BL 2727 .M57 1879 m^ BL 2727 .M57 1879 Mistakes of Ingersoll MISTAKES '"" INGERSOLL AS SHOWN BY I Rev. W. F. Crafts, Bishop Charles E. Cheney, Chaplain C. C. I McCabe, D.D., Arthur Swazey, D.D., Robert Collyer, D.D., Fred. Perry Powers, and Others. INCLUDING INGERSOLL'S LECTURE SKULLS, AND HIS ANSWER Prof. Swing, Dr. Ryder, Dr. Herford, Dr. Collyer, Dr. Thomas, Dr. Kohler, and Other Critics. EDITED BY CHICAGO: RHODES & McCLURE, PUBLISHERS. 1879. 2372 Nut Scitislied with his receut parade of the "Mistakes of Moses " before the Chicago pubhc (which called forth our fir.-^t book, entitled the " Mistakes of Ingersoll, as Shown By Prof. Swing and Others"), Mr. I. has since returned and delivered another lecture against the Bible and against his critics, Prof. Swing, Dr. Kyder, Dr. Herford and Dr. Collyer. These last efforts of Mr. Ingersoll have called forth the ])resent volume, in which will be found additional "Mistakes," as shown by Rev. W. F. Crafts, who is the well-known successor of Dr. Tiffany in Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church; by Chaplain C. C. McCabe, Bishop Cheney, Arthur Swazey, D.D., Robert Collyer, D.D., whose names are all familar to the public; and by Fred Perry Powers, who is favorably identified with Chicago journalism. Tlie "commendable fairness," mentioned by the press, in printing both the " text and replies " in the former volume, requires in this instance, also the text, which is given at the close and which includes Mr. IngersolPs replies to Prof. Swing, Dr. Ryder, Brooke Herford and others. J. B. McCLURE. Chicago, May IT, 1879. Entered according to Act ( f Congress, in the year 1879, by J. B. McClube & R. S. Rhcdes, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. Ottawa Y & Company, Donohue & Henneberbt, Printers. Binders. W. F. Crafts' Reply ...... Ingersollism Outlined— - Ten Points" instead of " Five "—Infi- del Protoplasm ••.... First Point in the Ten— Sepulchral Hoots of the Ingersoll Owl— A Theological Rip Van Winkle Ingersoll Mistakes a Part for the Whole— Gross Misrepresenta- tions ••.... The Great Ingersoll Boomerang— How it Works— Further Mis- representations Examined ..... Misrepresenting Bible Passages ..... Sun and Moon Standing Still . Hell The Present vs. the Future Ingersoll's Plorrible Estimate of Truth The Bible the Best of Books, and Christ the Best of Men Something New if True— Infidelity the Essential Factor in Pro- gressive Civilization— But Coleridge, Wm. H. Seward, Bis- marck, and other Great Statesman can not see it— Civilization goes, onlj with Christianity Marvelous Power of Time and Circumstance— Tragic Efi*ect of Iso-thermal Lines— Peoria Mud Necessarily the Seventh Heaven as Ingersf)ll Sees it . Law is Ingersoll's God ..... Liberty and Infidelity— What De Tocqueville Says About it Woman- Ingersoll's Theory at Variance with Facts Ingersoll's Theory of Childhood— Some of His Little Stories— The Whole Subject Carefully Examined— Significant Incident in the Life of Abraham Lincoln .... Ingersoll Says Christianity Fetters Thought— The Bible and a Host of Distinguished Men Say Otherwise A Cloud of Witnesses ..... Jesus Christ ..... Amazing Ignorance of Infidels Concerning the Scriptures- Hume's Ignorance of the New Testament— Tom Paine With- out a Bible 3 AiAE,. 7 10 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 31 24 26 26 27 28 32 34 37 38 4 CONTENTS. Distributed Ignorance ;ind Concentrated Hatred— Probable Cause of Ingersoirs Infidelity . . • • • ^^ The Truth of the Whole Matter . ■ • • • 40 Chaplains McCabe's Reply . • • • .43 The Famous Chaplain Has a Remarkable Dream— He Sees ihe Great City of Ingersollville -Which Ingersoll and the Infidel Host Enter— And are Shut in for Six Months— Remarkable Condition of Things Outside and Inside- Happiness and Misery— Ingersoll Finally Petitions for a Church and sends for a Lot of Preachers . . . . • 43 Dr. Swazey's Reply ....•• 49 Momentary View of Col. Ingersoll Through the Doctor's Glass— The Bible on the Meridian— What the Doctor Sees in the Great Book 49 Occultation of Ingersoll's Good Sense— General Survey of Deities— Scope of Divine Revelation ... 51 The Great Central Figure— Absolute Unity of the Bible System 53 The Bible Law of Development vs. Infidel Philosophy . 54 Common Sense View of the Subject— How it Eliminates Polyg- amy, Slavery, Etc. ....•• 56 More Common Sense— The Great Ingersoll Orb Approaching the Nihilistic Belt— Nebulae ..... 58 Dk. CollyePv's Reply ...... ^^ Dr. Collyer Relates a Little Story— A Book that Cost Mr. Inger- soll the Governorship of Illinois— The Volume Philosophically Considered— Heavy Blows . . • • • 63 Sparks Flying in all Directions— Singular Mental Phenomenon Occasioned by $25,000 a Year .... 64 The Clear Ring of Truth vc. the Dull Thud of the Baser Metal- Potency of Simple Statement— The Doctor's Objections to Ingersoll's Talk ..... Putting the Fine Edge on Orthodoxy— Taking a Weld with Prof. Swing and Dr. Thomas— Borax and Bigotry A Touching Illustration— Eloquence and Truth -Havelock's Saints ...••••• Atheism— Not an Institution but a " Destitution ! "—The True Life ^4 Fred. Perry Powers' Reply .... '«'5 The Sinaitic Code— Solvent Powers of th • Historic Method- Graphic Illustration of the Two Schools ... 75 CONTENTS. i Divine Adjustment of the ^Moral Law — Progressive Elimination of Polygamy, Slavery, Etc. — Mount Sinai and Mount Calvaiy 78 Purpose and Potency of the Mosaic Law ... 80 Excessive Wickedness and Proportionate Punishment — The Court of Ilcaven vs. the Court of Earth . . .82 Able Bodied Mendacity and Civilization — Love and Obedience 84 Mr. Powers' Punatch of reformers in the old times, who argned 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 godhness 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 umrti llir.i! ir dues 5 I 66 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. the advocates of the faith. Robert Southey says, in a letter to Sharon Turner, touching the contentions of his time between the sects, " When I liear 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 w^ere still true, in favor of the side which was dealt with most unfairly. The plea in 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 w^ho 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 sucli violent and utter denunciation as this, which lies within the spirit c»f 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 I am 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 most 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 a man can give that he believes he is right. DR. COLLY ERS REPLY. 67 The Clear Ring of Truth vs. the Dull Thud of the Baser Metal — Potency of Simple Statement— The Doctor's Objections to IngersoU's Talk. IS'ow, a man who seeks and loves the trnth, 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 sucli 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 cry " 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 17-iO to 17S0, are simi)ly 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 INGEMSOLL. inexorable affirmation, made good for all time, that neither priest nor Pope can play fast and loose with the Most High God. Always you iind the greatest and best men w^hen 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 opj^ositiun 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 Iris 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 Stebbins, of California, said once, when he was s])eaking 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. IngersoU's enorTuous and most fatal negation of God. DR. COLLY ERS ME FLY. 69 Putting the Fine Edge on Orthodoxy — Taking a Weld with Prof. Swing and Dr. Thoma'^ — Borax and Bigotry. JSTor 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 wars in atheism wlien tlie goddess of Rea- son was the divinity of France. Ortliodoxy, in a free-spoken land like ours, is very civil, indeed, and tiniia, 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 from the rocking base, as fast and as far the people for whom those men h.ive to care will follow. E"othing 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 enouofh, it is what our fathers shed their blood fur. Dr. Swing must be true to his ancient vows, or leave.'' If 3.1r. Ingersoll should ever lay out his money, and those of his mind put theirs to it, to build a great hall in AYashington or Chicago for the pro};agation of atheism, and employ a man to preach to them, and then if this man should depart as fiir 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 smite them on the mouth. 