mentionable. It is, nevertheless, worthy of note that, in most instances, those who have sought the more resolutely to defame the Holy Scriptures are those who are comparatively unacquainted with them. David Hume, distinguished both as essayist and historian, standing among the most noted of modern skeptical philosophers, was a resolute objector of the Bible, but was notoriously ignorant of its contents. Dr. Johnson, in conversation with several literary friends, once observed, in his usual, direct, and unequivocal manner, that no hon- est man could be a deist, because no man could be so after a fair examination of the truths of Christianity. When the name of Hume was mentioned to him as an exception to his remark, he replied: ‘ No, sir; Hume once owned to a clergyman in the bishopric of Durham, that he had never read even the New Testament with attention.’ ”’* Let us cross-question another important witness as to his knowledge of the book against which he offers testimony. We ask Thomas Paine as to his familiarity with the Bible, which he so bitterly condemns, and he replies, I keep no Bible.” I hold in my hand a sermon preached in New * From ‘“‘ What Noted Men Think of the Bible.” We f. CHAPTS” REPLY. 39 York City, by Rev. W. F. Hattield, in reply to Mr. Inger- soll’s lecture on Thomas Paine, in which reply, with abund- ant facts, such as would convince a court, it is shown con- clusively that Thomas Paine was vicious and corrupt in life, and miserable and remorseful in death. As to the value of Voltaire’s testimony against Christianity, Carlyle declares it worthless on the ground of lack of knowledge on the sub- ject of which he testifies. He says: “It is a serious ground of offense against Voltaire that he intermeddled in religion without being himself, in any measure, religious; that, in a word, he ardently, and with long-continued effort, warred against Christianity, without understanding, beyond the mere superfices, what Christianity was.” There are also a class of specialists who are quoted against the Bible, and who manifest a hostility to it, whose testi- mony is of little value because of the narrow range in which they have studied, making them authorities only in their special department. Halley, the astronomer, once avowed his skepticism in presence of Sir Isaac Newton. ‘The venerable man replied: ‘Sir, you have never studied these subjects and I have. Do not disgrace yourself as a philosopher by presuming to judge on questions you have never examined.” : Distributed Ignorance and Concentrated Hatred—Probable Cause of Ingersoll’s Infidelity. The largest proportion of skeptics, however, are mere sophomores, spoiled with a little learning which is only “distributed ignorance,” well represented by a precocious boy of fourteen, whom I found writing an essay on “ Mat- rimony,” and who left it during my call to argue in favor of Ingersollism and against the Bible (of which he knew .as little as of matrimony), which he admitted he had never read, as do nearly all skeptics when questioned on this 40 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. matter. The bitterness of the opposition to Christianity of Mr. Ingersoll and other infidels is explained by the Karl of Rochester, who was converted from infidelity and said, in explanation of his former course and that of others: “A bad heart, a bad heart is the great objection against the Holy Book.” “The fool hath said in his heart” (not his head) “there is no God.” The bad heart is father to the infidel thought. It is like the case of the old woman who broke her looking-glass because it showed the wrinkles creeping into her fading face. Men strive to break the Bible glass that shows the wrinkles and defects of character. The whole appearance and tone and spirit of Mr. Ingersoll in his lectures is suggestive of this heart hatred against the book which he attacks, “ kicks,” “hates,” not with the calmness of logic, but with the bitterness of a heart-hos- tility. Those infidels who have faithfully examined the Bible have usually been convinced of its truth and con- verted to Christianity. Among them, such distinguished . names as Lord Lyttleton, Gilbert West, Soame Jenyus, Bishop Thompson, and at least a score of notable cases in connection with Mr. Moody’s revival meetings in England. “What comparison, let us ask, will the number of cele- brated skeptics, even when the best possible showing is made, hold with the distinguished men who have ranked the sacred volume above all others?) Remember that your mother’s love for the Bible and your own early reverence for it, have the indorsement of the grandest and profound- est minds which have been known and honored among humanity.” The Truth of the Whole Maiter. But salvation is not by belief in a book, or a creed, or a Church, but by belief in the person of Jesus Christ. Mr. Ingersoll skips this hard problem, ‘ What think ye of . p e : 7 , ? 5 ae Byes ih BE vy’ > ; Eis pike Ps 7 SuTree QE eo AT Sy eee haa 7 a a> by Vis. . take ete we ot et Ne ea , eh Te ¥ : ‘ NSD a SE SS SS moa ee i oh Li ae ¥ ay Ae > Pek si rb acN el. eeee W. F. CRAFTS’ REPLY. 41 Christ?’ He hardly refers to this citadel of Christianity half a dozen times in all his lectures, making his attacks chiefly on human outposts and then claiming to have over- borne the citadel of Christianity. Even Strauss, Renan, Rousseau, Theodore Parker, Napoleon, and Richter—none of them experimental Christians—unite as a jury in the verdict expressed by Richter in regard to Christ, “ He is the purest among the mighty, the mightiest among the pure.” We have, then, two facts as a sure anchorage of our Christianity to-day. All scholarly skepticism agrees with Christianity that the Bible is the best of books and that Christ is the best of men. He who thus accepts the Bible and Christ can not logically or consistently stop short of a Christian life, following Christ as his pattern, and walking by the Bible as his rule. We may differ about creeds, and Church forms, and Bible interpretation, but he who has faith and faithfulness toward the person, Jesus Christ shall be saved. Let us then devoutly utter the creed of Daniel Webster, as. inscribed by his own request on his tombstone at Marshfield: ** LORD, I BELIEVE, HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF. PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT _ BSPECIALLY THAT DRAWN FROM THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE IN COM: PARISON WITH THE APPARENT INSIGNIFIOANCE OF THIS GLOBE, HAS SOMETIMES SHAKEN MY REASON FOR THE FAITH THAT IS IN ME}; BUT MY HEART HAS ASSURED ME THAT THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST MUST BE A DIVINE REALITY. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT CAN NOT BE A MERELY HUMAN PRODUCTION. ‘THIS BELIEF ENTERS {NTO THE VERY DEPTH OF MY CONSCIENCE. THE WHOLE HISTORY OF MAN PROVES It.” FE ks ~ CHAPLAIN McCABE’S REPLY. 43 CHAPLAIN M’CABE’S REPLY. The Famous Chaplain has a Remarkable Dream—He Sees the Great City of Ingersollville—Which Ingersoll and the Infidel Host Enter—And are Shut in for Six Months—Remarkable Condition of Things Outsido and Inside—Happiness and Mis- ery—Ingersoll Finally Petitions for a Church and sends for a Lot of Preachers. I had a dream which was not alla dream. I thought I was on a long journey through a beautiful country, when suddenly I came to a great city with walls fifteen feet high. At the gate stood a sentinel, whose shining armor reflected back the rays of the morning sun. As I was about to salute him and pass into the city, he stopped me and said: “Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?” I answered: “ Yes, with all my heart.” “ Then,” said he, “ you can not enter here. No man or woman who acknowledges that name can pass in here Stand aside!"’ said he, “ they are coming.” I looked down the road, and saw a vast multitude approaching. It was led by a military officer. “ Who is that?’ I asked of the sentinel. | “That,” he replied, “is the great Colonel Robert I : the founder of the City of Ingersollville.” “ Who is he?’ [ ventured to inquire. “ He is a great and mighty warrior, who fought in many bloody battles for the Union during the great war.” I felt ashamed of my ignorance of history, and stood silently watching the procession. I had heard of a Colonel 44 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. ]———_, * ig id “ 2 but, of course, this could not be the man. The procession came near enough for me to recognize some of the faces. I noted two infidel editors of national celebrity, followed by great wagons containing steam presses. There were also five members of Congress. All the noted infidels and scoffers of the country seemed to be there. Most of them passed in unchallenged by the sentinel, but at last a meek-looking individual with a white necktie approached, and he was stopped. I saw at a glance it was a well-known “ liberal”? preacher of New York. “Do you believe in the Lord Jesus?” said the sentinel. “ Not much!” said the doctor. Everybody laughed, and he was allowed to pass in. There were artists there, with glorious pictures; singers, with ravishing voices; tragedians and comedians, whose names have a world-wide fame. Then came another division of the infidel host—saloon- keepers by thousands, proprietors of gambling hells, brothels, and theatres. Still another division swept by: burglars, thieves, thugs, incendiaries, highwaymen, murderers — all—all marching in. My vision grew keener. I beheld, and lo! Satan him- self brought up the rear. High afloat above the mass was a banner on which was inscribed: ‘ What has Christianity done for the country?’ and another on which was inscribed: “Down with the churches! Away with Christianity—it interferes with our happiness!” And then came a murmur of voices, that grew louder and louder until a shout went up like the roar of Niagara: “Away with Him! Orucify Him, crucify Him!” I felt no desire now to enter Ingersollville. As the last of the procession entered, a few men and women, with broad-brimmed hats and plain bonnets, made CHAPLAIN McCABE’S REPLY. 45 their appearance, and wanted to go in as missionaries, but they were turned rudely away. A zealous young Metho- dist exhorter, with a Bible under his arm, asked permission to enter, but the sentinel swore at him awfully. Then I thought I saw Brother Moody applying for admission, but he was refused. I could not help smiling to hear Moody say, as he turned sadly away: “Well! they let me live and work in Chicago; it-is very strange they won’t let me into Ingersollville.” The sentinel went inside the gate and shut it with a bang; and I thought, as soon as it was closed, a mighty angel came down with a great iron bar, and barred the gate on the outside, and wrote upon it in letters of fire, “ Doomed to live together six months.”” Then he went away, and all was silent, except the noise of the revelry and shouting that came from within the city walls. I went away, and as I journeyed through the land I could not believe my eyes. Peace and plenty smiled everywhere. The jails were all empty, the penitentiaries were without occupants. The police of great cities were idle. Judges sat in court-rooms with nothing to do. Business was brisk. Many great buildings, formerly crowded with criminals, were turned into manufacturing establishments. Just about this time the President of the United States called for a Day of Thanksgiving. I attended services in a Presby- terian Church. The preacher dwelt upon the changed con- dition of affairs. As he went on, and depicted the great prosperity that had come to the country, and gave reasons for devout thanksgiving, I saw one old deacon clap his handkerchief over his mouth to keep from shouting right out. An ancient spinster, who never did like the “ noisy ” Methodists—a regular old blue-stocking Presbyterian— ecouldn’t hold in. She expressed the thought of every heart by shouting with all her might, “Glory to God for Inger- 46 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. sollville!’ A young theological student lifted up his hand and devoutly added, “ L’sto perpetua.” Everybody smiled. The country was almost delirious with joy. Great pro- cessions of children swept along the highways, singing, “ We'll not give up the Bible, God’s blessed Word of Truth.” Vast assemblies of reformed inebriates, with their wives. and children, gathered in the open air. No building would hold them. I thought I was in one meeting where Bishop Simpson made an address, and as he closed it a mighty shout went up till the earth rang again. O, it was won- derful ! and then we all stood up and sang with tears of joy, ‘“ All hail the power of Jesus’ name! Let angels prostrate fall ; Bring forth the royal diadem, And crown him Lord of all.” The six months had well-nigh gone. I made my way back again to the gate of Ingersollville. A dreadful silence reigned over the city, broken only by the sharp crack of a revolver now and then. I saw aman trying:to get in at the gate, and I said to him, “ My friend, where are you from?” “T live in Chicago,” said he, “and they’ve taxed us to- death there; and I’ve heard of this city, and I want to go in to buy some real estate in this new and growing place.” He failed utterly to remove the bar, but by some means. he got a ladder about twelve feet long, and with its aid, he climbed up upon the wall. With an eye to busta he shouted to the first person he saw: “ Hallo, there !—what’s the price of real estate in agers sollville ?” “ Nothing !” shouted a voice; “you can have all you want if you’ll just take it and pay the taxes.” “ What made your taxes so high?” said the Chicka man.. I noted the answer carefully; I shall never forget it. : a CHAPLAIN McCABE’S REPLY. 47 “ We've had to build forty new jails and fourteen peni- tentiaries—a lunatic asylum and an orphan asylum in every ward; we’ve had to disband the public schools, and it takes all the city revenue to keep up the police force.” “Where’s my old friend, I——-?” said the Chicago man. “QO, he is going about to-day with a subscription paper to build a church. They have gotten up a petition to send out for a lot of preachers to come and hold revival services. If we can only get them over the wall, we hope there’s a future for Ingersollville yet.” The six months ended. - Instead of opening the door, however, a tunnel was dug under the wall big enough for one person to crawl through at a time. First came two bankrupt. editors, followed by Colonel I himself; and then the whole population crawled through. “Then I thought, somehow, great crowds of Christians surrounded the city. There was Moody, and Hammond, and Earle, and hundreds of Methodist preachers and exhorters, and ay struck up, singing together, “Come, ye sinners, poor and needy.” A needier crowd never was seen on earth before. I conversed with some of the inhabitants of the aban- doned city, and asked a few of them this question: “ Do you believe in Hell?’ I can not record the answers; they were terribly orthodox. One old man said, ‘“ I’ve been there on probation for six months, and I don’t want to join.” I knew by that he was an old Methodist backslider. The sequel of it all was a great revival, that gathered in a mighty harvest from the ruined City of Ingersollville. Fs ot { Photographed by Mosher.} E F \ fat MIN ZA LG Z is Z F Ki oe a S \ “ill ty \ Z a SS \ {| \ Z WIN YY . \ \\ z \ hi\\\ Z : . \ \ SASS RN ia \\\ \ PAV . . ‘ \) ‘" \ \ » x ON ANY NS NY ~ . > ONS S . b ay. & “ . ‘ . RES ig X . N S \ . ‘ \ \ AES \ \ \ \ \ s ANY FYEVRY \\Wiss \ RN KS PA SWS SENN , NN) \ y . \ oN \ \ MAXX EQ \ \e WY \ . Fan \ \ ES . ‘ . \ <) : ss y > Y a ‘ Nos \\s . sy ANS v2 nN \ DR. SWAZHY’S REPLY. 49 DR. SWAZEY’S REPLY. Momentary View of Col. Ingersoll Through the Doctor’s Glass— The Bible on the Meridian—What the Doctor Sees in the Great Book. Tue genial, eloquent, sensational, unfair, evasive Colonel Ingersoll has come and gone. Nobody has been alarmed. But out of 400,000 people a large audience was found to laugh with him at Moses and the Bible. He eschewed argument altogether. He did not attempt to instruct any- body. He had only a campaign speech to make against— God. This article is simply an invitation to any fair- minded doubter to consider the reasonableness of a laugh at the Christian’s Bible. Is this book a bad book, or a silly book, just fit for jeer and sarcasm? Take a common- sense view. In order to do so, it is necessary to take a -common-place view, to bring to the foreground that which all assailants like to leave in the background, namely, that the Bible teaches by commandment and precept only that which is pure and good. Relating to man’s duty to himself, it teaches personal purity, sexual and otherwise; temperance in meats, drinks, opinions and ambition, responsibleness for inclinations, _ thoughts and actions; a paramount love for the truth; courage and hopefulness in all lawful purposes; self-im- provement, and a cheerful enjoyment of the good things of life. Relating to man’s duty to others, the Bible teaches honesty between man and man; restitution when wrong has been done, wittingly or unwittingly; the damnableness 4 50 : MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. of adultery, seduction, and everything that violates the purity of a family or a person; tlie forgiveness of injuries; a charitable view of human actions, including patience and forbearance, mercy; the duty of life-long usefulness, kind- ness and helpfulness; a genial temper in social and business life; obedience to magistrates; and a multitude of minor virtues. Jtelating to the moral order of things, the Bible teaches that wrong-doing is unavoidably the way of sorrow, ‘ and right-doing the way of happiness. ‘These teachings, given not in bald outline, but in fresh and animated pictures and discourses, make up the ethical system of the Bible from the first lesson of the antediluvian age to the last words of the book, which are against whore- mongers, and all makers and lovers of a lie, and in praise of all who are just and good. And, still further, in no instance is there‘left on record an immoral precept, or one which impurity, or injustice, or dishonesty, or unkindness, or selfishness in any form are proposed. There is no mis- take in that direction. Still further, we challenge any assailant to name a virtue, acknowledged to be such by the mass of mankind, which is wanting in the catalogue of Bible virtues. The ethical system is as complete as it is pure, as comprehensive as it is sound and true, absolutely covering the whole area of man’s duty to himself and to his fellow-man; a system sounding all depths, touching the most delicate fibres of life, and without a flaw or an omis- sion. Its precepts and laws come in their own order, but they all appear in the record first or last. The Buddhistic “decalogue” seems to have been in advance of the Mosaic in this—that it had two commandments wanting in the lat- ter—* Thou shalt not lie,” “Thou shalt not get drunk.” But these commandments, although not-in our own deea- logue, are written over and over again in the Old Testament as well as the New. And yet once more the moral require- DR. SWAZHY’S REPLY. 51 ments of the Bible, are as clear of puerilities as they are of impurity or oblique vision. The Buddhistic decalogue steps right down to a moral weakness of which the Bible is never guilty. ‘Thou shalt not visit dances nor theatrical representations.” “ Thou shalt not use ornaments nor per- fumery in dress.” Occultation of Ingersoll’s Good Sense—General Survey of Deities —Scope of Divine Revelation. Now the common-sense question occurs whetner a book containing such a system, always teaching men what is good and pure, always warning him against evil, and encouraging him to be a strong, sound, pure, complete man in everything, is worthy of sneers, ribaldry and irrever- ence, even though it were full of unbelievable fables and fantastic ideas of immortality. In what spirit can a com- pany of people shout their applause when a book whose lines of thought are always leading a man above himself is made the target of sarcasm and ridicule, and the cry is almost in so many words, ‘ Down with the Bible!’ Let us go alittle beyond the strictly ethical. The general ideas of our Bible about God commend themselves to the best wisdom of mankind. We make no reference now to any sect of theologies, but to the theological atmosphere both of the Old and New Testaments, namely, that God is, and being the Creator, the life and force of all things, in other words, as our Bible has it, the Living God, superin- tends all human affairs. Asa Oreator He has not forgotten His work; as a Father He is always mindful of His off- springs; and caring for man is leading him on by a great hope to a great inheritance; that His face is against evil doing, that He smiles on all whostrive to be just and good, and that in sorrow and want and temptation He folds to His great heart a rightéous and even a repentant man; and §2 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. as the shuttle goes back and forth, knitting into each other the soiled and blood-stained threads, He is weaving there- from a garment of light for. mankind; that superstition, despotism, slavery and war are only other names for His patience, while man is learning the great lesson. This is the Bible interpretation of the incomprehensible Cause and Spirit of the universe, that He is alive, and the Father and Friend of man now, and will have some more for him after the years have rolled by. Suppose, now, it be all untrue, is there not something in this dream or conceit that should bring a sigh rather than a sneer from the heart of the unbeliever? The god of Brahmanism is an ‘abstraction without attributes, the great nothing of the universe. Much the same is true of Budd- hism, only in another way. It has law and virtue, but no God of love, and asks no trust or faith. The same is true. in the unchanging round which knows no spirit above and no hope below, taught by Confucius to his disciples. The religion of the Persians presented a god who had a deyil-. god for a yokefellow, keeping up the eternal and never-to- be-ended quarrei of good and evil. Our Bible begins with the idea that God is one God, the only and the Supreme, and ends with this one God sending angels down to say to the weary world, ‘ Peace on earth good will to men.” Away beyond all the faiths and all the Bibles held sacred by mankind, ours alone declares that man is not an orphan, that good and evil are not eternal antagonisms, in other words, that the Great Supreme is our Father in Heaven. Trueor false, wisdom has taught nothing more inspiriting or helpful to man. Neither imagination nor credulity has else- where painted a vision so attractive, or outof the “silences” and “ eternities,” and mysteries, whispered so good a word in the ears of mortals. This idea of lordship and father- hood is not incidental. It runs through every. narration, +] DR. SWAZHY’S REPLY. 