70 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. Orthodoxy has exchanged tlie 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. I 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. Xor 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 chem 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 entrancino:. 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. COLLY ERS REPLY. 71 TQight bring blessing. So thev tell me, tliere is no place that can match Peoria in its power to turn good grain into whisky; tlierefore, shovel Peoria into the river, and leave the smiling prairies where the grain grows, a waste. ]^[otliing 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 tliose 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 tuuch.' " Xor would I lose one of 73 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 o-rave 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 i^. 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 satisfving of the outward sense, yet to the opening of the inward sense, which is the far grander result." DR. COLLYER'8 ME PLY. 73- A Touching Illustration — Eloquence and Truth — Havelock's Saints. Of the doctrine advanced by Mr. IngersoU, and his pur- pose to have done vt^th the God Jesus believed ;,i, and show reason why we should have done with Ilim, there is nothing to say if I have not said it steadily these many years. A remark of Charles Hare strikes me forcibly as I read the fevr 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. IngersoU 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. Call out Havelock's saints, tJiey are sure to be ready, and they are never dniTdc. They were of the sort that carry a Bible in their knapsack, and turn to chapter and verse, and sing ])salms from c>ld 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 jdways 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 wlio 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 sav, " 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. Kor 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 us to 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 ns 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 iu 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. FBED, PERR7 POWERS' REPLY. 75 rHED. PERHY POWERS' REPLY. The Sinaitic Code — Solvent Powers of the Historic Method — Graphic Illustration of the Two Schools. Christianity, 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 L^iape. 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 trom 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 resulr of antecedents, and in the natural effort to harmonize himself with his environment, has committed murder. Xow, 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 INGERSOLL. difficulty In making a perfect defense for itself, its predeces- sor and all of its members, no matter liow 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 brouo^ht 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 diflerent 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 laro^er animal than an elcnhant, be- cause he appeared so in the picture. The former repre- sents a school of atheists who attack the ethics of the Sina- itic code, and the latter represents a school of devout be- lievers who, receiving the Sinaitic code as a matter of rev- elation, feel compelled to defend it as the truth and noth- FRED. PERRY POWERS' REPLY. 77 ing but the truth, and the truth fur ail times and aii places. It is worth while to remember at the verj 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 mure than eio-hteen hundred years a^^o by the hiofhest 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 a toeth. 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 ofthe 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 1, 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, temptmg 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 ofthe hardness of your hearts, sufiered you to put away your wives ; but from the beginning it was not so. 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- <»th her which he put iivray doth commit adultery. — Matt, xix., 3-9. 78 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. Divine Adjustment of the Moral Law — Progressive Elimination of Polygamy, Slavery, Etc. — Mount Sinai and Mount Calvary. The "hardness of heart" referred to is evidently the dulhiess 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 cliose 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 shown 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 FRED. PERRY POWERS' REPLY. 79- liuinanity 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. AVhen 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 fall meaning of Calvary and whose lives give evidence of that fact. AYhen any considerable j^ortion 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 a certain 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 develoi)ed 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 I 80 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. out of place in a Christian church were it not that, even i to-daj, and in the United States, there are many persons j 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 I treated the seduction of an unbetrothed bondmaid as a : trivial offense, sufficiently atoned for hj the sacrifice of a [ ram. The seduction of a free maid, if she was not be- I trothed, was atoned for by marriage. It was on account of the "hardness of their hearts," their infancy in ethics, 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, vrho 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 ]:)rofit. 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 shut 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 know as 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 idolater. 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 MISTAKES OF INQEESOLL. Excessive Wickedness and Proportionate Punishment — The Court of Heaven vs. the Court of Earth. 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 excejDt 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 Kevelation. 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 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 it is 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 INOERSOLL. journers in the land of Egypt, the very reason we might sup]30se why they should be 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 stop 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 at a particular time wrote to a particular church is by no means necessarily a universal law. AVhat 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, je masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening, knowing that jour 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. JSTow, 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 a priori 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 Kew Testament that Christianity must be the ally of despotism, and then looks about him and sees that civil liberty is nut known outside of Christian lands, and has its fullest development in Eug- 86 MISTAKES OF INOER80LL. land and America, where Christianity in its simplest forms prevail, and where there are the fewest barriers between the human soul and tlie I^ew Testament itself; when he has argued from the IN^ew 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 m 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 to man. All the good from the Saviour of the World is communicated tlirough tliis Book. But for this Book we could not know right from wrong. All those things desirable to man are contained m It. I return you my sincere thanks for this very eleo-ant copy of the Great Book of God which you present.-^^m- him Lincoln, on receiving a present of a Bible. ITEM8. 87 I DEFT 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. The 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.) And, 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. The Bible is the only cement of nations, and the only r. Melville. Il Cjtci^, <^iv^, GCeu- 7 [Photographed by Mosber.] BISHOP CHENEY'S REPLY. BISHOP che:n^ey'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 Yalley diifer 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's own 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. They 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 d^wn 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, I 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 liave 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 beheve 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 out 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 circum- ference and two mighty armies were face to face in the Yalley 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 I Is there any point, I say, in this controversy where the skeptic and the believer can come to stand upon one common ground 1 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 fatliers, 93 MISTAKES OF INGER80LL. 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 poiut of time — four hundred and fifty years before the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Xow, 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 a man 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 tlien 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 nnderneath 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 time to you? I admit that it does, but not in the history of nations. It is only a trifle more than the time in which you and 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 how it 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 INOERSOLL. of royal houses, and the dissolutions of powerful parties, that tliat 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 sufier 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 years nearer to the days BISHOP CHENEY'S REPLY. 95 when Moses gave that haw to the Avorld. When King Josiah mounted the throne of Judah lie 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 liine. 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 ]\roses. 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. jSTow 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 INGEBSOLL. skeptical criticism; suppose that it had been denied that it had been written bj Washington, and if I fiad 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. Yan Euren, 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 him is 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 BISHOP CHENEY'S REPLY. 97 idolaters in the land of Eu;ypt. 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, whicli 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 though in the dead of night a man should steal out under cover of the darkness to the tombstone of liis 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 thuse who know me, I don't think I shall ever trace my line to Caesar Borgia. Cutting the Gordian Knot. Now again I would like to notice very briefly some oi 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 ])in and 7 98 MISTAKES OF INGEBSOLL. 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. Is it wonderful that the Bible has been made the subject of repeated attacks ? I no more hope to answ^er all the objections that can be put against a book such as the book in (jitestion, 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 but 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 the 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 liave 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 Pentateuch. 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 CHE NETS 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 hope to 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 ])ark com- missioners and find there the statement that they, a-t 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, I need only count them to have a posi- tive proof of the fact that the statement contained in the report was false. JSTow, 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, I want to say one word, and that is, I challenge any man in this congregation— I chal- leno-e any man in the wide w^orld 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 INOERSOLL. earth took place six thousand years ago. This Moses, whom Col. 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 thei-e 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 Xew 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 fjices 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. JSTow the first answer I have to give is, that there is not one syllable in the Bible that fixes the length of time ox man's existence upon this earth. Xot one syllable. Moses BISHOP GHENETS REPLY, lOl 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 ]^ew 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. Facts — 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 astoundinir 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 INOER80LL. But inifortunatelj for Sir Charles Lyell, American geolo- gists were on his track, and the United States coast survey followed in the pathway where iie had been investigating. Gen. Humphrey, of the American army, measured accu- rately the amount of the deposit. He reviewed the figures of the Eup^lish o^eoloo^ist, and he showed unanswerablv 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 ]^ile, was at least twelve thousand years old. But later investigations deeper down in the same soil came upon some more patterns, which w^ere 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 thi;-; gen- tleman's pen about what countless ages must have elapsed BISHOP CHENETS REPLY. 103 to perfect that saccharoid sandstone over tlie coffin, and over that to have put these layers upon hiyers of rock. The conclusion was, that the clironologj 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. lie 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 abihty 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 So Co. Corrected— Conclusion. I allude to one more of the Mosaic fiicts 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 INGEHSOLL. 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, involving 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. Xow, 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 imperativ^e ?ind 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. jS'ay, 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 Egy])t 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 BISHOP CHENEY S REPLY. 105 increase that the tables of the census of the United States to-day display, these thousands miiilit have easily amounted to three millions in two hundred and titteen years. I am not through with this stronghold of the enemies ol" the Pentateuch. 'As I study it eeems to nie that T 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 ao"0. They have taken up certain genealogies and s])ecula- ti'ons of commentators. They have taken up the calcula- tions of Hales and others, and they liave regarded them as infallible. Thev have never turned to the twelfth chapter of P^xodus, and'l find there the statement given with pre- cision that admits of no question that the sojourn of the children of Israel in Esrypt was four hundred and thirty years: '• And it came to pass, at the end of four hundred and thirtv years, within the self-same day it came to ])ass that all the hosts of the Lord came out of the land ot Eo-ypt.'^ Long before that, God had told Abraham that his seed should be stranc^ers 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 f^ict that in the Tsew Testament Stephen declares that God told the father ot 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. JSTow, if but seventy had gone down with Jacob into Egypt, an increase to two or three or even four milhons in four and a half centuries would have been no more than what is paralleled by the history ot 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 revehition. To know it, to stiKly it, is to find the very truth of God. Ingersoll's Lecture ON SKULLS, ANl) HIS REPLIES TO PROF. SWING, DR. RYDER, DR. HERFORD, DR. COLLYER, AXD OTHER CRITICS. REPRINTED PROM "THE CHICAGO TIMES." L.U)iES AND Gentlemen: Man advances just iu 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 simiile question of brain. Those amons 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 lay the foundation to prove that assertion. A little while ago I saw models of nearly evcrytliing 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 tl.at 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 miss- 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 w4lh four legs, a half dozen arms, several noses, and two or three rows of ears, and one Ltlle, 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 siivage 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 M'hich 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 not 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 SKULLS AND REPLIES. 