58 is implied in every precept, and re-affirmed in every prom- ise. And even if it be beyond proof it makes the whole Bible at least a golden dream. Suppose now one does not take as absolutely and histor- ically true the story of Adam’s rib and the woman, or of the fish swallowing a man and throwing him unhurt on the shore, does not the high moral tone of every command and every precept everywhere illumined by ‘this pure and golden dream, entitle this book to the reverence of man- kind? And especially since by the common consent the idea of virtue in our Bible goes beyond the many excellent things of Confucius, Zoroaster and the other sacred writers of other religions, and its idea of the “living God” sur- passes in purity and attractiveness, and in consolation and hope, all other religions, is not this purest blossom of the instinct, if you please to call it so, of duty and faith, of inestimable value as the guide and hope of man, even though it were overlaid with ten-fold more difficulties than the most ingenious scoffer can present? Or, if it is not reliable as a guide, is it not worthy of reverence as the proudest achievement of the hungry mind of man? The Great Central Figure—Absolute Unity of the Bible System. Still further, this Bible has for its central, or rather ter- minal, figure a name so remarkable that none but the obscene and profane use it lightly, a man so remarkable that whatever the skeptic may say of Moses or Paul, his tongue would refuse its office should he attempt to catalogue the mistakes of Jesus of Nazareth. Voltaire, Diderot, Bolingbroke, Strauss, Renan, all speak reverently of this One Man of history. And yet the whole New Testament is built up on the sayings and doings of this Man. And not the New Testament only. The Jewish scriptures, full of errors or not, were full of the ideas of a Messiah, from 54 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. Moses to Malachi. And this marvelous man claimed that He was that Messiah. So that the Old Testament, as well, is a record of various forms pointing to this Man. TI raise here no question of the truth of prophecy; I simply affirm that this Man, whose purity and wisdom are so singularly impressive, claimed to be the fulfillment of those old writings, identified Himself with Moses and David and Isaiah, and sanctified the great current of thought which from the mouths of these men flowed along the shores of that elder world. So that to revile the old Bible of the Jews is to revile Him. There is no scholar, orthodox or liberal, believing or skeptical, who docs not identify the phenomenon of Christianity with the phenomenon of Judaism. Out of the soil of Judaic history sprung this purer growth—Jesus and the things He taught. I suggest, therefore, that before one joins in the laugh against a religion which was founded long anterior to any other historical records than its own, he pause a little, remembering that this remarkable Man, who has not yet become antiquated, quoted those old books as His Bible, and doubtless had a tolerable understanding of their mean- ing and worth. And, perhaps, if He whose sermon on the mount is yet as fresh in the nineteenth century as though it were uttered to-day, found a vein of precious ore in those books, those same veins may be yet visible in our time, The Bible Law of Development vs. Infidel Philosophy. I have given, you will perceive, room for a large amount of the unaccountable and incredible in a Bible worthy of reverence. In fact, there is no occasion, except in the peculiarity of some men’s minds, to allowso much. There is a passage in the Bible that is descriptive of the kingdom of Heaven, and reads thus; “ First the blade and then the eres DR. SWAZEHY’S REPLY. 55 ear, and after that the full corn in the ear.” The Bible here gives the key to itself. It is a statement of the law of development, intellectual and moral. An observation of the Bible from the standpoint of this law discovers an answer to the objections that are just now brought against our sacred Book. Col. Ingersoll and men of his style of criticism (and, I am sorry to say, some preachers, also,) quote a verse from Genesis precisely as though the same words, or the same event, were found in the Gospels. They judge an act or a usage recorded in the Pentateuch precisely as though it were found in the Acts of the Apos- tles. They make no allowance for the stage of human progress. They would teach a child surveying before he had learned the multiplication table. They talk about “skulls” as indicating progress, but God must needs put the same ideas into a skull of the Laurentian period that He does into a skull of to-day. Otherwise, God is worthy of hate. They would preach the doctrine of equality on the‘deck of a man-of-war. They utterly ignore the drill that men and nations need in coming up to their majority. They would suffer the rabble in a court-room to vote down the decision of a judge on the bench. The men who are historically connected with God’s order of things must dis- pense with the great schoolmaster—experience. Ideas “must spring forth complete, like Minerva. Rafters and dome must touch the skies the same day the foundation stones were laid. Those are the ideas with which a certain class of critics approach the Old Testament. If a people are not ripe for a commonwealth, and God gives them a king, God is all wrong. If a people are become a great military camp and Moses proclaims martial law, Moses and his God are monsters of cruelty. If there are no jails, no way of disposing of prisoners of war, and a gentle servi- tude is the substitute, God isa great slave-driver. If men’s » Ie Ly ae 56 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. lusts are so greedy that even the best of them want more wives than one, the patience of God with the slow growth of moral ideas is translated as the establishment of polyg- amy. If a people are so vile and filthy that the beasts are clean and modest in comparison, and God sends an army to wipe them out of being, we are pointed to the white faces of women and children lifted on the crests of the divine wrath! Common Sense View of the Subject—How it Eliminates Poly- gamy, Slavery, etc. Common sense, in asking whether the Bible is worthy of confidence would ask whether, as matter of fact, the moral instruction of any period of Bible record was not fully up to the capacity of that period to receive it? It would ask another question—namely, whether a divine tuition is dif- ferent from any other, except that it is more skillful¢— whether, in fact, the critics who compare an old order of things with the highest state of moral development are not demanding that the people under God’s training shall be a miraculous people, throwing off prejudices as they do a Winter garment, bearing fruit without any intermediate period of growth and blossom, and, in general terms, upset- ting the every-day laws of progress. It is this idealism— than which nothing is more irrational—which creates a large share of the moral difficulties of the Old Testa- ment. It is the insane or reckless, the idiotic or perverse tenacity with which men demand that the divine teaching must not suit itself to the time in which it was given, but . must always be up to the ripest periods of progress, that gives any opportunity for the objugations of men who “ean write a better Bible” themselves than ours. The two great charges brought against the Bible are polygamy and slavery, Now, admit that in all stages, DR. SWAZHY’S REPLY. 57 from the chimpanzee up to Darwin, they are wrong (which is by no means clear), are these charges true? The fact that polygamy and slavery existed among the people who were under drill does not prove it. The fact that there were laws regulating either of these practices does not prove it. A law regulating the social evil does not prove that the sovereign people who make the laws approve the social evil, but only that, if men and women will go wrong, society must put up some defenses against corruption. Common sense inquires whether statutory allowance is an indorsement. And if that Remarkable Man, commenting on the divorce laws of Moses, said that Moses gave those laws because the people could not bear any better laws, common sense inquires if the same may not be true of other recognized usages which are below the ideal of an advanced age. And when one rails at the Bible for its ill-treatment of women, the railing is simply gratuitous. I have read the Old Testament more or less carefully for many years, but I do not, at this writing, remember a single word that dis- honors woman as woman. I have redd only a little of Brahminical writings, but I remember a sentence or two about women. “A woman is never fit for independence;” “ Women have no business with the text of the Veda. * * * Sinful women must be as foul as falsehood itself. This is fixed law.”’ Whether in the last quotation it is: meant that there is no purification for a bad woman, or what else, I do not know; but I do not recall anything like it in the Old Testament. Educated common sense knows that women among the Hebrews occupied a vastly higher level than the women of all other nations. It is simply notorious, that with all the lapses from virtue, the Hebrew women were as white as snow compared with the women of the Gentile world, and honor goes always hand in hand with virtue. 58 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. More Common Sense—The Great Ingersoll Orb Approaching the Nihilistic Belt — Nebule. Common sense demands that in judgment of the moral worth of the Bible, it be taken as a whole. The theory of all who receive the Old and New Testaments is that they: belong together, are so to be interpreted; that one is the beginning, and the other the conclusion, of the one Bible. | The one begins in the “ Laurentian period,” so to speak, and follows. man up from a wild nomad to wealth and empire, and the decay of empire; the moral and the civil law blend- ing and running along together for hundreds of years, then Separating by the ae explosion of the civil powers. The other takes him after the wounds caused by the explo- sion have partly healed, and puts forth mozal ideas unen- cumbered by any considerations of the state. The former gave moral laws to the Jew; the latter moral laws to the man; everything from first to last going on as nat- urally as the building of a city, or the growth of a tree. And common sense should inquire how it happens, that, while the great army of scholars who have studied these systems, believers and skeptics alike, have been filled with admiration, a man rises up now and then to vituperate the logic of events and malign the great God because He has not chosen to plant a tree with the branches in the ground and the roots in the air. Common sense naturally asks what the meaning of this bitter outbreak may be. We have no right to men’s motives. But this is a phenomenon, the cause of which we have a right to ask, as we would ask the cause of a fall- ing meteor. The Bible isa law and order book. It teaches that one must look out how he pulls up even the tares. Are we in our historic orbit passing a belt of nililism, a time when assassination is reform, and a bad shot at a poor DR. SWAZEHY’S REPLY. 59 ezar, inheriting semi-barbarism and striving with all his might to get rid of the inheritance, is to be lamented? You may be told that it is the horrid theology of the Bible which provokes assault. Common sense remarks that, horrid as its theology may be, its sterner features are just like the theology of nature, namely, a demand for obedience to law and “the survival of the fittest.” It is nature put into language, the operation of moral causes foretold—that is all. If you want a government more just than one which judges a man Aeuccdine to his deeds, good or bad, and takes into account his knowledge and oppor- tunities, why, the thing to do is to rail at nature, at cause and effect, at eee and harvest. For while on the better side the Bible theology is more beneficent than nature, on the hard side it is simply unmitigated natural law. Do the theologians preach that good men will be damned? Then rail at the theologians, and not at the Bible. In closing this short article, as an addendum, let me ask a question or two for the benefit of all who have a bad opinion of the Bible, as a woman’s book or a slave’s book. 1. Forget the harem of Solomon, and say why Judaism was a house of refuge for thousands of Roman and Greek women, many of them of noble birth, for a century pre- ceding the Christian era ? %, 2. ie the same line, squarely, has, or has not, the mod- ern estate of woman been the fruit of Christian (including Judaic) teaching? 3. Did not the Bible first mitigate and finally destroy slavery in the Roman empire ? 4, Did not the Bible destroy slavery in England and America? Charge all the slave-driving you will to Chris- tian men, and give any unbeliever all he claims, and then go down to a last analysis. 60 UISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 5. Are not republican institutions, including (as the old republics did not) democratic ideas, directly and palpably the fruit of the teachings of that remarkable Man (whom the French infidels called the Great Democrat); whose Bible was the Old Testament, and who told His followers how to amend and finish it by a book called the New Test- ament ? In whatever way these questions may be answered, the man who essays to answer them will find that it is not so easy to eliminate the genius of Moses and Jesus from the genius of the world’s movement toward virtue, equality and liberty. ‘ Tri the Prince that this (a costly copy of the Bible) is the secret of England’s greatness.—Queen Victoria. I HAvE always said and always will say, that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make better citizens, better fathers and better husbands.— Zhomas Jefferson. Tue Bible is equally adapted to the wants and infirmi- ties of every human being. No other book ever addressed itself so authoritatively and so pathetically to the judgment and moral sense of mankind.—Chancellor James Kent. Curist proved that He was the Son of the Eternal by His disregard of time. All His doctrines signify only, and the same thing, eternity —WVapoleon Bonaparte. I wave read the Bible morning, noon and night, and have ever since been the happier and better man for such reading.—_ _Ldward Burke. ) I po not believe human society, including not merely a few persons in any state, but whole masses of men, ever has attained, or ever can attain, a high state of intelli- gence, virtue, security, liberty, or happiness without the Holy Scriptures.— Willam H. Seward. A er ee a EN pe eee nse ee “ mas J > - Pie” PY a EL! : Z =" ~ = Srey oe = ele 2 {Photographed by Melander.] ers ate Eat iy ae Rk < 4 ~ oe Ke t se ae 7 ws hs A a, > = ae = « as ~ - ee 2d 3 a as me * ~ i rus DR. COLLYHR’S REPLY. 63 DR. COLLY ER’S REPLY. Dr. Collyer Relates a Little Story—A Book that cost Mr. Ingersoll the Governorship of Ilinois—The Volume Philosophically Considered—Heavy Blows. I nave been told a gentleman went to see Mr. Ingersoll once, when he lived in Peoria, and finding a fine copy of Voltaire in his library, said, ‘“ Pray, Sir, what did this cost you?” “TI believe it cost me the governorship of the State of [llinois,”’ was the swift and pregnant answer. 1 can not but recall the incident as he stands in the light of his lec- ture. Heseems to be saying, “It is my turn now, and I will do what I can to square the account. I will dethrone your God to-day amid peals of laughter; blow His being down the wind on the wings of myepigrams. I have those about me who will send my words flying all over the state, I will start a crusade which will shut up your churches some day, silence your immemorial prayers, slay all the hopes that would strive after something more than this momentary gleam between the eternities, make of no account the grand deep truth that ‘life struck sharp on death makes awful lightning,’ and so dwarf our human kind that when we get man where we want him he shall never again be able to look over the low billows of his green graves, and end the fight by making my own creed good once, for all that Man, God’s last work, who seemed so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who rolled the psalms in wintry skies, Who built him fanes for fruitless prayer, 64 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. Who trusted God was love indeed, And love, creation’s final law; Though nature red, in tooth and claw, With raven, shrieked against his creed; Who loved, who suffered countless ills, Who battled for the true and just, Is-blown about the desert dust, And sealed within the iron hills.” Now, since we first knew Mr. Ingersoll by report, there has been a time when those who can only believe in God as a rather helpless little brother, by no means able to take care of Himself, and in themselves as big brothers, who are bound to stand up for Him, might have felt there was grave danger in such a sight as we have witnessed—of a vast array of men and women, some of them it is fair to believe of a thoughtful turn, assembled to hear the last and best word which can be said why (sod should be dethroned, and His presence and providence numbered among the things that seemed true enough once, but pass away inevit- ably in the process through which we arise from “ our dead selves to higher things,” Sparks Flying in all Directions—Singular Mental Phenomenon Occasioned by $25.000 a Year. He was clothed once in a fine austerity; went on his lonely way quite content, to give grave and serious reasons for rejecting what so many of us hold dearer than our life, and was faithful to his instinct and insight, though such ovations as were ever given him—as Dr. Dyer used to say of the old abolitionists—might take the form mainly of rotten eggs. I know of more than one man, who, in those days, nourished a deep and most tender regard for him, and found something noble in the stand he made for the best a man can do and be, who hasto abide so utterly alone. But Mr. Ingersoll, roystering around as the popular advocate of ‘ 4 WE a oly) ves We BE ont \ DR. COLLYEHR’S REPLY. 65 atheism, at $25,000 a year, as the common report goes, is quite another sort of a man. No doubt the laborer is worthy of his hire. Those who run the thing may be trusted to see to that, and a good many of us who stand on the other side may not be much better, according to the old proverb that it is “money makes the mare go.” _ ‘Still, as this always turns the fine edge of owr endeavor, - and makes us weak for good when we make it at all a matter of barter and sale, so it must be with Mr. Inger- soll, making him weak for what I can not but believe to be evil. He is no more in such a case than the second batch of reformers in the old times, who argued lustily for a reformation, while still they grew rich on the Church lands. No more than your Archbishop, in the Church of England, arguing on the godliness of tythes and priestly authority. So Mr. Ingersoll, in motley, trying to laugh the deepest and most sacred convictions of men down the wind under the guise of girding at the Pentateuch (for we must thank him, I say again, for the frankness with which he tells us this is his ultimate aim), is a very differ- ent man to the quiet, manful fellow we used to hear of in Peoria long ago, who won such regard from those who could at all understand him. The man in the ring, whose sole business it is to make you laugh, makes no converts even to rough riding. And so there is ground for neither hope nor fear, as we stand on that side or this, about the advance of atheism, so long as this remains as the best method of its choicest champions. It may make headway with such men as Voltaire had to handle, and in such times; but this serious and deep-hearted race of ours never did take to this kind of thing, and never will. It is only as the crackling of the thorns under a pot. Nor can this bitter and relentless spirit toward those who differ help the advocates of atheism any more than it does. 5 66 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. the advocates of the faith. Robert Southey says, in aletter to Sharon Turner, touching the contentions of his time between the sects, ‘“‘ When I hear the dissenters talk about Churchmen, I feel like a very high Churchman myself; but when I hear Churchmen talk about dissenters, I feel that I am a dissenter, too.” It was but the bias of a nature, in which the balances were still true, infavor of the side which . was dealt with most unfairly. The pleain the mind of one who could look on both sides with a calm concern, that the result of fighting over the lamp should not be to put out the light, or of contending over the nature and properties of the spring to soil the water so that no one could drink at it, be he ever so athirst. Lord Bacon says, “ there is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when those think they do best who go farthest; but care should be taken that the good should not be purged away with the bad, which commonly happens when this is the method.”’ So I think it must be with such violent and utter denunciation as this, which lies within the spirit of Mr. Ingersoll’s address. It has pleased a very bright and able man in our ranks to fall into accord with him in many things he has to say, and to show how we also hold this ground. I may be old-fashioned, and unfit for a fair judgment, but Iam very much of Southey’s mind, and when I hear orthodoxy denounced in such a spirit, I say I agree with Mr. Ingersoll nowhere. Here is bigotry of a new shape, denouncing bigots; and I sway to the other side for very charity, and the desire that the must good pos- sible should be found in any evil, and especially that one should think as well as possible of those who can not see as we do, but are still of as fine and clear a grain, and show as noble a soul of self-sacrifice—that uttermost and inner- most proof aman can give that he believes he is right. DR. COLLYERS RHPLY. 67 The Clear Ring of Truth vs. the Dull Thud of the Baser Metal —Potency of Simple Statement—The Doctor’s Objections to Ingersoll’s Talk. Now, a man who seeks and loves the truth, must be esteemed in every human society; but so far as my own observation goes, the most of our fights and contentions carried on in such a spirit as this I am trying to touch, end in vast clouds of dust and smoke, in which the clear, shining sun of the truth turns blood-red to our human vision. And those who, even with the best intentions, are forever going about, as we say, with a chip on their shoul- der, are likely in the end to be voted a common nuisance. The truth must be told, no matter who gets hurt; the truth, or even semblance of the truth, which smites the man who tells it, and moves his heart so that he has to ery “ Woe is me if I preach not this Gospel!’ But the truth still comes to us through clear and simple statements which tell their own story, rather than through denial, denuncia- tion, satire, slang, and appeals to the top-gallery. So Channing thought, and the result is, that his best sermons are simply statements of the truth as it had come home to his own heart and mind. So Parker thought, and reading his life again, just now, I find there is nothing the man longed for so much as that he might be quiet, and just let the truth dome itself in his great fine heart and brain, while he regrets bitterly the evil times that compelled him to take to other methods; and the best work he ever did for the deep, still truth, are statements. So John Wesley thought, when once he struck his shining path from earth to heaven, and his sermons from 1740 to 1780, are simply statements of the ever-growing and ever-brightening truth God is revealing to man. And so even Calvin thought, and his earliest and best utterances are still statements, grim, hard, iron-clinched, but all the same the stern and 68 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. inexorable affirmation, made good for all time, that neither priest nor Pope can play fast and loose with the Most High God. Always you find the greatest and best men when they themselves are at their best making statements, exactly as Jesus does in the sermon on the mount. Saying what is in them simply and sincerely, feeling sure, as Coleridge says, that “no authority can ever prevail in opposition to the truth.”” So Columbus holds himself before the Council of Salamanca, when a new world is in debate. So Stephen- son holds himself before the House of Lords, when he has to answer for his locomotive. So Newton affirms his dis- covery of the law of gravitation ; and Harvey, that of the circulation of the blood. That is the law of all truth-tell- ing in its noblest and best shape, and then the contention, if there is one, is simply the hiss, as Stebbing, of California, said once, when he was speaking in defence of the Chinese, “is simply the hiss the white-hot truth makes when it strikes the black waters of hell.” Here, then, is my radical objection to Mr. Ingersoll’s talk, apart from his final aim. It is conceived and done in a narrow and most bigoted spirit, by one who claims, above all things in the world, to be free from bigotry. The men of whom he speaks so unworthily are, take them by and large, worthy men. The things in the five books of Moses, so called, on which the fathers based their creeds, are rapidly passing into worthier meanings; and the day is not far distant when the old belief will have rotted down, and be as when an old tree rots, to become the nursing mother of a bed of violets. No man believes in such things any more, who has read and thought to any purpose; and the man who has not done this, had far better believe in the six days’ work and. one day’s rest, rib, serpent, fall, flood, ark, manna, and all the rest of those wonders, than in Mr. Ingersoll’s enormous and most fatal negation of God. DR. COLLYERS REPLY. 69 Putting the Fine Edge on Orthodoxy—Taking a Weld with Prof. Swing and Dr. Thomas—Borax and Bigotry. Nor is that bad and bitter spirit in orthodoxy now which once found utterance in fire and the axe, as it did in far more ruthless ways in atheism when the goddess of Rea- son was the divinity of France. Orthodoxy, in a free-spoken land like ours, is very civil, indeed, and timid, as I think, almost to a fault, showing just the spirit which is no* sure the ground may not slip from under it any moment; and so far as its finest leaders go edging away trom the rocking base, as fast and as far the people for whom those men have to care will follow. Nothing could be more gentle than the way orthodoxy used Brother Swing. He was no more orthodox than you are. He might not think so, but that’s the truth, patent to the whole world. Yet the church to which he was preaching, and the old standbys, as we call them, said, “ This is what we are here for, and have laid out our money and time for, and, if you go back far enough, it is what our fathers shed their blood for., Dr. Swing must be true to his ancient vows, or leave.” If Mr. Ingersoll should ever lay out his money, and those of his mind put theirs to it, to build a great hall in Washington or Chicago for the propagation of atheism, and employ a man to preach to them, and then if this man should depart as far backward from their way of thinking as Brother Swing departed forward from that of the Presbyterians, they will be much more catholic and inclusive than I think they are if they use that man as gently. I do not mention this for proof of my word that ortho- doxy is getting to be very civil—indeed, gentle, timid, and even wanting in a proper courage to take care of its own household, if we are to judge from the half-and-half meas- ures they are taking with Mr. Talmadge, in Brooklyn, and the way in which they let him smife them on the mouth. 40 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. — Orthodoxy has exchanged the old fetters of iron for silken bands with an elastic base. Brother Thomas, my dear and good friend, has no right to preach in a Methodist pulpit, and in the days I remember, would not have preached in one to this time. There must be a certain concert of opin- ion, capable of being brought within fair lines, or nobody would organize or hold anything. This is the secret of our most happy relation through all these years in this church. We hold together through a large, free, common opinion about certain grand verities. J should injure my own nature if I went over those lines. Yet men are continually going over them in the orthodox churches. But they bear and forbear, scold a little, fret a good deal, and trust the brother may see things different presently or depart in peace, and then, when there is no help for it, they lift him very gently out of the fold. Nor is the scorn Mr. Ingersoll pours out on these ancient books befitting any man who could feel his way to their heart, apart from any theory of inspiration or the use made of them to hinder human progress. It is the spirit of the Caliph he shows, who, when the question came up what - should be done with a superb library, said, “Burn it; what- ever is against the Koran ought to be burnt, and whatever agrees with the Koran is not needed.” With some such narrow vision he would judge these venerable monuments of the most ancient time; make an end of them to human credence; get them branded for worthless in the interests of human reason; and order himself toward them as if an iconoclast, looking over the treasures of the Louvre, should note only what is grotesque or painful, while he missed what is most beautiful and entrancing, tumble the whole into a heap, and burn it into ashes and lime. Men have misused these books, there can be no doubt of that, and turned some parts of them into bane, which, well used, DR. COLLYHRS REPLY. 71 might bring blessing. So they tell me, there is no place that can match Peoria in its power to turn good grain into whisky; therefore, shovel Peoria into the river, and leave the smiling prairies where the grain grows, a waste. Nothing in the world shows a man s limitations so fatally as the play of this power which can not or will not distin- guish between the use and the abuse of things, or will over- look the abiding good because of the transient evil. We tolerate it easily in the child who turns in wrath on the chair against which he has bruised himself; we look twice at the man who does this, and then draw our own conclu- sion. I have been told, on good authority, that Mr. Inger- soll, in his childhood and his early youth, did get badly ’ bruised against these books. Well, the books have to take it now; but is this the sign of a large and a gracious mind? One would think he might have gotten over it before this, and come to understand them better than mere instruments of hurt. I can agree in nothing touching the Bible and the soul’s life with the man who tells me his aim is to damage or destroy the faith of man in God, to the best of his ability; but if this was out of the way, one might not object to his antagonism to the misuse of Moses by those who think they do God service. Still, in any case, I find too much beauty in the books to allow me to touch them with irreverent hands. They are simply above all stand- ards of value, with which I measure other books outside the Scriptures, in the revelation they make to me of the way men felt their way toward a sure faith in God in those old times, and so grew, in many instances, to be very noble and good at last, and, as I have said, of the way in which they tried to account for this wonderful and mysterious universe in which they found themselves when they had “learned the use of I and me, and said ‘I am not what I see, and other than the things I touch.’” Nor would I lose one of 72 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. the wonders. They all tell us something we want to know about the working of the human mind. That is a very poor and rude matter I treasure in my study; a broken vase of gray clay, with a few fishbone marks on it; but if there was not another of them in the world I would not exchange it for the Portland vase, for this reason: That on a day, so remote I can not strike it, some poor savage made that vase in my little town, to hold the dust of some one dear to him, put those marks on it for a token of what was in his mind, and then made a little vault and hid it away until the sun of this century should shine on it, and when I hold that vase, I find a trace of the man who had else been lost. There is the faint beat of a human heart lingering in the clay, and a dim remembrance of tears, and the marks, and as if they should open my grave two thousand years from now, and find the white cross still fresh on my coffin, and say, “Tender, loving hands laid that there, let us deal with it tenderly.” These rude and half-shapen things in the old books are the clue to the man who made them, and how he felt, and what he thought. I would not spare the least letter out of them, but would scan them in all reverence, let who will scorn them. They all belong to our human history, and it is only their mis- fortune they have ever been misused. They are included in the saying of the great and wise German, that the Bible begins nobly with Paradise, the symbol of Faith, and con- cludes with the eternal kingdom; and with the grand, sweet word of Thomas Carlyle: “In the poorest cottage there is one book wherein, for thousands of years, the spirit of man has found light and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is deepest in him. The Book wherein to this day the eye that will look well, the mystery of existence reflects itself, and if not to the satisfying of the outward sense, yet to the opening of the inward sense, which is the far grander result.” Pa mee CHT Wa MMR YOR RA Ee! ine MAYS LR Ray ld ms Ae re is 3 Moe > Leen ees Let.) a4 wh ne whe che . P T : i. Trae) “ hal . 7 Ate “Ne eae | f ‘ i v yay Rusgl? ty Myf a Pig ee : ey oS y j i ‘ ae if HME Sy ol a ¢ DR. COLLYHR’S REPLY, 13 A Touching Illustration—Hloquence and Truth—Havelock’s Saints. Of the doctrine advanced by Mr. Ingersoll, and his pur- pose to have done with the God Jesus believed in, and show reason why we should have done with Him, there is nothing to say if I have not said it steadily these many years. A remark of Charles Hare strikes me forcibly as [ read the few words that are said on this matter, in the address, “There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver the mind can not use its wings—the clearest proof that it is out of its element.” For when I consider how eloquent Mr. Ingersoll has been at times, and the moving cause of it, I can see that he also must answer to this law. He never said grander words than those about our boys, their mighty heart, and utter self-sacrifice, for the noblest ends. But there never was anything done since the world stood, in which the presence of God could be traced, and his power felt more clearly, nor did ever men make such sacrifice with a devouter sense that God was within it all, than those most worthy his grand and touch- ing eulogium. “Call out Havelock’s saints,” Sir Archi- bald Campbell shouted, when hope was almost dead in the great Sepoy rebellion in India. Something must be done, and done on the swift instant, or there would be more woful work among the women and children. Cail out Havelock’s saints, they are sure to be ready, and they are never drunk. They were of the sort that carry a Bible -in their knapsack, and turn to chapter and verse, and sing psalms from old Rouse’s version to Dundee and Elgin, and the Martyrs, and nourish their hearts on stories of the way stout battles were fought and grand martyrdoms endured for God among the moors. Call out Havelock’s saints, they are always ready, and never get drunk, and they do fight like the very angels. They were but the brothers of the great, simple 74 ' MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. souls who fought at Ball’s Bluff, and in scores of battles beside, while mothers and sisters did the praying for the moment, for they had no time except just to look up and hear that voice in the heart say, “ Steady, my boy, steady, you are of a grand stock, you must tell a grand story. And they told it, and at the heart of it all was God, and a new life for the nation, and in time a new civilization that shall shed its blessing on the whole waiting world. Atheism—Not an Institution but a “ Destitution!”»—The True Life. I have no stones to throw at atheism any more than I have stones to throw at blindness. It can never be more than a very sore and sad limitation, not an institution, but a destitution. This Anglo-Saxon nature is not good soil for it; no arguments can make it take hold and grow in us any more than arguments can make roses take hold and grow on Aberdeen granite. Nor have I any exhortation save this: That as we stand as pioneers of the noblest and fairest faith we can reach, a faith which throws no strands to stay itself on the fall, or the flood, or the manna, or the sun, standing still, or any of these old wonders, but just fronts the light and drinks it in, we shall grow ever more worthy to prove God’s presence in the world, by revealing it in our life, and in the work he has given usto do. There is no argument like that which lies within a sweet and true life which looks to God forever for its inspiration and its joy. Let us be right worthy of our faith. Then shall this Western Goth, So fiercely practical, so keen of eye, Find out some day that nothing pays but God. Served whether in the smoke of battle field, In work obscure done honestly—or vote For truth unpopular—or faith maintained, To ruinous convictions—or good deeds, Wrought for good’s sake, heedless of heaven or hell. FRED. PERRY POWERS’ REPLY. 15 FRED. PERRY POWERS’ REPLY. The Sinaitic Code—Solvent Powers of the Historic Method — Graphic Illustration of the Two Schools. Crristranity, like a fortress on an open plain, is liable to attack from opposite directions. But it is well for the at- tacking parties to remember that columns of argument do not, like columns of soldiers, co-operate when moving in opposite directions. Christianity is not to be disposed of by proving that at the same time it is and is not a certain thing. : The “historic method,” like every new journal, seems “to meet a long-felt want:” It has been clutched greed- ily and employed in every conceivable shape. It proves not only that whatever is is right, but that whatever was was right, and whatever will be will be right. It has been car- ried to a point where it undermines personal responsibility, and with it Mr. Herbert Spencer, in the conclusion of his Sociology, enjoins the reformer and the philanthropist from activity. It eliminates ethical considerations from the mind-of the historian. It closes the eyes of society to the vices of its members, and it lays its hand upon the mouth of the judge before whom stands a man who, as the result of antecedents, and in the natural effort to harmonize himself with his environment, has committed murder. Now, it is a little singular that this invaluable historic method should be a legitimate weapon against the church, but an illegitimate weapon for the church. If the church is to be allowed to use this weapon freely it will have no 76 MISTAKES OF INGHRSOLL. difficulty in making a perfect defense for itself, its predeces- sor and all of its members, no matter how wild or wicked. The historic method is a solvent in which the inqui- sition disappears, and which at once removes those spots on the robe of religious history, the wars and massacres of the Israelites. I have no disposition to make any such exten- sive use of the historic method as this. But all matters of history are to be studied as historical, not as contempora- neous. And it is in the last degree uncandid for the oppo- nents of Christianity to make the extremest use of the his- toric method when it suits their purpose, and then, in dealing with religious history, eliminate ordinary historic perspective. In this latter particular the enemies of the church are not alone. The Reformation brought in a re- vival of Judaism, and a large section of Protestant Chris- tianity resolutely closes its eyes to the fact that the Mosaic dispensation was given several thousand years ago, and to a race wholly different in its position from any now existing. The Mosaic dispensation is not the only thing treated in this way. The directions given by St. Paul to a particular church at a particular date are constantly appealed to in the churches as universal law, applicable to all churches and throughout all ages. If a picture with a man in the foreground and an elephant in the background were shown to two savages, one of whom knew something about ele- phants, and the other of whom did not, the former would insist upon it that the artist was a ignoramus for painting an elephant smaller than a man, and the other would con- clude that man was a larger animal than an elephant, be- cause he appeared so in the picture. The former repre- sents a school of atheists who attack the ethics of the Sina- itie code, and the latter represents a school of devout be- levers who, receiving the Sinaitic code as a matter of rev- elation, feel compelled to defend it as the truth and noth- Pg foi oy ‘fal x NS «i M7 RA ey els iy ay hit UNG to sah 4 ) 4 \ 4 ‘ . 7 \ . F< 5 ~ \ FRED. PERRY POWERS’ REPLY. ra ing but the truth, and the truth for all times and all places. Jt is worth while to remember ait the very outset what both parties to the war waged over the ethics of the Pentateuch seem disposed to ignore, that what are now denounced as the errors of the Sinaitic code were pointed out more than eighteen hundred years ago by the highest authority rec- ognized by the Christian world. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus Christ used the fol- lowing language: Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for atoeth. But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other, also.