100 his poor, hapless, feeble and starving children. But now, instead ot 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 tom-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 difierence between those skulls that there was between the products of those skulls, and I said to myself: "After all, it is a simple 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 dwelt joy, liberty and love. And I said to myself, it is all a ([uestion 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 h:is done it by holding out every incentive to tiie 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 a devil factory. He believed in Hell, and the belief was aeon- 110 MISTAKES OF INGEBSOLL. solation to liim. 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 I have. 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 to ask 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 that can 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 saj^s 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. Ill plow was given to a pious farmer iu an exceedingly holy dream, autl that twisted straw is the ueplus 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 ? Kow, 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. It is 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 is the 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 M'cre brutes than in any other time or nation. Re ligion 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 u>en and won>en 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, tliiey, to*, prayed to this bank." " Did they ever get any ?" " No, not tliat 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 fliat 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 l)eing fried forever in Hell that it didn't seem so bad to burn a feu- minutes. I love 112 MISTAKES OF INQEESOLL. liberty and I liate 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 a man 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 see for yourselves the justice of damning a man if his parents had happened to baptize him in the wrong way — God can not afford to break a rule 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 d^n'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 saj^: " I will recant," I think I would. There is not much of the martyr about me. 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 hj'pocrites 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 last 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 checks, " 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 sucii 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 hjgic— and it was done, too, by Protestants — Protestants that persecuted to the extent of their power, and that is as much as Calliolicism 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 iwe 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 old 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 insiitu- 114 MISTAKES OF INGEBSOLL. 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 ph^^siciaii to feel his pulse. What for ? 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 peaco 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 sufl'ered 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 liappiness, 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 was a 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 — 9nd 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- bers 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 done 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 in a 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 they 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. Our 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 distip.ction. 116 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. The time will come when no matter how much money a man has, he will not he respected unless he is using it for the benefit of his fellow- men. It will soon be here. It no longer satisfies the ambition of a great man to be king or emperor. The last Napoleon w^as 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 Coesar, 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 unreasoning chance, while George Eliot wears robes of glory woven in the loom of her own genius. And so it is the world over. The time is coming when a man will be rated at his real worth, and that \)j 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 DO the divine height of marriage. I believe in marriage. If there is any Heaven upon earth it is in the family by the fireside, and the family is a 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 live in 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 SKULLS AND REPLIES. 117 Every minister in tlie C'liy 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 jow 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 wiiether 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 w^ould have done. Don't tell your people that is a poem. Don't tell your people that is pictorial. That w^on'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 a rule second thoughts are best. This God made a man 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 w^orld. 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 118 MISTAKES OB' INGERSOLL. liked her and they started housekeeping, and they were told of certain things they miglit 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 clubs. 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 wTitten about four thousand years before the other. All commentators agree that the one that M\as 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 j^ears. 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 a man 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 was 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 a thousand ^olian harps. Brahma, when he put them there, said : " Let them have a period of courtship, for it is my desire and will that true love should torever precede mar- riage." When I read that, it was so 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. Imacfine that courtship ! No prospective fathers or mothers-in-law ; no prying and gossiping neighbors; nobody to say, "Young man, how do 3^ou expect to support her?" Nothing of that kind — nothing but the night- ingale singing its song of joy and pain, as though the thorn alreadj'- touched its heart. They w^ere married by the Supreme Brahma, and he said to them, " Remain here; you must never leave this islanel." 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 hills and vales, such dells and dales, such mountains crowned with snow, SKULLS AND HE FLIES. 119 tsuch. 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." bhe, like every other woman that ever lived, said : " Let well enough alone ; we have all we want ; let us stay here." But he said : " 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. But the moment tiiey got over Ihey 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 : " I 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: " If thou 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 Ijelieve 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 ? " It is vile. No gentleman will ever be satisfied with the love of a beggar and a slave— no gentle- man will ever be satisfied except with the love of an equal. What kind 120 MISTAKES OF INGEBSOLL. 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 Avere 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 a king and spend my money like a beggar. If it has got to go let it go. And this is my advice to the poor. For you can never be so poor that wdiatever you do you can't do in a grand and manly way. I hate a 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 window^s 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 boui:ht calico at five cents or six, and w^ant 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 tw^o, she, of course, is fresh and fine and ready to w^ait 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 m'an — 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 percent 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 SKULLS AND BEFLIES. 121 that. I tell you the happy man is the successful mau. T-.e 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 a woman to make her hapny ; that marries her as much for her own sake as for his own ; not the mau that thmks 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 m a hut wiili 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 tlie sky — with my children upon my knees and their arms about me. I would 133 MISTAKES OB' INQEUSOLL. rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder known as Napoleon the Great. It is not necessary to 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 two 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 is enough. Ah ! the difl'er- 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, 3'ou 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 WTinkles 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 t3 think of it. If a man loves a woman she docs not ever grow*old to him, and the WM)mau who really loves a 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." I like to think of ir. 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 hiuglitcr 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. 123 I love to think of it in that way— absolute equals, happy, happy, and free, all 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, I am too much of a gentleman to say she shall not. But they say woman has not sense enough to vote. It don'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 names pronounced by the lips of the mother, ciiildren 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 a 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 whipping his children for putting false rumors afloat! Thmk 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 lie is born of weakness on one side and tyranny on the other. That is what it is. 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 to do? 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 a little breastwork in the shape of a lie to defend itself. When a great general wins a battle by what they call strategy, v/e build monuments to him. Wliat is strategy ? Lies. Suppose a man as much larger than we are as we are larger than a child five years of aij;c, should come at us with a liberty pole in his hand, and in tones of thunder want to know "v/ho 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 yourself Keep your word with your child the same as you would with your K-; MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. banker. If you tell a child you will do anything, either do it or give- the cliild 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 M^as a boy over there at Grand Rapids about five or six years old, a nice, smart bo}', as you will see 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 1 liars in the Stale of Michigan!" When you go liome 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 v.'ay 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 op m ion 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 in some orphan asylum, and there we see the bleeding back of a child wiiipped beneath tho 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. Hcwe 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 tiiink of a sweeter way to spend an Autumn afternoon than to take that pliotograph and go to the cemetery, when the maples are clad in tender gold, and when little scarlet runners are coming from SKULLS AND REPLIES. 135 ■die sad heart of the earth, and sit down upou that mound, and hjok upon that photograph, and think of the Hesh, now dust, lliat 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 upou 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 Idl 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 heart to 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 I do. I intend so to live that when 1 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. We commenced Saturday to get a good ready. And when the sun w^ent down Saturday night there was a gloom deeper than midnight that fell upon the house. You could not crack hickory nuts then. 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 school, when I was supposed to be there. Why I was not burned to a crisp w^as 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 higli, 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. Veil, when he got through that, then came the catechism 136 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. — the chief end of man. Then my tura came, and we sat along on a little bench where our feet came within about fifteen inches of 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 : " Yes, sir." " Well, boys, do you know that you would go to Hell if you died in your sins?" And we said : " Yes, sir." And thea came the great test: "Boys" — I can't get the tone, you know. And do you know that is how the preachers get the bronchitis. You never heard of an auctioneer getting the bronchitis, nor the second mate on a steamboat — never. What gives it to the minister is talking solemnly when they don't feel that wa}'-, and it has the same influence upon the organs of speech that it would have upon the cords of the calves of your legs to walk on your tip-toes, and so I call bronchitis " parsonitis." And if the ministers would all tell exactly what they think they would all get well, but keep- ing back a part of the truth is what gives them bronchitis. Well the old man — the dear old minister — used to try and show us how long we would be in Hell if we would only locate there. But to finish the other. The grand test question was : " Boys, if it was God's will that you should go to Hell, would you be willing to go?" And every little liar said : " Yes, sir." Then, in order to tell how long we would stay there, he used to eay : " Suppose once in a billion ages a bird should come from a far distant clime and carry ofi" in its bill one little grain of sand, the time would finally come when the last grain of sand would be carried away. Do you understand? " Yes, sir." " Boys, by that time it would not be sun-up in Hell." Where did that doctrine of Hell come from ? I will tell you ; from that fellow in the dug-out. Where did he get it? It was a souvenir from the wild beasts. Yes, I tell you he got it from the wild beasts, from the glittering eye of the serpent, from the coiling, twisting snakes with their fangs mouths ; and it came from the bark, growl and howl of wild beasts; it was born of a laugh of the hyena and got it from the depraved chatter of malicious apes. And I despise it with every drop of my blood and defy it. If there is any God in this universe who will damn his children for an expression of an honest thought I wish to go to Hell. I M'ould SKULLS jiND REPLIES. 127 rather go there than go to Heaven and keep the company of a God that would thus damn his children. Oh ! it is an infamous doctrine to teach that to little children, to put a shadow in the heart of a child to fill the in- sane asylums with that miserable, infamous lie. I see now and then a litlle girl— a dear little darling, with a face like the light, and eyes of joy, a human blossom, and I think, " is it possible that little girl will ever grow np to be a Presbyterian?'' Is it possible, my goodness, that that flower will finally believe in the five points of Calvinism or in the eternal damnation of man?" Is it possible that that little fairy will finally believe that she could be happy in Heaven with her baby in Hell ? Think of it ! Think of it ! And that is the Christian religion ! We cry out against the Indian mother that throws her child into the Ganges to be devoured by the alligator or crocodile, but that is joy in comparison with the Christian mother's hope, that she may be in salva- tion while her brave boy is in Hell. I tell you I want to kick the doctrine about Hell — I want to kick it out every time I go by it. I want to get Americans in this country placed so they will be ashamed to preach it. I want to get the congregations so that they won't