— Matt. v., 38, 39. The lex talionis, here repudiated, was not a rabbinical interpolation; it was an integral maxim of the Sinaitic code, as the following words, coming shortly after the Deca- logue, show: And if any mischief follows, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for han, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.—Exodus xxi., 23-25, Free divorce was another Sinaitic error, so called, and in pointing it out Christ gave us the key to the whole Mosaic dispensation, as the following passage shows: The Pharisees also came unto Him, tempting Him, and saying unto Him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And He answered and said unto them, Have ye not read that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, for this cause shall a man leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. They say unto Him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your wives; but from the beginning it was notso. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornica- tion, and shall marry another, committeth adultery; and whoso marri- eth her which he put away doth commit adultery.— Matt. xix., 3-9. 78 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. . Divine Adjustment of the Moral Law— Progressive Hlimination of Polygamy, Slavery, Etc.— Mount Sinai and Mount Calvary. The “hardness of heart” referred to is evidently the dullness of the intellectual and moral sense that character- ized the almost savage slaves of the Egyptians when they came up out of Egypt.- Instead of imposing on them an ethical system perfectly complete and perfectly unintelligi- ble to them in their degraded condition, Moses, under di- rection of divine wisdom, gave them a moral law which they could understand, and which would develop in them a capacity for something purer and higher. , Polygamy was tolerated, not because it was the ideal system; not because the deity of the Hebrews could devise no other, but because polygamy is the natural intermedi- ate station between promiscuity and monogamy. God chose to make a civilized people out of the Jews, not by His creative fiat, but by operating through natural laws of | sociology. In due time, when men were prepared for it, the law of permanent and monogamous marriage was pro- mulgated, but it was in advance of public sentiment, as is aE by the fact that when Christ, in the passage above quoted, forbade free divorce, and proclaimed the sanctity of the marital relation, the disciples suggested that if that was the law it was better not to marry. So slavery was tolerated under the Mosaic law. But ser- vitude for a short term of years was substituted for per- manent and hereditary servitude, and the law threw some protection about the person of the slave. The Mosaic dis- pensation is not responsible for a defense of slavery. It tolerated an intermediate state between barbarism and civ- ilization. A fact of vast importance to notice is that this Mosaic system contained within itself the seeds which, when ‘ i AS Lau oi Ae Pee ee ees la Toes + f=) Oe, 1") 4 Se ‘a a +2 » of aye Y ry Ge ye gi 1 BK hol €)% eae) WAY Oe NP , A Sire mall y A i pede eee eR . ae oe re ? ’ ” ‘ SO EAM vive ° . ‘ ; ; ’ Me Fis 2 r ab Ne ae ’ we 4 FRED. PERRY POWERS’ REPLY. 19 humanity had outgrown the old dispensation, would mature into a new dispensation so far in advance of human attain- ments, that after nearly nineteen centuries the human race has not begun to catch upon it. Christ expounded the Old Testament references to Himself, beginning with Moses. When Sinai had reduced society to order, and stamped out ' paganism, then Calvary came and appealed to all that was highest and purest in man. Even at this late day there are not many souls that really comprehend the full meaning of Calvary and whose lives give evidence of that fact. When any considerable portion of the human race has received all that Calvary can confer, a new dispensation may be expected. In this sense the Mosaic dispensation was perfect and complete. As promulgated on Mount Sinai, it was adapted only to acertain low condition of mankind. But it contained a vital principle, which enabled it to expand as fast as civilization advanced. Starting with the Decalogue, it developed the penitential psalms and the noble exhorta- tions of the prophets, and finally the Beatitudes. Begin- ning with a catalogue of penalties, it in course of time developed sorrow for sin, and at last that love-to God which withholds from sin. This system of religion has developed faster than civilization has advanced. The Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai probably knew something of the wrong- fulness of murder, theft and adultery. But, to-day, in spite of great moral advances—to-day, nineteen centuries after Christ—how much does the human race really know about “ hungering and thirsting after righteousness?” Let the foolish declaration that we have outgrown Christianity come from those who have been filled, and who still want something more. The Decalogue is by no means the complete moral code that it is often represented to be, and it would be singularly 80 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. out of place in a Christian church were it not that, even to-day, and in the United States, there are many persons incapable of comprehending the Beatitudes which compre- hend all there is in the Decalogue, and vastly more. The seventh commandment does not apply to crimes, both participants in which are unmarried, and the Mosaic law treated. the seduction of an unbetrothed bondmaid as a trivial offense, sufficiently atoned for by the sacrifice of a ram. The seduction of a free maid, if she was not be- trothed, was atoned for by marriage. It was on account of the “hardness of their hearts,” their infancy in ethies, that this easy-going statute regarding the sexes was enacted. But Christ said : Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, ‘‘ Thou shalt not commit adultery;’’ but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in- his heart.— Matt. v., 27, 28. The Decalogue said, “Thou shalt not kill,” but Jesus Christ added to this as follows : Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in dan ger of the judgment.— Matt. v., 22. The Decalogue forbade the bearing of false witness; it was silent as to ordinary mendacity. In the New Testa- ment this law is extended to cover all untruthfulness. Purpose and Potency of the Mosaic Law. The purpose of the Mosaic law was to start the Israelites on the path of spiritual enlightenment. It was a provi- sional system, superseded at the right time by Christianity. The sacrifices were fines imposed on the guilty. They were also daily reminded of the existence of God, and the blood pouring from the altar taught the serious nature and fatal consequences of sin as nothing else would. Of course, to a set of modern sophists, who deny the existence of sin, FRED. PERRY POWERS’ REPLY. 81 the sacrifices are simply meaningless, revolving spectacles; but the man who hasn’t studied the subject enough to understand the meaning of the Hebrew sacrifices is estopped from discussing them in public. : The barbarities of the Mosaic system form a pet subject of denunciation by gentlemen who have a repugnance to study, coupled with a mania for delivering lectures, when the latter can be done at a pecuniary profit. If a man thinks it just as well to worship the sun or a bull as to worship Jehovah, of course he will regard the penalties denounced against idolatry as tyrannical and barbarous. But no man, unless he has a purpose to accomplish thereby, can sliut his eyes to the barrier that idolatry places in the way of mental or moral progress, or both. The interests of the human race demanded that paganism should be roofed out somewhere, if not everywhere. The promise to Abra- ham, that in his seed should all the nations of the earth be blessed, has been fulfilled, but that has been accomplished only by the most rigorous hostility to paganism among the Jews. In spite of all the stern laws of Moses, Israel again and again relapsed into paganism; yet it was an absolute necessity that if what we now knowas civilization was ever to come, paganism must in some corner of the world be stamped out, and the way prepared for Christianity. To teach the Israelites what a moral contagion was idolatry, they had to be taught that it was a physical contagion, contaminating everything connected with the idolator. Had not this been done, the Israelites would have remained, like all the rest of the world, immersed in the unspeakably unclean worship of Baal and Astarte and Moloch. Cost what it might, the ravages of the pestilence had to be checked somewhere. 6 82 MISTAKES OF INGHRSOLL. Excessive Wickedness and Proportionate Punishment—The Court of Heaven vs. the Court of Harth. Of course, the wars of the Israelites and the annihilation of certain tribes are held to be horrible cruelties by the sophists of the present day. But we are distinctly told that it was for their extraordinary wickedness that these tribes were exterminated. We are again and again told that it was for the wickedness of the Amalekites that their destruction was commanded. We get some glimpses of the unmentionable vileness of some of these Canaanitish tribes. The fact was that they were ulcers on the body of - the human race which had to be cut out. Possibly the innocent suffered with the guilty, and possibly there were no innocent except the infants, whom it would have been no mercy to save after their unclean parents were destroyed. It is probable that the moral taint had so rooted itself in the physical system that, had the children been spared, they would have inevitably developed into adults as unclean as their parents. The passages sometimes quoted to show that Jehovah was vindicative, are passages aimed at sin. The most ample amnesty to the repentant is prom- ised from one end of Genesis to the other end of Revelation. The people who denounce the divine government, as mani- fest in the Old Testament, either deny that there is any such thing as sin, or, which is often the case, they have admirable reasons for being angry because sin is punished. The gentlemen who denounce the destruction of Sodom are necessarily apologists for the Sodomists. When malignancy is charged against Jehovah it is im- portant to remember that the presence of five righteous persons would have saved Sodom. There was only one righteous person, and not only was he enabled to escape but he secured immunity for his family. Nineveh was gee FRED. PERRY POWERS’ REPLY. 83 spared because the people repented. The Israelites were delivered from their enemies when they forsook their sins. On the other hand Nathan’s rebuke to David is a matter of record, and Solomon’s licentiousness was punished by the revolt of Jeroboam and the ten tribes. The statement that Jehovah disregarded distinctions of right and wrong, or treated the innocent and guilty alike, or took pleasure in the death even of the wicked is false, and known to be so by the persons who make it. The very sentiment of hu- manity which prompts certain persons to denounce the di- vine government of the Jews is found only where Chris- tianity, the legitimate successor of Judaism, prevails. What are denounced as massacres committed by the Israelites were judicial executions performed under the or- ders of the only court in the universe which has perfect in- — formation of the cases tried before it, and which is per- fectly free from weaknesses. To object to the judgment one must either show that the condemned were innocent, which at this late day can not be shown, or one must show that the crimes were less heinous than the court held them to be, which is to become an apologist for crimes of every character, some of which are not even to be named. It is also to be remembered that the divine. government is the creator of society, instead of the creature of society, as is human government. The former is, therefore, not to be judged precisely as the latter is, even though abstract justice is the same in Heaven that itis on earth. The charge of vindictiveness is absolutely without foundation; and, by the way, of all the nations known to the Jews the one we might suppose them most hostile to is the Egypt- ian, for it was in Egypt that the Israelites were enslaved and maltreated. Yet the divine command, coming from Moses, was that the Israelites should in no case oppress the Egyptians, and the reason was that they were once so- 84 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. journers in the land of Egypt, the very reason we might suppose why they should i especially bitter toward the Egyptians. Able Bodied Mendacity and Civilization— Love and Obedience. . There is a good deal of dense ignorance or able-bodied mendacity in circulation regarding the ethics of the New Testament. Jesus Christ and His apostles upheld neither political nor domestic despotism. But it is a fact which lecturers should understand that civil order is the first step toward civilization. Despotism is more conducive to civilization than anarchy is. Furthermore, when Paul wrote his epistles the Roman officials suspected all Chris- tians of being hostile to the government, and it was espe- cially necessary that the Roman power should understand by the loyalty of the Christians that He whom they called their king was a spiritual sovereign, and not a rival of the emperor. What Paul ata particular time wrote to a particular church is by no means necessarily a universal law. What is particularly to be noted is that the exhortations to obe- dience on the part of the citizen, the wife, the child and the servant are coupled with and conditioned on exhorta- tions to the ruler, the husband, the parent and the master, which certain uncandid and irrational persons, some of whom are inside the church and some of whom are outside of it, are careful to ignore. In Ephesians v. 22, Paul com- mands wives to submit themselves to their husbands, but in the twenty-fifth verse husbands are commanded to love their wives as Christ loves His church. Now, if the hus- band fulfills his part of the mutual obligation, the wife’s submission will not be of a very mental character. In Ephesians vi. 1, children are commanded to obey their par- ents, but in the fourth verse fathers are commanded not FRED, PERRY POWERS’ REPLY. 85 to provoke their children to wrath, but to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. In the next verse servants are commanded to obey their masters, but in the ninth verse we read, “ And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening, knowing that your Master also is in Heaven; neither is there respect of person with Him.” In Hebrews xiii. 17, we read, “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves; for they watch for your souls as they that must give account.” The command to obey rules is conditioned on the dis- charge of their duties by the rulers. Now, in omitting one half of each double command, and on the strength of the other half arraigning Christianity as the ally of domestic and political tyranny, modern “ free thought” is accomplishing a great work, is it not? The distinguishing characteristic of “free thought” seems to be that it is thought freed from all subservience to facts. Mr. Powers’ Pungent Peroration. Theology has made many shipwrecks by an excess of @ priory reasoning, and by reasoning deductively when the means of reasoning inductively exist. But what is termed materialism is habitually doing the same thing, if it can make a point against Christianity by so doing. The ene- mies of Calvinism have denounced it because it promoted immorality. Yet a severer code of morals would be diffi- - cult to find than that maintained by the English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, and the French Huguenots, all Cal- vinists. Would it not be just as rational to judge Calvinism by its fruits as to judge its fruits by Calvinism? When man has argued from the New Testament that Christianity must be the ally of despotism, and then looks about him and sees that civil liberty is not known outside of Christian lands, and has its fullest development in Eng- 96 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. land and America, where Christianity in its simplest forms prevail, and where there are the fewest- barriers between the human soul and the New Testament itself; when he has argued from the New Testament to show that Chris- tianity is inimical to the best interests of womanhood, and then looks around and sees womanhood honored only in Christian countries, constantly employed by and honored in the church, must it not occur to him with painful force that he is a good ‘deal off the track? It would not be necessary to remind philosophers of the fact, but it is necessary to remind sophists that the Jews did a good many things that the Mosaic dispensation is not responsible for, and that it is mere idiocy to hold Chris- tianity responsible for everything done by individuals or associations in its name. The man who can not discrim- inate between the legitimate results of a system, and the abuses grafted on to it by its professed adherents, is plainly unfit to debate philosophical questions. If people made half the effort to understand the Bible that they make to discard it, they wouldn’t be so funny as they are now, but they would know more. THERE are over two hundred passages in the Old Testa- ment which prophesied about Christ, and every one of them has come true.—D. L. Moody. In regard to the Great Book, I have only to say it is ‘the best gift which God has given toman. All the good from the Saviour of the World is. communicated through this Book. But for this Book we could not know right from wrong. All those things desirable to man are contained in it. I return you my sincere thanks for this very elegant copy of the Great Book of God which you present.—Abra- ham Lincoln, on receiving a present of a Bible. 2 nc : : ae a aise ¥ TS Sa! a " wt) eae ee ATR Om CR ENO Ie Sak gb RE le. SAE ki eee 4 pe A eet ae, 59 hoe ay Binh SAO SAD Sagan A f ene gM A A | bal L they ie if s ’ £ Cr : a + \ 4 Dil Aah aia A 6 ey ' " ; - cn he Sas bie ITEMS. 87 7 DEFY you all, as many as are here, to prepare a tale so simple and so touching, as the tale of the passion and death of Jesus Christ, whose influence will be the same after so many centuries.— Denis Diderot. Tue Bible is the best book in the world. It contains more of my little philosophy than all the libraries I have seen.— John Adams. (Second President of United States.) Anp, finally, I may state, as the conclusion of the whole matter, that the Bible contains within itself all that, under God, is required to account for and dispose of all forms of infidelity, and to turn to the best and highest uses all that man can learn of nature.—Chancellor Dawson. Tue Bible is the only cement of nations, and the only cement that can bind religious hearts together.—Chevalier Bunsen. Tue Bible is the Word of God—with ail the peculiarities of man, and all the authority of God.— Prof. Murphy. From the time that, at my mother’s feet, or on my fa- ther’s knee, I first learned to lisp verses from the sacred writings, they have been my daily study and vigilant con- templation. If there be anything in my style or thoughts to be commended, the credit is due to my kind parents in instilling into my mind an early love of the Scriptures.— Daniel Webster. Tur same divine hand which lifted up before the eyes of Daniel and of Isaiah the veil which covered the tableau of the time to come, unveiled before the eyes of the author of Genesis the earliest ages of the creation. And Moses was the prophet of the past, as Daniel and Isaiah and many others were the prophets of the future—Prof. Guyot. We are persuaded that there is no book by the perusal of which the mind is so much strengthened and so much enlarged as it is by the perusal of the Bible-—Dr. Melville. [ Photographed by Mosher.} ter aes ae + BISHOP CHENEY’S REPLY. 