listen to it. We can not divide the world off into saints and sinners in that way. There is a little girl, fair as a flower, and she grows up until she is twelve, thirteen, or fourteen years old. Are you going to damn her in the fifteenth, sixteenth or seventeenth year, when the arrow from Cupid's bow touches her heart and she is glorified — are you going to damn her now ? She marries and loves, and holds in her arms a beautiful child. Are you going to damn her now ? When are you going to damn her? Because she has listened to some Methodist minister and after all that flood of light failed to believe? Are you going to damn her then ? I tell you God can not afl"ord to damn such a woman. A woman in the State of Indiana forty or filty years ago who carded the wool and made rolls and spun them, and made the cloth and cut out the clothes for the children, and nursed them, and sat up with them nights and gave them medicine, and held thfm in her arms and wept over them— cried for joy and wept for fear, and finally raised ten or eleven good men and women with the ruddy glow of health upon their cheeks, and she would have died for any one of them any moment of her life, and finally she, bowed with age and bent with care and labor, dies, and at the moment the magical touch of death is upon her face, she looks as though she never had had a care, and her children burying her cover her face with tears. Do you tell me God can afford to damn that kind of a woman? One such act of injustice would turn Heaven itself into Hell. If there is any God, sitting above him in infinite serenity we have the figure of justice. Even a God mu^t do justice; even a God 128 MISTAKES OF INOERSOLL. must worship justice; and any form of superstition tliat destroys justice is infamous ! Just think of teaching that doctrine to little children ! A little child would go out into the garden, and there would be a little tree laden with blossoms, and the little fellow would lean against it, and there would be a bird on one of the bows, singing and swinging, and thinking about four little speckled eyes warmed by the breast of its mate, — singing and swinging, and the music in happy waves rippling out of the tiny throat, and the flowers blossoming, the air filled with perfume, and the great white clouds floating in the sky, and the little boy would lean up against the tree and think about Hell and the worm that never dies. Oh ! the idea there can be any day too good for a child to be happy in ! Well, after we got over the catechism, then came the sermon in the afternoon, and it was exactly like the one in the fore-noon, except the other end to. Then we started for home — a solemn march — " not a soldier discharged his farewell shot" — and when we got home if we had been real good boys we used to be taken up to the cemetery to cheer us up, and it always did cheer me, those sunken graves, those leaning stones, those gloomy epitaphs covered with the moss of years always cheered me. When I looked at them I said : " Well, this kind of thing can't last always." Then we came back home, and we had books to read which were very eloquent and amusing. We had Josephus, and the " History of the Waldenses," and " Fox's Book of Martyrs," Baxter's "Saint's Rest," and "Jenkyu on the Atonement." I used to read Jenkyn with a good deal of pleasure, and I often thought that the atone- ment would have to be very broad in its provisions to cover the case of a man that would write such a book for the boys. Then I would look to see how the sun was getting on, and sometimes I thougt it had stuck from pure cusscdness. Then I would go back and try Jenkyu's again. Well, but it had to go down, and when the last rim of light sank below the horizon, ofi would go our hats and we would give three cheers for liberty once again. I tell you, don't make slaves of your children on Sunday. The idea that there is any God that hates to hear a child laugh ! Let your children play games on Sunday. Here is a poor man that hasn't money enough to go to a big church and he has too much independence to go to a little church that the big church built for charity. He don't want to slide into Heaven that way. I tell you don't come to church, but go to the woods and take your family and a lunch with you, and sit down upon the old log and let the children gather flowers and hear the leaves whispering poems like memories of long ago, and when the sun is about going down, kissing the summits of far hills, go home with your hearts filled with throbs of joy. There is more recreation and joy in that SKULLS AND liEPLJEJS. 129 than goino: to a dry goods box with a steeple ou lop of it and hearing a man tell you that your chances are about ninety-nine to one for being eternally damned. Let us make this Sunday a day of splendid pleasure, not to excess, but to everything that makes man purer and grander and nobler. I would like to see now something like this: Instead of so many churches, a vast cathedral that would hold twenty or thirty thou- sand of people, and I would like to see an opera })roduced in it that would make the souls of men have higher and grander and nobler aims. I would like to see the walls covered with pictures and the niches rich with statuary; I would like to see something put there that you could use in this world now, and I do not believe in sacrificing the present to the future; I do not believe in drinking skimmed milk here with the promise of butter beyond the clouds. Space or time can not be holy any more than a vacuum can be pious. Not a bit, not a bit ; and no day can be so holy but what the laugh of a child will make it holier still. Strike with hand of fire, on, weird musician, thy harp, strung with Apollo's golden hair! Fill the vast cathedral aisles with symphoDies sweet and dim, deft toucher of the organ's keys; blow, bugler, blow until thy silver notes do touch and kiss the moonlit waves, and charm the lovers wandering 'mid the vine-clad hills. But know your sweetest strains are discords all compared with childhood's happy laugh — the laugh that fills the eyes with light and every heart with j oy ! O, rippling river of laughter, thou art the blessed boundary line between the beasts and men, and every wayward wave of thine doth drown some fretful fiend of care. O Laughter, rose lipped daughter of Joy, there are dim- ples enough in thy cheeks to catch and hold and glorify all the tears of grief. Don't plant your children in long, straight rows, like posts. Let them have light and air and let them grow beautiful as palms. Wlieu I was a little boy children went to bed when they were not sleepy, and always got up when they were. I would like to see that changed, but they say we are too poor, some of us, to do it. "Well, all right. It is as easy to wake a child with a kiss as with a blow ; with kindness as with a curse, And, another thing; let the children eat what they want to. Let them commence at whichever end of the dinner they desire. That is my doc- trine. They know what they want much better than you do. Nature is a great deal smarter than you ever were. All the advance that has been made in the science of medicine, has been made by the recklessness of patients. I can recollect when they wouldn't give a man water in a fever— not a drop. Now and then some fellow would get so thirsty he would say: " Well, I'll die any way, so I'll drink it," and thereupon he would drink a gallon of water, and thereupon he would burst into a generous perspiration, and get well— 130 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. and the next moroiug when the doctor would come to see him they would tell him about the man drinking the water, and he would say: "How much?'' "Well, he swallowed two pitchers full," "Is he alive?" "Yes." So they would go into the room and the doctor would feel his pulse and ask him : " Did you drink two pitchers of water ?" "Yes." " My God ! what a constitution you have got." I tell you there is something splendid in man that will not always mind. Why, if we had done as the kings told us five hundred years ago, we would all have been slaves. If we had done as the priests told us we would all have been idiots. If we had done as the doctors told us we would all have been dead. We have been saved by disobedience. We have been saved by that splendid thing called independence, aad I want to see more of it, day after day, and I want to see children raised so they will have it. That is my doctrine. Give the children a chance. Be perfectly honor bright with them, and they will be your friends when you are old. Don't try to teach them something they can never learn. Don't insist upon their pursuing some calling they have no sort of fac- ulty for. Don't make that poor girl play ten years on a piano when she lias no ear for music, and when she has practiced until she can play "Bonaparte crossing the Alps," and you can't tell after she has played it whether Bonaparte ever got across or not. Men are oaks, women are vines, children are flowers, and if there is any Heaven in this world, it is in the family. It is where the wife loves the husband, and the husband loves the wife, and where the dimpled arms of children are about the necks of both. That is Heaven, if there is any — and I do not want any better Heaven in another vvorld than that, and if in another world I can not live with the ones I loved here, tiien I would rather not be there. I would rather resign. Well, my friends, I have some excuses to make for the race to which I belong. In the first place, this world is not very well adapted to rais- ing good men and good women. It is three times better adapted to the cultivation of fish than of people. There is one little narrow belt running zigag around the world, in v/hich men and women of genius can be raised, and that is all. It is with man as it is with vegetation. In the valley you find the oak and elm tossing their branches defiantly to the storm, and as you advance up the mountain side the hemlock, the pine, the bircli, the spruce, the fir, and finally you come to little dwarfed trees, that look like other trees seen through a telescope reversed — every limb SKULLS AND REPLIES. 131 twisted as through pain — getting a scanty substance from the miserly crevices of the rocks. You go on and on, until at last the highest crag is freckled with, a kind of moss, and vegetation ends. You miglit as well try to raise oaks and elms where the mosses grow, as to raise great men and great women where their surroundings are unfavorable. You must have the proper climate and soil. There never has been a man or woman of genius from the southern hemisphere, because the Lord didn't allow the right climate to fall upon the land. It falls upon the water. There never was much civilization except where there lias been snow, and ordinarily decent Wiuter. You can't have civilization without it. Where man needs no bedclothes but -clouds, revolution is the normal condition of such a people. It is the Winter that gives us the home; it is the Winter that gives us the fireside and the family relation and all the beautiful flowers of love that adorn that relation. Civilization, liberty, justice, charity and intellectual advancement are all flov/ers that bloom in the drifted snow. You can't Jiave them anywhere else, and that is tlie reason we of the north are civilized, and that is the reason that civilization has always been with Winter. That is the reason that philosophy has been here, and, in spite of all our superstitions, we have advanced beyond some of the other races, because we have had this assistance of nature, that drove us into the family relation, that made us prudent; that made us lay up at one time for another season of the year. So there is one excuse I have for my race. I have got another. I think we came from tlie lower animals. I am not dead sure of it, but think so. When I first read about it I didn't like it. My heart was filled with sympathy for those people leave noth- ing to be proud of except ancestors. I thought how terrible this will be upon the nobility of the old world. Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the Duke Orang-Outang or to the Princess Chim- panzee. After thinking it all over I came to the conclusion that I liked that doctrine. I became convinced in spile of myself. I read about rudimentary bones and muscles. I was told that everybody had rudi- mentary muscles extending from the ear into the cheek. I jisked: ^' What are they ?" I was told : " They are the remains of muscles ; that they became rudimentary from the lack of use." They went into bank- ruptcy. They are the muscles with which your ancestors used to flap their ears. Well, at first, I was greatly astonished, and afterwanl I was more astonished to find they had become rudimentary. How can you account for John Calvin unless we came up from the lower animals? How could you account for a man that would use the extremes of torture unless you admit that there is in man the elements of a snake, of a vul- ture, a hyena, and a jackal? How can you account for the religious 133 MISTAKES OF INQERSOLL. creeds of to-day ? How can you account for that infamous doctrine of Hell, except with an animal origin ? How can you account for your conception of a God that would sell women and babes into slavery ? Well, I thought that thing over and I began to like it after a while,, and I said : " It is not so much difference who my father was as who his- son is." And I finally said I would rather belong to a race that com- menced with the skulless vertebrates in the dim Laurentian seas, that wriggled without knowing why they wriggled, swimming without know- ing where they were going, that come along up by degrees through millions of ages, through all that crawls, and swims, and floats, and runs, and growls, and barks, and howls, until it struck this fellow in the dug- out. And then that fellow in the dug-out getting a little grander, and each one below calling every one above him a heretic, calling every one who had made a little advance an infidel or an atheist, and finally the heads getting a little higher and donning up a little grander and more splendidlj^ and finally produced Shakspeare, who harvested all the field of dramatic thought and from whose day until now there have been none but gleaners of chaff and straw. Shakspeare was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched all the shores of human thought, within which were all the tides and currents and pulses upon which lay all the lights and shadows, and over which brooded all the calms, and swept all the storms and tempests of which the soul is capable. I would rather belong to that race that commenced with that skulless vertebrate; that produced Shakspeare, a race that has before it an infinite future, with the angel of progress leaning from the far horizon, beckoning men forward and upward forever. I would rather belong to that race than to have de- scended from a perfect pair upon which the Lord has lost money every momeui from that day to this. Now, my crime has been this: I have insisted that the Bible is not the word of God. I have insisted that we should not whip oui children. I have insisted that we should treat our wives as loving equals. I have denied that God — if there is any God— ever upheld polygamy and slav- ery. I have denied that that God ever told his generals to kill innocent babes and tear and rip open women with the sword of war. I have denied that, and for that I have been assailed by the clergy of the United States. They tell me I have misquoted ; and I owe it to you, and maybe I owe it to myself, to read one or two words to you upon this subject. In order to do that I shall have to put on my glasses; and that brings me back to where I started — that man has advanced just in proportion as his thought has mingled with his labor. If man's eyes hadn't failed he would never have made any spectacles, he would never have had the telescope, and he never would have been able to read the leaves of Heaven. SKULLS AND REPLIES. 