88 BISHOP CHENEY’S REPLY, : How the Question of Forgery Applies to the Five Books of Moses. In looking at almost any object in the world of nature round about, it becomes remarkable only from certain points of view. The cathedral rocks that form one of the glories of the Yosemite Valley differ not much from any other great pile of jagged cliffs, except in a certain position, where the great mass of Gothic spires and arches appear clothed with evergreen ivy. Only as you reach a certain point where Profile Notch penetrates the White Mountains, do you see far up, up on the topmost cliff, the formation of a face cut in the solid granite by nature’sown chisel. But the case of alleged forgery before us is extraordinary from every point of view, for forgery is generally something which concerns some brief document, something that requires only a signature in order to secure its currency. The longer and more elab- orate the document which forgery produces, the more danger there must inevitably be of its final and ultimate detection. But here are five long historic books. They are full of details. They cover vast periods of time. Thoy enter into a variety of topics. Incidentally they discuss not only ques- tions of religion, but of law, of politics, of commerce, even of hygiene—medical laws of health. Was ever forgery com- mitted before or since on such a gigantic scale as this? Moreover, there is no crime that is liable to be so speedily detected as forgery. The man who signs some document with another’s name rarely goes down to the grave without meeting his punishment here on earth. Why, only a few weeks ago, the doors of our penitentiary, in the State of 90’ MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. Illinois, closed upon a prisoner who had affixed the name of another, whose name was better than his own, to a check upon which he had received the money; but only one month intervened as a gap between that crime and the punishment it merited and received. It was a hundred years ago; that Thomas Chatterton, one of the most wonderful men, or boys, | might rather say, that England has ever produced, forged a huge mass of papers, professedly historical, that were dated away back in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The style was that of the monks and chroniclers, which he had imitated with the greatest possible perfection. The references to the customs of that ancient period were such as to avoid detection, and Chatterton, in the precocity of his intellect, and in the versatility of his talent, was without a peer in English literary history. The English literary world re- ceived it as a revelation out of lost centuries. The great scholars of England were deceived. But it only took three years to expose to every eye the fraud that had been committed, and Chatterton, whom Wordsworth called the “marvelous boy,” ended his career in a suicide’s grave. O, brethren! who can count the years, who can enumerate the centuries which have rolled over this world of ours since the alleged forgery of this man Moses! And yet to-day, after the lapse of centuries, there are more people who believe in that forgery as the genuine work of the man whom God appointed the great law-giver and leader of Israel, there are more people who hang their hopes for time and eternity on this alleged fraud, and that which has grown ont of this alleged fraud—the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ—than ever before in two thousand years. Am I not then justified in saying that if this be a forgery, which is contained in the five books of Moses, it is the most extraordinary forgery that has ever been committed in the world since words BISHOP CHENEY’S REPLY. 91 expressed human thought, or human beings learned to wield a pen? The “Common Ground” of the Contending Parties—Logical Position of Ezra. Now, in the first place, I desire to call your attention to certain facts concerning the Mosaic record. In all contro- versies in every department of human thought there are certain points which are regarded as neutral ground. When our great civil war shook this land from centre to cireum- ference and two mighty armies were face to face in the Valley of the Tennessee, the stars and stripes floated in the same breeze that wafted the stars and the bars ; the strains of “Dixie” and “My Maryland” commingled with “ Hail Columbia” and the “Star-Spangled Banner ;” the soldiers of the different armies exchanged such commodi- ties as they possessed, as if they had been neighbors in peace at home. No wonder that finally it came to pass that between these armies there was what is known as neutral ground, on which it was agreed that the soldiers of one side should not fire on those of the other. Now, is there any such ground as that between those who defend what are known as the five books of Moses, and those who declare they were never written by Moses at all? Is there any point, I say, in this controversy where the skeptic and the believer can come to stand upon one common ground ? If we can find such a neutral ground as that, it will save us a long, tiresome, profitless debate. Now, such a ground I think we have in the life and his- tory of Ezra, the writer of the book of the Old Testament, which bears his name. It is conceded on all hands that this man was a scribe of the Jewish law after the close of the Babylonian captivity. After .the people had returned from the land of their exile into the land of their fathers, 92 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. he gathered into one great collection all these sacred writ- ings that were held by the Jews to be the inspired word of God. No infidel that I am aware of has ever questioned the fact that in this collection of Ezra was contained the five books of Moses. It has been claimed by some of the least scholarly of infidels that Ezra wrote those five books. But that idea was found visionary and was long ago given up by those who opposed the truth of Christianity. But the fact remains that no one, Christian or unbeliever, to-day — questions the historic fact that the five books of Moses, as we now accept them, were received as the writings of the lawgiver of the Jewish people when Ezra was at the acme of his influence after the Baylonian captivity. But they state that it was universally conceded that it was four hun- dred and fifty years before the birth of Christ. In other words, it was admitted that every Jew who returned out of the Babylonian captivity, held these five books to be the works of Moses, the man of God, twenty-three hundred years ago. The Bishop Planting Signals on the Mountain Tops of History— Survey of the New Moses Air Line. We stand, then, without dispute, without any controversy, at this point of time—four hundred and fifty years before the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Now, fix that point in your memory while I attempt, like a civil en- gineer penetrating some wilderness, to plant the signal on some more remote mountain top of history. Now, all the ancient writings, whether Egyptian or Chaldean, cor- roborate the testimony of the Bible that these Hebrews were slaves in the land of Egypt. They also agree that they migrated into Southern Syria, under the leadership of aman who was called Moses—a word which meant “ one drawn out of the water.” It is also universally allowed that they settled in this new land, which had long before BISHOP CHENEY'S REPLY. 93 been promised to their fathers, about the year 1450 before Christ. We have established then our second date—a date which no skeptic has ever called in question. When our great tunnel that brings the pure water of Lake Michigan into every home and household in this city was in process of construction, the workmen began at either end. There was a shaft out in yonder crib, and there was another on the shore, and underneath the waves the two parties of -toilers worked toward each other. And so it is with us. We tunnel between our two shafts. The date 450 B. C. and the date 1450 B. C.—only one thousand years are to be ac- counted for. Does that seem along period of timeto you? I admit that it does, but not in the history of nations. It is only a trifle more than the time in which youand I are living is removed from: the time of William of Normandy, who conquered Harold and the English barons. Now we will cross the sea to the old tower that still recalls the memory of William the Conqueror. We will enter the office of public records, and in that fire-proof vault, guarded as they guard the specie that is gathered into the treasury of the nation, is'a book in two huge volumes of vellum. It is known as the “ Doomsday Book.” In the year 1086, eight hundred years ago, remember, William the Conqueror caused that record to be prepared. It is nearly as old as the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, was in the days of Ezra the scribe. But not a page of the “Doomsday Book” has been lost; not a line has been altered; not a letter erased. Its pages read to-day as they did in this old time when the Norman heel was on the Saxon neck—eight centuries. ago. The ink is as fresh on the parchment as though that parchment were unstained by age. Do you ask howit is that the record has remained uncorrupted? Do you ask how it is that after all the revo- lutions that have swept over England, after all the changes 94 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. of royal houses, and the dissolutions of powerful parties, that that has remained perfectly unaltered? The answer is a perfectly easy one to give. It is because “ Doomsday Book” contains the name of every man, who, in the days of William the Conqueror, owned one rood of English soil. It contains a description of the lands throughout the realm. It gives the boundaries of every great estate, and every old English family must, therefore, find the roots of its gene- alogy in that old book of the early times of the Norman conquest. It gives the title to every acre of land in Eng- land. Thus, two of the strongest motives that can influence the human mind and the human will, have conspired to guard this “ Doomsday Book ” with a jealous and tireless care. The possession of a great name, and the possession of landed property are wrapped up in England in the safety of that one book. Now, exactly the same motives conspired for the preservation, from all corruption, of the five books of Moses. They contain the list of those who came out of Egypt with Moses and entered into Palestine; they gave a description of the land that was apportioned to each and every name. ‘To lose these books, which the Jews ever regarded as a precious treasure, the genealogy of their household—to suffer them to be tampered with, was to unsettle the title to every man’s field from Dan to Beersheba. If the “ Doomsday Book” has survived, uncorrupted, what reason on earth is there to doubt that the Penta- teuch was preserved intact during the thousand years that intervened between the time of Moses and the time of Ezra?’ But I need not stop here. Ezra, as I have said, was one of the captives who returned out-of exile. But Daniel, long before the time of Ezra, speaks of this law of Moses. He bases his own conduct and his own private character upon it. Daniel brings us a hundred vears nearer to the days: a ‘ ee eee ROR ae OA a a ee i" Wyk 4 TY wi Le ea op ane ier Mr RY Tee CAS on alate ryLiee AM ; : re AS aS, } Vie Oke ; abies, Se ies” s a) Pm at BRL? ~ “ rs } st ' BISHOP CHENEY'S REPLY. 95 when Moses gave that law tothe world. When King Josiah mounted the throne of Judah he found that throne pol- luted by the wickedness that characterized the reign of his father, King Manasseh, and then there came an overwhelm ing and powerful revival of religion throughout the king- dom. Monarch and subject united in humiliation before God. Numbers of people bowed down before the Jehovah whom they had offended. But we all distinctly know that the root and the seed out of which this revival sprung was the finding of the copy of the five books of Moses, and learning there what Moses had commanded against the sin of idolatry. I have reached a point nearer yet to the time of Moses himself. I will hasten on. Termination of the Great Air Line. One thousand and four years before Christ, Solomon regulated the temple service and worship, but he regulated it, we are distinctly told, according to the law that was contained in the Pentateuch. And we are within four hun- dred and fifty years of the death of Moses. But David refers constantly to the five books of Moses in the psalms. The law of Moses was the foundation on which all the relig- ious character of the psalms of David rest. Before David was Samuel. His entire career pre-supposes the exist- ence of the Mosaic books. But only three hundred and fifty years intervened between Samuel and Moses. Joshua succeeded Moses as the leader of the chosen people. Again and again in his addresses to the people, did he reprove, exhort and encourage Israel, but everywhere on the basis of the books of the law of Moses. Thus, we have link by link carried back this chain of testimony to the very days in which Moses lived. Now we want no better proof than that in the secular history. Suppose the farewell address of George Washington had been made the object of 96 MISTAKES OF INGHRSOLL. skeptical criticism; suppose that it had been denied that it had been written by Washington, and if I find it alluded to in Mr. Lincoln’s address at the monument-raising in Gettys- burg; if I find in one of his speeches that President Polk also spoke of it; if this is true of Mr. Van Buren, and Mr. Madison before him, and if even John Adams, the suc- cessor of George Washington in the presidential chair, refers to that address—why then, every sensible man will say that it is the nearest equivalent of mathematical demon- stration that can possibly be given of the genuineness of the document to which I have referred. Genealogical Reflections. Now, I want you to notice again that if these writings | were forged, they were forged by men, who even in so doing, blackened the character of their own lineage and an- cestry. It has been well said that a man whose chief glory is in his ancestors, is very like a potato—the best part of himis under ground. But after all there is no good man who does not rejoice—and thank God for the fact—when he is able to trace back a long line of God-fearing, pure- living, honest men and women as the seed from whence he sprang. If I go to work and forge a genealogy for my- self, I certainly will not manufacture one that describes my forefathers as the blackest set of criminals that ever escaped from a penitentiary. No one pretends for a mo- ment that any one but the Jews were those who could have been responsible for the Testament records ; but it they forged it they must have had some motive. Forgers always have a motive. There is something before their minds that is to be gained. But what did these forgers do? Why they compiled a record of their own family tree, that overwhelmed their fathers with everlasting shame and contempt. They described the ancient Hebrews as besotted WA Me aenyT Oe ath BN ete Aa oe ae a iety a¥ Popes Byers pe te As ab i ta: A) Py a ay AAG y K t \ a . ~ BISHOP CHENEY'S REPLY. 97 idolaters in the land of Egypt. When God promised them a land, all their own, flowing with milk and honey—when all that was set before them—they were willing to give up all hope of prosperity, all hope of deliverance from slavery, if they might only have that which they sighed for—the fish and the leeks and garlic of Egypt. They are repre- sented as bowing down to the worship of a calf, which their own hands had made out of their golden ear-rings, and doing that in the very presence of God, displayed upon Mount Sinai, and are described when they reached the borders of the promised land, when all its glory was before them, and its liberty was almost theirs, as being too cowardly to fight the battles that were necessary to gain the possession of their inheritance, till at last God refused to let one of the miserable, cowardly generation enter the land He had promised to their fathers. Yet all this is forgery, not of the Assyrians, not of the Egyptians, who were their hereditary enemies ; not of the Philistines, but themselves—the forgery of the Jews them- selves. As thoughin the dead of night 4 man should steal out under cover of the darkness to the tombstone of his dead father, and with chisel and mallet in hand try to erase the honorable record of his life, and forge a lying epitaph that made him the vilest scoundrel that ever polluted the earth. Nay,if I commit a forgery on my family record, if ever I try to impose a fabulous family tree on those who know me, I don’t think I shall ever trace my line to Cesar Borgia. Cutting the Gordian Knot. Now again I would like to notice very briefly some of the objections to the credibility of the Mosaic writers. Now, there is nothing easier than to start difficulties on any subject which the human mind can give atten- tion to. Let a child in its tiny fingers grasp a pin and 7 98 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. get at the silvered side of a mirror, and in five minutes it will do more damage than the most skillful laborer can remedy with the work of many hours. Ts it wonderful that the Bible has been made the subject of repeated attacks? I no more hope to answer all the objections that can be put against a book such as the book in question, or even the books of Moses—I say I can no more hope to answer all these attacks than in this spring- time I can hope to pick off every green leaf that starts out upon every spreading tree. It were an easier and more effective way to girdle the tree itself. God girdles the tree of infidelity by revival. If the record of experience tells any fact in the world, it is this, that a thousand objections which tle head can see, vanish into thin air when the spirit of God gets hold of a man’s heart. Why, there are men here to-night who remember the hour when they found difficulties upon every page of the word of God, when they objected to every principle it propounded, and now look back to the difficulties they used to find there, and wonder how it was possible that they could ever have been troubled by difficul- ties so palpably absurd. They did not study out one by one the replies that might have been made to these objec- tions. When, in June, huge swarms of flies make our city - like the land of Egypt in the days of old, we never under- take to kill them one by one; half a million of people would not be sufficient for that. But God’s west wind blows, and they are scattered. So it is that the winds of God’s spirit sweep away the swarms of difficulties that men find in the Bible. And yet I am prepared to-night to take up two or three of the objections which have been urged against the credibility of the Pertateuch. These objections resolve themselves into two different parts—the one to the facts of the history of Moses, the other to the morality of BISHOP CHENEHY’S REPLY. 99 the acts that are there recorded, or the precepts that are there laid down. I won’t have time to go over both branches of the subject. The limits of such a sermon as this absolutely forbid it. I speak now of the facts. At some future time I hopeto take up the moral portion of it. Now, every time you visit the South Park, you find a place of rest under the grateful shade of an ancient willow. The vast expanse of its gigantic branches, the immense girth of its trunk are the witnesses of its venerable age. If I should take up to-morrow the report of the park com- missioners and find there the statement that they, at vast expense, had transplanted that willow tree from the native soil in which it grew to adorn Chicago’s pleasure-ground, I should know beforehand that it was false; the very appear- ance of the tree gives the lie to the statement, and.if there were any way in which I could examine the rings that made up the trunk, [ need only count them to have a posi- tive proof of the fact that the statement contained in the report was false. Now, precisely akin to that is the accusation that is often brought against the Book of Genesis. It is said that Moses declares that six thousand years ago God created this world in which we are living now. But we only need to count the geologic strata—we only need to number the rings of the huge trunk of this earth in order to disprove the statement. The Bishop’s Challenge—Moses and Ingersoll as Chronologists. Now, in reply to this difficulty, which is so often urged against the Book of Genesis, | want to say one word, and that is, I challenge any man in this congregation—I chal- lenge any man in the wide world that has ever read the Bible, to find in any book of the Bible, much less in the Book of Genesis, the statement that the creation of this 100 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. earth took place six thousand years ago. This Moses, whom Ool. Ingersoll thinks was such a blunderer; whose mistakes have been the subject of his jeers and blasphem- ous ridicule, was a more careful man than our Peoria skep- tic thinks. He certainly was careful not to fix the time at which God created this earth. Whether that creation took place six thousand or six million years ago, he does not state. He does say that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But that is all. All that he asserts is, that matter—the substance out of which the earth was made—is not eternal; it had a beginning; He did create it. Well, then, again, the creation of man, equally with that of the world, is made the object of attack. We are told that the Bible claims that between five and six thousand years ago God placed the first pair of the human family in Eden. But when geologists have dug down into the forma- tions that make up this globe—formations which upon mathematical calculation have taken ages and ages to pro- duce — they find there the remains of ancient tools, weap- ons, ornaments and utensils that prove that man must have lived in a time far ante-distant to that of Adam. For example, the skeleton of an Indian was exhumed some years ago, while digging for the foundation of the gas-works in the City of New Orleans, and it was alleged by one geologist of that day that it could not have been less than fifty thousand years ago that that man lived. It has been flaunted in our faces that science and religion are opposed to each other; that the Bible is against progress, and that we all must concede that the Pentateuch is but a tissue of falsehood. Now the first answer I have to give is, that there is not one syllable in the Bible that fixes the length of time or man’s existence upon this earth. Notone syllable. Moses ee we eae ne pa a4, opi ax i? BISHOP CHENEY’S REPLY. 101 does not tell us anything about the date that God created Adam and put him in the garden of Eden. True, we have in the New Testament, in the genealogy of Christ, a state- ment of the number of generations from Abraham down to the Saviour; but who knows precisely what is the mean- ing of the term “ generations?” The word is used in a variety of senses in the Bible, and it baffles all calculation to deter- mine how many ages intervened between Adam and Abra- ham. ‘The wisest scholars have been perplexed to fix the number of centuries that rolled over the world in that period of time. To say that God placed man upon this earth six thousand years ago, is not quoting the Bible. I want you to remember that. I want you to tell it to the skeptic that picks out genealogical difficulties in the Scrip- ture. It is only repeating the result of calculations in chronology of certain fallible men who, as fallible, were liable to be mistaken. All infidels do it in trying to fasten upon the Scripture the blunders of mistaken men. But, as is well known, the.tendency of the best geologists in our day is rapidly going away from the old* ideas of the vast periods of time in the construction of this earth. Mud Calendars vs. Fiacts—Some Sad and Sorrowful Scientific - Figuring in the Sand. It was not very long ago that Sir Charles Lyell, the distin- guished English geologist, calculated from his own stand- point the rate at which the mud is deposited in the great delta of the Mississippi. By actual figures he reached the astounding calculation that the formation of the delta of the Mississippi must have -occupied not less than one hundred thousand years. And, when down underneath that deposit a skeleton was exhumed, it proved beyond all question that not less than fifty thousand years ago human feet had trod the soft soil of the delta of the Mississippi. 102 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. But unfortunately for Sir Charles Lyell, American geolo- gists were on his track, and the United States coast survey followed in the pathway where he had been investigating. Gen. Humphrey, of the American army, measured accu- rately the amount of the deposit. He reviewed the figures of the English geologist, and he showed unanswerably that the whole delta of the Mississippi could not have been in process of formation longer than four thousand four hundred years. For many years geologists held that a quantity of pottery that was found some sixty feet below the surface of the soil, in the delta of the Nile, was at least twelve thousand years old. But later investigations deeper down in the same soilcame upon some more patterns, which were undoubtedly of Roman origin, and under these, a brick that bore inefface- ably the stamp of Mehemet Ali, a modern pasha. If you have visited Minneapolis, you certainly must have been struck by the formation of the banks where the Mis- sissippi has cut its way through the rocks. Above there is layer upon layer, stratum upon stratum of limestone, and beneath them the saccharoid sandstone, white as the sugar from which it derives its name, and soft enough to be cut with a knife, lies in huge masses. On the bluff overlooking the river, there lives, in an immense house, which many years ago was a popular hotel of the ancient city of St. Anthony’s Falls, a friend of mine. One day there came to him startling news. Just outside of his premises, in exca- vating for the foundation of a new building, the workmen had struck upon a wooden coffin, and in it they found what was recognized to be, beyond all doubt, human bones. A local geologist, a physician of the state, with some skeptical tendencies, seized upon this new foundation of the an- tiquity of man, and the next day the columns of an even- ing paper of St. Paul contained an article from this gen- tleman’s pen about what countless ages must have elapsed pelt’, ERS Ses NS So a ate ay SO 2 HAN n tei pase Si ft ato ‘ . \ ~ a : r BISHOP CHENEY’S REPLY. 103 to perfect that saccharoid sandstone over the coffin, and over that to have put these layers upon layers of rock. The conclusion was, that the chronology of the Bible was utterly a mistake, and that we had, before the days ot Mr. Ingersoll, one of the mistakes of Moses. On reading the article my friend felt at once it was his duty to investi- gate the event. He found the coffin still unremoved, for it was solidly wedged into the saccharoid sandstone, and small pieces of the bones were scattered carelessly about. My friend, whose Christian feeling is only equaled by his profound ability and scholarship, began carefully to examine these relics of pre-Adamite man. Imagine his surprise to find that the coffin which had been made so many ages be- fore Adam was placed upon this earth, was the plank sewer of the old hotel in which he lived, and the bones were those of some innocent lamb, that a careless cook had some time ago flung into that receptacle. I honor geology, but I claim it is yet a very imperfect science, and even with all its im- perfections I have yet to find a solitary principle or fact that geology has laid down that contradicts+one word of the five books of Moses. A Mistake of Ingersoll, Tom Paine & Co. Corrected—Conclusion. I allude to one more of the Mosaic facts that is assailed by the opponents of the Gospel. It is a difficulty which Mr. Ingersoll recently brought forward in that remarkable production of his, as something which he had discovered; but Bishop Colenso, whom the Church of England some thirty years ago sent out among the Zulus, dwelt upon it long ago, and even before his time, Tom Paine had made it his weapon against the truthfulness of the Pentateuch. It is simply this: We are told that the children of Israel, according to the Bible, were in the land of Egypt, in cap- tivity, two hundred and fifteen years. There went down « 104 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. with Jacob and his sons, their wives and children, seventy souls in all. But the Exodus finds in the army of Israel six hundred thousand fighting men, invelving a total of men, women and children which could not have been less than two or three millions, and it is declared that such an increase is utterly unparalleled in the annals of history. - Our mathematicians have figured it all out to their satis-. faction. Now, I want you to observe what a tissue of blunders make up this opposition to this Great Book. First of all turn back to the life of Abraham, the ancestor of Jacob, and you there discover that a Hebrew family did not consist merely of the parents and children. The ser- vants were a part of the Hebrew household, and God dis- tinctly made His commands imperative and unavoidable upon Abraham, that every male youth born in his house should receive the seal of circumcision. He therefore became a participator in the Abrahamic covenant. Nay, more, if he bought a servant he had to be brought into the covenant of circumcision. God insists upon this, and thus ‘every servant of every Hebrew household became a He- brew, and was reckoned in the family into which he was adopted. Away back in the time of Abraham, if you take up the Book of Genesis you will find he had so many of these servants born in his own household, that three hundred and eighteen of them, able-bodied men, soldiers, followed him to battle, and when Jacob, in the one hundred and thirtieth year of his age, went down into the land of Egypt the three hundred and eighteen of Abraham’s day surely must have multiplied into thousands. The Pentateuch, it is true, gives only the formal list of Jacob’s sons, their wives and their children. There is no formal mention of this vast crowd of attendants, who, not- withstanding as part of the family, must have entered into the land of Egypt with them. Thus, at the very rate of ‘vial a BISHOP CHENEY'S REPLY. 105 increase that the tables of the census of the United States to-day display, these thousands might have easily amounted to three millions in two hundred and fifteen years. I am not through with this stronghold of tho enemies of the Pentateuch. As I study it seems to me that I never knew a ghost to vanish into thinner air. I would like to know where or how the critics learned that Israel was in bondage in the land of Egypt two hundred and fifteen years. Why, they learned in precisely the way that they learned that Moses said this earth was made just six thousand years ago. They have taken up certain genealogies and specula- tions of commentators. They have taken up the calcula- tions of Hales and others, and they have regarded them as infallible. ‘They have never turned to the twelfth chapter of Exodus, and I find there the statement given with pre- cision that admits of no question that the sojourn of the children of Israel in Egypt was four hundred and _ thirty years: ‘“ And it came to pass, at the end of four hundred and thirty years, within the self-same day it came to pass that all the hosts of the Lord came out of the land of Keypt.” Long before that, God had told Abraham that his seed should be strangers in a land that was not theirs, and that they should afflict them four hundred years. And the Jews so understood it, as shown by the fact that in the New Testament Stephen declares that God told the father of the faithful that his seed should sojourn in a strange land, and they should bring them into bondage and evil entreat them four hundred years. Now, if but seventy had gone down with Jacob into Egypt, an increase to two or three or even four millions in four and a half centuries would have been no more than what is paralleled by the history of every race on the surface of the globe. In Italy, three hundred years ago, when men were wild over the discovery of Galileo’s telescope, there was one philosopher who refused to look through the tube that pierced the vail of the starry worlds, and when he was asked the reason, “I am afraid,” he said, “that I should believe . Galileo’s theory of the planetary motion.” My brethren, look into the telescope of revelation. To know it, to study it, is to find the very truth of God. DNGERSOLI’S | ECTURE ON oC A Be: AND HIS REPLIES TO PROF, SWING, DR. RYDER, DR. HERFORD, DR. COLLYER, AND OTHER CRITICS. REPRINTED FROM “THE CHICAGO TIMES.” LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Man advances just in the proportion that he mingles his thoughts with his labor —just in the proportion that he takes advantage of the forces of nature; just in proportion as he loses superstition and gains confidence in himself. Man advances as he ceases to fear the gods and learns to love his fellow-men. It is all, in my judgment, a question of intellectual development. Tell me the religion of any man and I will tell you the degree he marks on the intellectual thermometer of the world. It is a simple question of brain. Those among us who are the nearest barbarism have a barbarian religion. Those who are nearest civilization have the least superstition. It is, I say, a simple question of brain, and I want, in the first place, to ane the foundation to prove that assertion. A little while ago I saw models of nearly everything that man has made. I saw models of all the water craft, from the rude dug-out in which floated a naked savage — one of our ancestors — a naked savage, with teeth twice as long as his forehead was high, with a spoonful of brains in the back of his orthodox head —I saw models of all the water craft of the world, from that dug-out up to a man-of-war that carries a hundred guns and miles of canvas; from that dug-out to the steamship 107 108 “MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. that turns its brave prow from the port of New York, with a compass like a conscience, crossing three thousand miles of billows without migs- ing a throb or beat of its mighty iron heart from shore to shore. And I saw at the same time the paintings of the world, from the rude daub of yellow mud to the landscapes that enrich palaces and adorn houses of what were once called the common people. I saw also their sculpture, from the rude god with four legs, a half dozen arms, several noses, and two or three rows of ears, and one little, contemptible, brainless head, up to the figures of to-day,—to the marbles that genius has clad in such a personality that it seems almost impudent to touch them without an introduction. I saw their books—books written upon the skins of wild beasts—upon shoulder-blades of sheep—books written upon leaves, upon bark, up to the splendid volumes that enrich the libraries of our day. When I speak of libraries I think of the remark of Plato: “A house that has a library in it has a soul.” I saw at the same time the offensive weapons that man has made, from a club, such as was grasped by that same savage when he crawled from his den in the ground and hunted a snake for his dinner: from that club to the boomerang, to the sword, to the cross-bow, to the blunderbuss, to the flint-lock, to the cap-lock, to the needle-gun, up to a cannon cast by Krupp, capable of hurling a ball weighing two thousand pounds through eighteen inches of solid steel. I saw, too, the armor from the shell of a turtle that one of our brave ancestors lashed upon his breast when he went to fight for his country; the skin of a porcupine, dried with the quills on, which this same savage pulled over his orthodox head, up to the shirts of mail that were worn in the middle ages, that laughed at the edge of the sword and defied the point of the spear; up to a monitor clad in complete steel. And I say orthodox not only in the matter of religion, but in everything. Whoever has quit growing he is orthodox, whether in art, polities, religion, philosophy—no matter what. Whoever thinks he has found it all out he is orthodox. Orthodoxy is that which rots, and heresy is that which grows forever. Orthodoxy is the night of the past, full of*the darkness of superstition, and heresy is the eternal » coming day, the light of which strikes the grand foreheads of the intel- lectual pioneers of the world. I saw their implements of agriculture, from the plow made of a crooked stick, atttached to the horn of an ox by some twisted straw, with which our ancestors scraped the earth, and from that to the agricultural implements of this generation, that make it possible for a man to cultivate the soil without being an ignoramus. In the old time there was but one crop; and when the rain did net come in answer to the prayer of hypocrites a famine came and people fell upon their knees. At that time they were full of superstition. They were frightened all the time for fear that some god would be enraged at pei ty Gee te aie Sake NR AIR RE ARE UO OR UCU i SKULLS AND REPLIES. 109 his poor, hapless, feeble and starving children. But now, instead of depending upon one crop they have several, and if there is not rain enough for one there may be enough for another. And if the frosts kill all, we have railroads and steamships enough to bring what we need from some other part of the world. Since man has found out some- thing about agriculture, the gods have retired from the business of pro- ducing famines. I saw at the same time their musical instruments, from the tom-tom —that is, a hoop with a couple of strings of raw-hide drawn across it— from that toni-tom, up to the instruments we have to-day, that make the common air blossom with melody, and I said to myself there is a regular advancement. I saw at the same time a row of human skulls, from the lowest skull that has been found, the Neanderthal skull— skulls from Central Africa, skulls from the bushmen of Australia— skulls from the farthest isles of the Pacific Sea—up to the best skulls of the last generation—and I noticed that there was the same difference between those skulls that there was between the products of those skulls, and I said to my-elf: “After all, it is asimple question of intellectual development.’’ There was the same difference between those skulls, the lowest and highest skulls, that there was between the dug-out and the man-of-war and the steamship, between the club and the Krupp gun, between the yellow daub and the landscape, between the tom-tom and an opera by Verdi. The first and lowest skull in this row was the den in which crawled the base and meaner instincts of mankind, and the last was a temple in which Gwelt joy, liberty and love. And I said to myself, it is all a question of intellectual development. Man has advanced just as he has mingled his thought with his labor. As he has grown he has taken advantage of the forces of nature; first of the moving wind, then of falling water, and finally of steam. From one step to another he has obtained better houses, better clothes, and better books, and he has done it by holding out every incentive to the ingenious to produce them. The world has said, give us better clubs and guns and cannons with which to kill our fellow Christians. And whoever will give us better weapons and better music, and better houses to live in, we will robe him in wealth, crown him in honor, and render his name deathless. Every incentive was held out to every human being to improve these things, and that is the reason we have advanced in all mechanical arts. But that gentleman in the dug-out not only had his ideas about politics, mechanics, and agriculture; he had his ideas also about religion. His idea about politics was “right makes might.” It will be thousands of years, may be, before mankind will believe in the saying that “right makes might.” He had his religion. That low skull was adevil factory. He believed in Hell, and the belief was acon- 110 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. solation tohim. He could see the waves of God’s wrath dashing against: the rocks of dark damnation. He could see tossing in the white-caps. the faces of women, and stretching above the crests the dimpled hands of children; and he regarded these things as the justice and mercy of God. And all to-day who believe in this eternal punishment are the barbarians of the nineteenth century. That man believed in a devil, too, that had a long tail terminating with a fiery dart; that had wings. like a bat—a devil that had a cheerful habit of breathing brimstone, that had a cloven foot, such as some orthodox clergymen seem to think Ihave. And there has not been a patentable improvement made upon that devil in all the years since. The moment you drive the devil out. of theology, there. is nothing left worth speaking of. The moment they drop the devil, away goes atonement. The moment they kill the devil, their whole scheme of salvation has lost all of its interest for mankind. . You must keep the devil and you must keep Hell. You must keep the devil, because with no devil no priest is necessary. Now, all I ask is this—the same privilege to improve upon his religion as upon his dug- out, and that is what I am going to do, the best I can. No matter what church you belong to, or what church belongs to us. Let us be honor bright and fair. I want toask you: Suppose the king, if there was one, and the priest. if there was one at that time, had told these gentlemen in the dug-out: “That dug-out is the best boat thatcan ever be built by man; the pattern of that came from on high, from the great God of storm and flood, and any man who says he can improve it by putting a stick in the middle of it and a rag on the stick, is an infidel, and shall be burned at the stake ;?’? what, in your judgment—honor bright—would have been the effect upon the circumnavigation of the globe? Suppose the king, if there was one, and the priest, if there was one—and I presume there was a priest, because it was a very ignorant age—suppose this king and priest had said: “The tom-tom is the most beautiful instrument of music of which any man can conceive; that is the’kind of music they have in Heaven; an angel sitting upon the edge of a glorified cloud, golden in the setting sun, playing upon that tom-tom, became so enrap- tured so entranced with her own music, that in a kind of ecstasy she dropped it—that is how we obtained it; and any man who says it can be improved by putting a back and front to it, and four strings, and a bridge, and getting a bow of hair with rosin, is a blaspheming wretch, and shall die the death,”—I ask you, what effect would that have had upon music ? If that course had been pursued, would the human ears, in your judg- ment, ever have been enriched with the divine symphonies of Beethoven > Suppose the king, if there was one, and the priest, had said: “ That crooked sticks is the best plow that can be invented; the pattern of that. SKULLS AND REPLIES. 111 plow was given to a pious farmer in an exceedingly holy dream, and that twisted straw is the ne plus ultra of all twisted things, and any man who says he can make an improvement upon that plow, is an atheist;” what, in your judgment, would have been the effect upon the science of agriculture? i Now, all I ask is the same privilege to improve upon his religion as upon his mechanical arts. Why don’t we go back to that period to get the telegraph? Because they were barbarians. And shall we go to bar- barians to get our religion? What is religion? Religion simply embraces the duty of man to man. Religion is simply the science of human duty and the duty of man to man—that is what it is. Itis the highest science of all. And all other sciences are as nothing, except as they contribute to the happiness of man. The science of religion isthe highest of all, embracing all others. And shall we go to the barbarians to learn the science of sciences? The nineteenth century knows more about religion than all the centuries dead. There is more real charity in the world to-day than ever before. There is more thought to-day than ever before. Woman is glorified to-day as she never was before in the history of the world. There are more happy families now than ever before—more children treated as though they were tender blossoms than as though they were brutes than in any other time or nation. Religion is simply the duty a man owes to man; and when you fall upon your knees and pray for something you know not of, you neither benefit the one you pray for nor yourself. One ounce of restitution is worth a mil- lion of repentances anywhere, and a man will get along faster by help- ing himself a minute than by praying ten years for somebody to help him. Suppose you were coming along the street, and found a party of men and women on their knees praying to a bank, and you asked them, “ Have any of you borrowed any money of this bank?” “ No, but our fathers, tey, to, prayed to this bank.” “ Did they evergetany?’ ‘ No, not that we ever heard of.’ I would tell them to get up. It is easier to earn it, and it is far more manly: Our fathers in the “ good old times,”’—and the best that I can say of the “ good old times” is that they are gone, and the best I can say of the good old people that lived in them is that they are gone, too—believed that you made a man think your way by force. Well, you can’t do it. There is a splendid something in man that says: “I won’t; I won’t be driven.” But our fathers thought men could be driven. They tried it in the “ good old times.” I used to read about the manner in which the early Christians made converts—how they impressed upon the world the idea that God loved them. [I have read it, but it didn’t burn into my soul. I didn’t think much about it—I heard so much about being fried forever in Hell that it didn’t seem so bad to burn a few minutes. I love a WE FR Ne ek A oon he, e * re. Ny, if iN - "4 y 4 Y 7 eo a . b y F. Ng a {the 112 MISTAWNEHS OF INGERSOLL. liberty and I hate all persecutions in the name of God. I never appre- ciated the infamies that have been committed in the name of religion until I saw the iron arguments that Christians used. I saw, for instance, the thumb-screw, two little innocent looking pieces of iron, armed with some little protuberances on the inner side to keep it from slipping down, and through each end a screw, and when some man had made some trifling remark, as, for instance, that he never believed that God made a fish swallow aman to keep him from drowning, or something like that, or, for instance, that he didn’t believe in baptism. You know that is very wrong. You can sce for yourselves the justice of damning aman if his parents had happened to baptize him in the wrong way— God can not afford to break arule or two to save all the men in the world. I happened to be in the company of some Baptist ministers once—you may wonder how I happened to be in such company as that— and one of them asked me what I thought about baptism. Well, I told them I hadn’t thought much about it—that I had never sat up nights on that question. I said: “ Baptism—with soap—is a good institution.” Now, when some man had said some trifling thing like that, they put this thumb-screw on him, and in the name of universal benevolence and for the love of God—man has never persecuted man for the love of man; man has never persecuted another for the love of charity—it is always for the love of something he calls God, and every man’s idea of God is his own idea. If there is an infinite God, and there may be—I don’t know—there may be a million for all I know—I hope there is more than one—one seems so lonesome. They kept turning this down, and when this was done, most men would say: “‘ I will recant.” I think I would. There is not much of the martyr aboutme. I would have told them: ‘Now you write it down, and I will sign it. You may have one God or a million, one Hell or a million. You stop that—I am tried.” Do you know, sometimes I have thought that all the hypocrites in the world are not worth one drop of honest blood. I am sorry that any good man ever died for religion. I would rather let them advance a little easier. It is too bad to see a good man sacrificed for a lot of wild beasts and cattle. But there is now and then a man who would not swerve the breadth of a hair. ‘There was now and then a sublime heart willing to die.for an intellectual conviction, and had it not been for these men we would have been wild beasts and savages to-day. There were some men who would not take it back, and had it not. been for a few such brave, heroic souls in every age we would have been cannibals, with pictures of wild beasts tattooed upon our breasts, dancing around some dried-snake fetish. And so they turned it down to the iast thread of agony, and threw the victim into some dungeon, where, in the throb.’ SKULLS AND REPLIES. | 113 bing silence and darkness, he might suffer the agonies of the fabled damned. This was done in the name of love, in the name of mercy, in the name of the compassionate Christ. And the men that did it are the men that made our Bible for us. I saw, too, at the same time, the collar of torture. Imagine a circle of iron, and on the inside a hundred points almost as sharp as needles. This argument was fastened about the throat of the sufferer. Then he could not walk nor sit down, nor stir without the neck being punctured by these points. In a little while the throat would begin to swell, and suffocation would end the agonies of that man. This man, it may be, had committed the crime of saying, with tears upon his cheeks, “I do not believe that God, the father of us all, will damn to eternal perdition any of the children of men.” And that was done to convince the world that God so loved the world that He died for us. That was in order that people might hear the glad tidings of great joy to all people. I saw another instrument, called the scavenger’s daughter. Imagine a pair of shears with handles, not only where they now are, but at the points as well and just above the pivot that unites the blades a circle of iron. In the upper handles the hands would be placed; in the lower, the feet; and through the iron ring, at the centre, the head of the victim would be forced, and in that position the man would be thrown upon the earth, and the strain upon the muscle would produce such agony that insanity took pity. And this was done to keep people from going to Hell—to convince that man that he had made a mistake in his logic— and it was done, too, by Protestants—Protestants that persecuted to the extent of their power, and that is as much as Catholicism ever did. They would persecute now if they had the power. There is not a man in this vast audience who will say that the church should have temporal power. There is not one of you but what believes in the eternal divorce of church and state. Is it possible that the only people who are fit to go to heaven are the only people not fit to rule mankind? I saw at the same time the rack. This was a box like the bed of a wagon, with a windlass at each end, and ratchets to prevent slipping. | Over each windlass went chains, and when some man had, for instance, — denied the doctrine of the trinity, a doctrine it is necessary to believe in order to get to Heaven — but, thank the Lord, you don’t have to under- stand it. This man merely denied that three times one was one, or maybe he denied that there was ever any Son in the world exactly as ld as his father, or that there ever was a boy eternally older than his mother—then they put that man on the rack. Nobody had ever been persecuted for calling God bad—it has always been for calling him good. When I stand here to say that, if there is a Hell, God is a fiend; they say that is very bad. They say I am trying to tear down the institu- 114 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. — tions of public virtue. But let me tell you one thing; there is no refor- mation in fear — you can scare a man so that he won’t do it sometimes, but I will swear you can’t scare him. so bad that he won’t want to do it. Then they put this man on the rack and priests began turning these levers, and kept turning until the ankles, the hips, the shoulders, the elbows, the wrists, and all the joints of the victim were dislocated, and he was wet with agony, and standing by was a physician to feel his pulse. Whatfor? To save his life? Yes. In mercy? No. But in order that they might have the pleasure of racking him once more. And this was the Christian spirit. This was done in the name of civili- zation, in the name of religion, and all these wretches who did it died in peace. There is not an orthodox preacher in the city that has not a respect for every one of them. As, for instance, for John Calvin, who was a murderer and nothing but a murderer, who would have disgraced an ordinary gallows by being hanged upon it. These men when they came to die were not frightened. God did not send any devils into their death-rooms to make mouths at them. He reserved them: for Voltaire, who brought religious liberty to France. He reserved them for Thomas Paine, who did more for liberty than all the churches. But all the inquisitors died with the white hands of peace folded over the breast of piety. And when they died, the room was filled with the rustle of the wings of angels, waiting to bear the wretches to Heaven. When I read these frightful books it seems to me sometimes as though I had suffered all these things myself. It seems sometimes as though I had stood upon the shore of exile, and gazed with tearful eyes toward home and native land; it seems to me as though I had been staked out upon the sands of the sea, and drowned by the inexorable, advancing tide; as though my nails had been torn from my hands, and into the bleeding quick needles had been thrust; as though my feet had been crushed in iron boots; as though I had been chained in the cell of the Inquisition, and listened with dying ears for the coming footsteps of release; as though I had stood upon the scaffold and saw the glittering axe fall upon me; as though I had been upon the rack and had seen, bending above me, the white faces of hypocrite priests; as though I had been taken from my fireside, from my wife and children, taken to the public square, chained; as though fagots had been piled about me; as though the flames had climbed around my limbs and scorched my eyes to blindness, and as though my ashes had been scattered to the four winds by all the countless hands of hate. And, while I so feel, I swear that while I live I will do what little I can to augment the liberties of man, woman and child. I denounce slavery and superstition every- where. I believe in liberty, and happiness, and love, and joy in this world. I am amazed that any man ever had the impudence to try and SKULLS AND REPLIES. 115 do another man’s thinking. I have just as good a right to talk about theology as a minister. If they all agreed I might admit it wasa science, but as they all disagree, and the more they study the wider they get apart, I may be permitted to suggest it is not a science. When no two will tell you the road to Heaven--that is, giving you the same route —end if you would inquire of them all, you would just give up trying ‘ to go there, and say: ‘I may as well stay where I am, and let the Lord ‘come to me.” Do you know that this world has not been fit for a lady and gentle- man to live in for twenty-five years, just on account of slavery. It was not until the year 1808 that Great Britain abolished the slave trade, and up to that time her judges, her priests occupying her pulpits, the mem- ers of the royal family, owned stock in the slave ships, and luxuriated upon the profits of piracy and murder. It was not until the same year that the United States of America abolished the slave trade between this and other countries, but carefully preserved it as between the states. It was not until the 28th day of August, 1833, that Great Britain abolished human slavery in her colonies; and it was not until the 1st day of Jan- uary, 1863, that Abraham Lincoln, sustained by the sublime and heroic North, rendered our flag pure as the sky in which it floats. Abraham Lincoln was, in my judgment, in many respects, the grandest man ever president of the United States. Upon his monument these words should be written: “ Here sleeps the only man in the history of the world, who, having been clothed with almost absolute power, never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.” For two hundred years the Christians of the United States deliberately turned the cross of Christ into a whipping-post. Christians bred hounds to catch other Christians. Let me show you what the Bible has dgne ‘for mankind: “ Servants, be obedient to your masters.”’ The only word coming from that sweet Heaven was, ‘Servants, obey your masters.” Frederick Douglas told me that he had lectured upon the subject of freedom twenty years before he was permitted to set his foot ina church. I tell you the world has not been fit to live in for twenty-five years. ‘Then all the people used to cringe and crawl to preachers. Mr. Buckle, in his history of civilization, shows that men were even struck dead for speaking impolitely to a priest. God would not stand it. See how thtey used to crawl before cardinals, bishops and popes. It is not so now. Before wealth they bowed to the very earth, and in the presence of titles they became abject. All this is slowly, but surely changing. We no longer bow to men simply because they are rich. Uur fathers wor- shipped the golden calf. The worst you can say of an American now is, he worships the gold of the calf. Even the calf is beginning to see this distinction. 116 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. , The time will come when no matter how much money a nhan has, he will not be respected unless he is using it for the benefit of his fellow- men. It willsoonbehere. It nolonger satisfies the ambition of a great man to be king or emperor. The last Napoleon was not satisfied with being the emperor of the French. He was not satisfied with having a circlet of gold about his head. He wanted some evidence that he had something of value within his head. So he wrote the life of Julius Cesar, that he might become a member of the French academy. The emperors, the kings, the popes, no longer tower above their fellows. Compare, for instance, King William and Helmholtz. The king is one of the anointed by the Most High, as they claim—-one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. Compare this king with Helmholtz, who towers an intellectual Colossus above the crowned mediocrity. Compare George Eliot with Queen Victoria. The queen is clothed in garments given her by blind fortune and unreascning chance, while George Eliot wears robes of glory woven in the loom of her own genius. And soit isthe worldover. The time is coming when a man will be rated at his real worth, and that by his brain and heart. We care nothing now about an officer unless he fills his place. No mat- ter if he is president, if he rattles in the place nobody cares anything about him. I might give you an instance in point, but I won’t. The world is getting better and grander and nobler every day. Now, if men have been slaves, if they have crawled in'the dust before one another, what shall I say of women? They have been the slaves of men. It took thousands of ages to bring women from abject slavery up to the divine height of marriage. I believe in marriage. If there is any Heaven upon earth it isin the family by the fireside, and the famiy is® unit of government. Without the family relation is tender, pure and true, civilization is impossible. Ladies, the ornaments you wear upon your persons to-night are but the souvenirs of your mother’s bond- age. The chains around your necks, and the bracelets clasped upon your white arms by the thrilled hand of love, have been changed by the wand of civilization from iron to shining, glittering gold. Nearly every civilization in this world accounts for the devilment in it by the crimes of. woman. They say woman brought all the trouble into the world. I don’t care if she did. I would rather live in a world full of trouble with the women I love, than to livein Heaven with nobody but men. I read in a book an account of the creation of the world. The book I have taken pains to say was not written by any God. And why do I say so? Because I can write a far better book myself. Because it is full of bar- barisms. Several ministers in this city have undertaken to answer me —notably those who don’t believe the Bible themselves. I want to ask these Mick me tung. . Wael Tcem x 2 AL, SKULLS AND REPLIES. 117 Every minister in the City of Chicago that answers me, and those who have answered me had better answer me again — I want them to say, and without any sort of evasion — without resorting to any pious tricks — I want them to say whether they believe that the Eternal God of this universe ever upheld the crime of polygamy. Say it square and fair. Don’t begin to talk about that being a peculiar time, and that God was easy on the prejudices of those old fellows. I want them to answer that question and to answer it squarely, which they haven’t done. Did this God, which you pretend to worship, ever sanction the institution of human slavery? Now, answer fair? Don’t slide around it. Don’t begin and answer what a bad man I am, nor what a good man Moses was. Stick to the text. Do you believe in a God that allowed a man to be sold from. his children? Do you worship such an infinite monster? And if you do, tell your congregation whether you are not ashamed to admit it. Let every minister who answers me again tell whether he believes God commanded his general to kill the little dimpled babe in the cradle. Let him answer it. Don’t say that those were very bad times. Tell whether He did it or not, and then your people will know whether to hate that God or not. Be honest. Tell them whether that God in war captured young maidens and turned them over to the soldiers; and then ask the wives and sweet girls of your congregation to get down on their knees and worship the infinite fiend that did that thing. Answer! It is your God I am talking about, and if that is what God did, please tell your congregation what, under the same circumstances, the devil would have done. Don’t tell your people that is a poem. Don’t tell your people that is pictorial. That won’t do. Tell your people whether it is true or false. That is what I want you to do. In this book I have read about God’s making the world and one man. That is all he intended to make. The making of woman was a second thought, though I am willing to admit that as arule second thoughts are best. This God made aman and put him in a public park. In a little while He noticed that the man got lonesome; then He found He had made a mistake, and that He would have to make somebody to keep him company. But having used up all the nothing He originally used in making the world and one man, He had to take a part of a man to start a woman with. So He causes sleep to fall on this man—now under- stand me, I do not say this story is true. After the sleep had fallen on this man the Supreme Being took a rib, or, as the French would call it, a cutlett, out of him, and from that He made a woman; and I am willing to swear, taking into account the amount and quality of the raw material used, this was the most magnificent job ever accomplished in this world. Well, after He got the woman done she was brought to the man, not to see how she liked him, but to see how he liked her. He eg ae" eee ue hs eaaae | 4 1, i ine he thats enh Gee Pha, if 1 , SHEVA te Pig oe CO aa ptetmen Parag dh Aigo ws 2 Pipa shew) SUPE bE We Lh ONAN aii iat cris y ie . » om aad ss," Cd ar * at aad ta , oa co vas Vir ery 2 hI N , pee ve > A Shea Ae Be ee ea hay Caran . 4 ve i ~* ; wi Ling ‘ , oe (Oo e i i ie es oe “i oD ¥, + y eae MA le ‘ 63u0) ae é - | yet y oe : - { rele | = 3 118 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. liked her and they started housekeeping, and they were told of certain things they might do and of one thing they could not do—and of course they did it. .I would have done it in fifteen minutes, I know it. There — wouldn’t have been an apple on that tree half an hour from date, and the limbs would have been full of ciubs. And then they were turned out of the park and extra policemen were put on to keep them from getting back. And then trouble commenced and we have been at it ever since. Nearly all of the religions of this world account for the exist- — ence of evil by such a story as that. Well, I read in another book what appeared to be an account of the same transaction. It was written about four thousand years before the ether. All commentators agree that the one that was written last was the original, and the one that was written first was copied from the one | that was written last; But I would advise you all not to’allow your creed to be disturbed by a little matter of four or five thousand years. It is a great deal better to be mistaken in dates than to go to the devil. In this other account the Supreme Brahma made up his mind to make the world and aman and woman. He made the world, and he made the man and then the woman, and put them on the Island of Ceylon. According to the account it qvas the most beautiful island of which man can conceive. Such birds, such songs, such flowers, and such verdure! And the branches of the trees were so arranged that when the wind swept through them every tree was athousand Aolian harps. Brahma, when he put them there, said: ‘“ Let them havea period of courtship, for it is my desire and will that true love should forever precede mar- riage.” When I read that, it wasso much more beautiful and lofty than the other, that I said to myself: “If either one of these stories ever turns out to be true, I hope it will be this one.” ; Then they had their courtship, with the nightingale singing and the stars shining and the flowers blooming, and they fell in love. Imagine that courtship! No prospective fathers or mothers-in-law; no prying and gossiping neighbors; nobody to say, “ Young man, how do you expect to support her?’ Nothing of that kind—nothing but the night ingale singing its song of joy and pain, as though the thorn already touched its heart. They were married by the Supreme Brahma, and he said tothem, “ Remain here; you must never leave this island.” Well, after a little while the man—and his name was Adami, and the woman’s name was Heva—said to Heva: “I believe I'll look about a little.” He wanted to go West. He went to the western extremity of the island where there was a little narrow neck of land connecting it with the mainland, and the Devil, who is always playing pranks with us, pro- duced a mirage, and when he looked over to the mainland, such hiHs and vales, such dells and dales, such mountains crowned with snow, — SKULLS AND REPLIES. 119 such cataracts clad in bows of glory did he see there, that he went back and told Heva: ‘The country over there is a thousand times better than this; let us migrate.’ She, like every other woman that ever lived, said: ‘‘ Let well enough alone; we have all we want; let us stay here.” Buthesaid: ‘No, let us go;” so she followed him, and when they came to this narrow neck of land, he took her on his back like a gentleman, and carried her over. Butthe moment they got over they : heard a crash, and, looking back, discovered that this narrow neck of land had fallen into the sea.. The mirage had disappeared, and there was naught but rocks and sand, and then the Supreme Brahma cursed them both to the lowest Hell. Then it was that the man spoke—and I have liked him ever since for it—“‘ Curse me, but curse not her; it was not her fault, it was mine.” That’s the kind of a man to start a world with. The Supreme Brahma said: “TI will save her but not thee.” And then spoke out of her full- ness of love, out of a heart in which there was love enough to make all her daughters rich in holy affection, and said: ‘Ifthou wilt not spare him, spare neither me; I do not wish to live without him, I love him.” Then the Supreme Brahma said—and I have liked him ever since I read it—“‘I will spare you both, and watch over you and your children forever.’ Honor bright, is that not the better and grander story ? And in that same book I find this: ‘“ Man is strength, woman is beauty; man is courage, woman is love. When the one man loves the one woman, and the one woman loves the one man, the very angels leave Heaven, and come and sit in that house, and sing for joy.’’ In the same book this: “ Blessed is that man, and beloved of all the gods, who is afraid of no man, and of whom no man is afraid.” Magnificent char- acter! A missionary certainly ought to talk to that man. And [I find ‘this: “ Never will I accept private, individual salvation, but rather will I stay and work, strive and suffer, until every soul from every star has been brought home to God.” Compare that with the Christian that expects to go to Heaven while the world is rolling over Niagara to an eternal and unending Hell. So I say that religion lays all the crime and troubles of this world at the beautiful feet of woman. And then the church has the impudence to say that it has exalted women. I believe that marriage is a perfect partnership; that woman has every right that man has—and one more—the right to be protected. Above all men in the world I hate a stingy man—a man that will make his wife beg for money. “What did you do with the dollar I gave you last week?” “ And what are you going to do with this?” Itis vile. No gentleman will ever be satisfied with the love of a beggar and a slave—uo gentle- man will ever be satisfied except with the love of an equal. What kind 120 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. of children does a man expect to have with a beggar for their mother? A man can not be so poor but that he can be generous, and if you only have one dollar in the world and you have got to spend it, spend it like a lord—spend it as though it were a dry leaf, and you the owner of unbounded forests—spend it as though you had a wilderness of your own. That’s.the way to spend it. I had rather be a beggar and spend my last dollar like a king, than be aking and spend my money like a beggar. If it has got to go letit go. And this is my advice to the poor. For you can never be so poor that whatever you do you can’t do in a grand and manly way. I hatea cross man. What right has a man to assassinate the joy of life? When you go home you ought to go like a ray of light—so that it will, even in the night, burst out of the doors and windows and illuminate the darkness. Some men think their mighty brains have been in a turmoil; they have been thinking about who will be Alderman from the Fifth Ward; they have been thinking about politics, great and mighty ques- tions have been engaging their minds, they have bought calico at five cents or six, and want to sell it for seven. Think of the intellectual strain that must have been upon that man, and when he gets home everybody else in the house must look out for his comfort. A woman who has only taken care of five or six children, and one or two of them sick, has been nursing them and singing to them, and trying to make one yard of cloth do the work of two, she, of course, is fresh and fine and ready to wait upon this gentleman—the head of the family—the boss! I was reading the other day of an apparatus invented for the eject- ment of gentlemen who subsist upon free lunches. It is so arranged that when the fellow gets both hands into the victuals, a large hand descends upon him, jams his hat over his eyes—he is seized, turned toward the door, and just in the nick of time an immense boot comes from the other side, kicks him in italics, sends him out over the side- walk and lands him rolling in the gutter. I never hear of such a man—a boss—that I don’t feel as though that machine ought to be brought into requisition for his benefit. Love is the only thing that will pay ten per cent of interest on the out- lay. Love is the only thing in which the height of extravagance is the ‘last degree of economy. It is the only thing, I tell you. Joy is wealth. Love is the legal tender of the soul—and you need not be rich to be happy. We have all been raised on success in this country. Always been talked with about being successful, and have never thought our- selves very rich unless we were the possessors of some magnificent man- sion, and unless our names have been between the putrid lips of rumor we could not be happy. Every little boy is striving to be this and be { Ay rae * ae eo + " ya At en 4! eo “de ; ‘arte ¥ » * AY » ~ sé jw . " i‘ re {* « San ts ‘ + om a 7 i i ay ” * ged as 4 e oe “ al hh — SKULLS AND REPLIES. a 121 that. I tell you the happy man is the successful man. Tse man that has won the love of one good woman is a successful man. The man that has been the emperor of one good heart, and that heart embraced all his, has been a success. If another has been the emperor of the round world and has never loved and been loved, his life is a failure. It won’t do. Let us teach our children the other way, that the happy man is the successful man, and he who is a happy man is the one who always tries to make some one else happy. The man who marries 2 woman to make her happy; that marries her as much for her own sake as for his own; not the man that thinks his wife is his property, who thinks that the title to her belongs to him— that the woman is the property of the man; wretches who get mad at their wives and then shoot them down in the street because they think the woman is their property. I tell you it is not necessary to be rich and great and powerful to be happy. A little while ago I stood by the grave of the old Napoleon—a mag- nificent tomb of gilt and gold, fit almost for a dead deity—and gazed upon the sarcophagus of black Egyptian marble, where rest at last the ashes of the restless man. I leaned over the balustrade and thought about the career of the greatest soldier of the modern world. I saw him walking upon the banks of the Seine, contemplating suicide—I saw him at Toulon—I saw him putting down the mob in the streets of Paris —I saw him at the head of the army of Italy—I saw him crossing the bridge of Lodi with the tri-color in his hand—I saw him in Egypt in the shadows of the pyramids—I saw him conquer the Alps and mingle the eagles of France with the eagles of the crags. I saw him at Marengo —at Ulm and Asterlitz. I saw him in Russia, where the infantry of the snow and the cavalry of the wild blast scattered his legions like Winter’s withered leaves. I saw him at Leipsic in defeat and disaster—driven by a million bayonets back upon Paris—clutched like a wild beast—ban- ished to Elba. I saw him escape and retake an empire by the force of his genius. I saw him upon the frightful field of Waterloo, where chance and fate combined to wreck the fortunes of their former king. And [I saw him at St. Helena, with his hands crossed behind him, gazing out upon the sad and solemn sea. I thought of the orphans and widows he had made—of the tears that had been shed for his glory, and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition. And I said I would rather have been a French peas- ant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door, and the grapes growing purple in the kisses of the Autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky— with my children upon my knees and their arms about me. I would 122 < MISTAKES OF INGHRSOLL. rather have been that man and gone down to the tengueless silence o? the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder known as Napoleon the Great. It is not necessary t¢ be rich in order to be happy. It is only necessary to be in love. Thou sands of men go to college and get a certificate that they have an edu cation, and that certificate is in Latin and they stop studying, and in twe years to save their life they couldn’t read the certificate they got. It is mostly so in marrying. They stop courting when they get mar. ried. They think, we have won her and that isenough. Ah! the differ- ence before and after! How well they look! How bright their eyes! How light their steps, and how full they were of generosity and laughter! I tell you a man should consider himself in good luck if a woman loves him when he is doing his level best! Good luck! Good luck! And another thing that is the cause of much trouble is that people don’t, count fairly. They do what they call putting their best foot forward. That means lying a little. I say put your worst foot forward. If you have got any faults admit them. If you drink, say so and quit it. If you chew and smoke and swear, say so. If some of your kindred are not very good people, say so. If you have had two or three that died on the gallows, or that ought to have died there, say so. Tell all your faults, and if after she knows your faults she says she will have you, you have got the dead wood on that woman forever. I claim that there should be perfect equality in the home, and I can not think of anything nearer Heaven than a home where there is true republicanism and true democ. racy at the fireside. All are equal. And then, do you know, I like to think that love is eternal; that if you really love the woman, for her sake, you will love her no matter what she may do; that if she really loves you, for your sake, the same; that love does not look at alterations, through the wrinkles of time, through the mask of years—if you really love her you will always see the face you loved and won. And I like to think of it. If a man loves a woman she does not ever growsold to him, and the woman who really loves 2 man does not see that he grows old. He is not decrepit to her, He is not tremulous. He is not old. He is not bowed. She always sees the same gallant fellow that won her hand and heart. I like to think of it in that way, and as Shakspeare says: ‘‘ Let Time reach with his sickle as far as ever he can; although he can reach ruddy cheeks and ripe lips, and flashing eyes, he can not quite reach love.” TI like to think of it. We will go down the hill of life together, and enter the shadow one with the other, and as we go down we may hear the ripple of the laughter of our grandchildren, and the birds, and spring, and youth, and love will sing once more upon the leafless branches of the tree of age. SKULLS AND REPLIES. 128 I love to think of it in that way—absolute equals, happy, happy, and free, al: our own. But some people say: ‘“‘ Would you allow a woman to vote?” “Yes, if she wants to; that is her business, not mine. If a woman wants to vote, [am too much of a gentleman to say she shall not. But they say woman has not sense enough to vote. Itdon’t take much. But it seems to me there are some questions,-as for instance, the question of peace and war, that a woman should be allowed to vote upon. A woman that has sons to be offered on the altar of that Moloch, it seems to me that such a grand woman should have as much right to vote upon the question of peace and war as some thrice-besotted sot that reels to the ballot box and deposits his vote for war. But if women have been slaves, what shall we say of the little children born in the sub-cellars; children of poverty, children of crime, children of wealth, children that are afraid when they hear their rames pronounced by the lips of the mother, cbildren that cower in fear when they hear the footsteps of their brutal father, the flotsam and jetsam upon the rude sea of life, my heart goes out to them one and all. Children have all the rights that we have and one more, and that is to be protected. Treat your children in that way. Suppose yourchild tells @ lie. Don’t pretend that the whole world is going into bankruptcy. Don’t pretend that that is the first lie ever told. Tell them, like an hon- est man, that you have told hundreds of lies yourself, and tell the dear little darling that it is not the best way; that it soils the soul. Think of the man that deals in stocks whipving his children for putting false rumors afloat! Think of an orthodox minister whipping his own flesh and blood, for not telling all it thinks! Think of that! Think of a lawyer beating his child for avoiding the truth! when the old man makes about half his living that way. A lieis born of weakness on one side and tyranny on the other. Thatis what itis. Think of a great big man coming at a little bit of a child with a club in his hand! What is’ the little darling todo? Lie, of course. I think that mother Nature put that ingenuity into the mind of the child, when attacked by a parent, to throw up alittle breastwork in the shape of a lie to defend itself. When a great general wins a battle by what they call strategy, we build monuments to him. What isstrategy? Lies. Suppose a man as much larger than we are as we are larger than a child five years of age, should come at us with a liberty pole in his hand, and in tones of thunder want to know “ who broke that plate,” there isn’t one of us, not excepting myself, that wouldn’t swear that we never had seen that plate in our lives, or that it was cracked when we got it. Another good way to make children tell the truth is.to tell it sontsele Keep your word with your child the same as you would with your 124 MISTAKES OF INGHRSOLL. banker. If you tell achild you will do anything, either do it or give the child the reason why. Truth is born of confidence. It comes from the lips of love and liberty. I was over in Michigan the other day. There was a boy over there at Grand Rapids about five or six years old, a nice, smart boy, as you will sec from the remark he made—what you might call a nineteenth century boy. His father and mother had prom- ised to take him out riding. They had promised to take him out riding for about three weeks, and they would slip off and go without him. Well, after a while, that got kind of played out with the little boy, and the day before I was there they played the trick on him again. They - went out and got the carriage, and went away, and as they rode away from the front of the house, he happened to be standing there with his nurse, and he saw them. The whole thing flashed on him in a moment. He took in the situation, and turned to his nurse and said, pointing to his father and mother: “‘ There goes the two d——t liars in the State of Michigan!” When you go home fill the house with joy, so that the light of it will stream out the windows and doors, and illuminate even the darkness. It is just as easy that way as any in the world. I want to tell you to-night that you can not get the robe of hypocrisy on you so thick that the sharp eye of childhood will not see through every veil, and if you pretend to your children that you are the best man that ever lived—the bravest man that ever lived—they will find you out every time. They will not have the same opinion of father when they grow up that they used to have. They will have to be in mighty bad luck if they ever do meaner things than you have done. When your child confesses to you that it has committed a fault, take that child in your arms, and let it feel your heart beat against its heart, and raise your children in the sunlight of love, and they will be sunbeams to you along the pathway of life. Abolish the club and the whip from the house, because, if the civilized use a whip, the ignorant and the brutal will use a club, and they will use it because you use the whip. Every little while some door is thrown open ir some orphan asylum, and there we see the bleeding back of a child whipped beneath the roof that was raised by love. It is infamous, and the man that can’t raise a child without the whip ought not to have a child. If there is one of you here that ever expect to whip your child again, let me ask you some- thing. Have your photograph taken at the time and let it show your face red with vulgar anger, and the face of the little one with eyes swimming in tears, and the little chin dimpled with fear, looking like a piece of water struck by a sudden cold wind. If that little child should die, I can not think of a sweeter way to spend an Autumn afternoon than to take that photograph and go to the cemetery, when the maples - are clad in tender gold, and when little scarlet runners are coming from SKULLS AND REPLIES. 125 the sad heart of the earth, and sit down upon that mound, and look upon that photograph, and think of the flesh, now dust, that you beat. Just think of it. I could not bear to die in the arms of a child that I had whipped. I could not bear to feel upon my lips, when they were withered beneath the touch of death, the kiss of one that I had struck. Some Christians act as though they really thought that when Christ said, “Suffer little children to come unto me,” He had a rawhide under ' His coat. They act as though they really thought that He made that remark simply to get the children within striking distance. I have known Christians to turn their children from their doors, especially a daughter, and then get down on their knees and pray to God to watch over them and help them. I will never ask God to help my - children unless I am doing my level best in that same wretched line. 1 will tell you what I say to my girls: ‘“‘Go where you will; do what crime you may; fall to what depth of degradation you may; in all the storms and winds and earthquakes of life, no matter what you do, you never can commit any crime that will shut my door, my arms or my heartto you. As long as I live you shall have one sincere friend.”’ Call me an antheist; call me an infidel because I hate the God of the Jew— which Ido. I intend so to live that when I die my children can come to my grave and truthfully say: “ He who sleeps here never gave us one moment of pain.” When I was a boy there was one day in each week too good for a - child to be happy in. In these good old times Sunday commenced when the sun went down on Saturday night, and closed when the sun went down on Sunday night. Wecommenced Saturday to get a good ready. ‘And when the sun went down Saturday night there was a gloom deeper than midnight that fell upon the house. You could not crack hickory nutsthen. And if you were caught chewing gum, it was only another evidence of the total depravity of the human heart. Well, after a while we got to bed sadly and sorrowfully after having heard Heaven thanked | that we were not all in Hell. And I sometimes used to wonder how the mercy of God lasted as long as it did, because I recollected that on sev- eral occasions I had not been at schoo!, when I was supposed to be there. Why I was not burned to a crisp was a mystery to me. The next morn- ing we got up and we got ready for church—all solemn, and when we got there the minister was up in the pulpit, about twenty feet high, and he commenced at Genesis about “The fall of man,” and he went on to about twenty thirdly; then he struck the second application, and when he struck the application I knew he was about half way through. And then he went on to show the scheme how the Lord was satisfied by pun- ishing the wrong man. Nobody but a God would have thought of that ingenious way. Well, when he got through that, then came the catechism ‘ok feat ais 2 ary ERA Tah sey ¥ Yee gk M Ae Pi as ee Ba WAGs a) ay Sa TT tats ere SP lhe ae ASE bal ne Sy Ba een tee Vee ARIE part et 5 te) RO Bm he oN y y § , ‘ tes b (Doe) s pis | Bes whet q 126 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. —the chief end of man. Thenemy turn came, and we sat along on a little bench where our feet came within about fifteen inches Or the floor, and the dear old minister used to ask us: “Boys, do you know that you ought to be in Hell ?” And we answered up as cheerfully as could be expected under the cir- cumstances: ; a ee 'e- = 4 SPE ae oS | z e/ ¥ Ende ont SN =f ‘ \, = - a . . S ORT, x ees N cena Rag . SS SSG SS 4 \ ds e selon tat \ = ae na . eeteeeete (AA IN Ses \ SESE CCR QAR