133 Mr. Ingersoll's Reply to Dr. Collyer. Now, they tell me — and there are several geutlemen who have spoken on this subject — the Rev. Mr. Collyer, a gentleman standing as high as anybody, and 1 have nothing to say against him, because I denounce a God who upheld murder, and slavery and polygamy, he says that what I said was slang. I would like to luive it compared with any sermon that ever issued from the lips of that gentleman. And before he gets through he admits that the Old Testament is a rotten tree that will soon fall into the earth and act as a fertilizer for his doctrine. Is it honest in that man to assail my motive ? Let him answer my argument! Is it honest and fair m him to say I am doing a certain thing because it is popular? Has it got to this, that, in this Christian country, where they have preached every day hundreds and thousands of sermons— has it got to this that mfidelity is so popular in the United States ? If It has, I take courage. And I not only see the dawn of a brighter day, but the day is here. Think of it ! A minister tells me in this year of grace, 1879, tliat a man is an infidel simply that he may be popular. I am glad of it. Simply that he may make money. Is it possible that we can make more money tearing up churches than in building them up ? Is it possible that we can make more money denouncing the God of slavery than we can praising the God that took liberty from man? If so, I am glad. I call publicly upon Robert Collyer— a man for whom I have great i-espect- 1 call publicly upon Robert Collyer to state to the people of this city whether he believes the Old Testament was inspired. I call upon him to state whether he believes that God ever upheld these institutions ; whether he believes that God was a polygamist ; whether he believes that God commanded Moses or Joshua or any one else to slay little children in the cradle. Do you believe that Robert Collyer would obey such an order? Do you believe that he would rush to the cradle and drive the knife of theological hatred to the tender heart of a dimpled child ? And yet when I denounce a God that will give such a hellish order, he sa^^s it is slang. I want him to answer; and when he answers he will say he does not believe the Bil)le is inspired. That is what he will say, and he holds these old worthies in the same contempt that I do. Suppose he should act like Abraham. Suppose he should send some woman out into the wilderness with his child in her arms to starve, would he think that mankind ought to hold his name up forever, for reverence? Robert Collyer says that we should read and scan every word of the Old Testament with reverence ; that we should take this book up with 134 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. reverential hands. I deny it. AVe sliould read it as we do every other book, and everything good in it, keep it; and everything that shocks the brain and shocks the heart, throw it away. Let us be honest. Mr. Ingersoll's Reply to Prof. Swing. Prof. Swing has made a few remarks on this subject, and I say the spirit he has exhibited has been as gentle and as sweet as the perfume of a flower. He was too good a man to stay in the PresbyteHan church. Pie was a rose among thistles. He was a dove among vultures — and they hunted him out, and I am glad he came out. I tell all the churches to drive all such men out, and when he comes I want him to state just what he thinks. I want him to tell the people of Cbicago whether he believes the Bible is inspired in any sense except that in which Shaks- peare was inspired. Honor bright I tell 3^ou that all the sweet and beautiful things in the Bible would not make one play of Shakspeare, all the philosophy in the world would not make one scene in Hamlet, all the beauties of the Bible would not make one scene in the Midsummer Night's Dream; all the beautiful things about woman in the Bible would not begin to create such a character as Perdita or Imogene or Miranda. Not one. I want him to tell whether he believes the Bible was inspired in any other way than Shakspeare was inspired. I want him to pick out something as beautiful and tender as Burns' poem to Mary in Heaven. I want him to tell whether he believes the story about the bears eating up children ; whether that is inspired. I want him to tell whether he considers that a poem or not. I want to know if the same God made those bears that devoured the children because they laughed at an old man out of hair. I want to know if the same God that did that is the same God who said, " Sufi'er little children to come unto me, for such is the kingdom of Heaven." I want him to answer it, and answer it fairly. That is all I ask. I want just the fair thing. Now, sometimes Mr. Swing talks as though he believed the Bible, and then he talks to me as though he didn't believe the Bible. The day he made this sermon I think he did, just a little, believe it. He is like the man that passed a ten dollar counterfeit bill. He was arrested, and his father went to see him and said, "John, how could you commit such a crime ? How could you bring my gray hairs in sorrow to the grave ?'* " Well," he says, " father, I'll tell you. I got this bill and some days I thought it was bad and some days I thought it was good, and one day when I thought it was good I passed it." I want it distinctly understood that I have the greatest respect for Prof. Swing, but I want him to tell whether the 109th psalm is inspired. SKULLS AND REPLIES. 135 I want him to tell whether the passages I shall afterward read in this book are inspired. That is what I want. Ingersoll's Reply to Brooke Herford, D.D. Then there is another gentleman liere. His name is Herford. He says it is not fair to apply the test of truth to the Bible— I don't think it is myself. He says although Moses upheld slavery, that he improved it. They were not quite as bad as they were before, and Heaven justified slavery at that time. Do you believe that God ever turned the arms of children into chains of slavery ? Do you believe that God ever said to a man: "You can't have your wife unless you will be a slave! You cannot have your children unless you will lose your liberty; and un- less you are willing to throw them from your heart forever, you can not be free ?" I want Mr. Herford to state whether he loves such a God. Be honor bright about it. Don't begin to talk about civilization, or what the church has done or will do. Just walk right up to the rack aud say whether you love and worship a God that estab- lished slavery. Honest! And love and worship a God tiiat would allow a little babe to be torn from the breast of its mother and sold into slavery. Now tell it fair, Mr. Herford, I want you to tell the ladies in your congregation that you believe in a God that allowed women to be given to the soldiers. Tell them that, and then if you say it was not the God of Moses, then don't praise Moses any more. Don't do it. Answer these questions. The Ingersoll Gattling G-un Turned on Dr. Ryder. Then here is another gentleman, Mr. Ryder, the Rev. Mr. Ryder, and he says that Calvinism is rejected by a majority of Christendom. He is mistaken. There is what they call the Evangelical Alliance. They met in this country in 1875 or 1876, and there were present representatives of all the evangelical churches in the world, and they adopted a creed, and that creed is that man is totally depraved. That creed is that there is an eternal, universal Hell, and that every man that does not believe in a cer- tain way is bound to be damned forever, and that there is only one way to be saved, and that is by faith, and by faith alone; aud they would not allow anybody to be represented there that did not believe that, and they would not allow a Unitarian there, and would not have allowed Dr. Ryder there, because he takes away from the Cliristiau world the conso- lation naturally arising from the belief in Hell. Dr. Ryder is mistaken. All the orthodox religion of tiie day is Cal- vinism. It believes in the fall of man. li: believes in the atonement. It believes in the eternity of Hell, and it believes in salvation by faith; that is to say, by credulity. 136 MISTAKES OF 1NQER80LL. That is what they believe, and he is mistaken ; and I want to tell Dr. Ryder to-day, if there is a God, and He wrote the Old Testament, there is a Hell. The God that wrote the Old Testament will have a Hell. And I want to tell Dr. Ryder another thing, that the Bible teaches an eternity of punishment. want to tell him that the Bible upholds the doctrine ot Hell. I want to tell him that if there is no Hell, somebody ought to have said so, and Jesus Christ himself should not have said: "■ I will at the last day say: ' Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.' " If there was not such a place, Christ would not have said: "Depart from me, ye cursed, and these shall go hence into everlasting fire." And if you, Dr. Ryder, are depending for salvation on the God that wrote the Old Testament, you will inevitably be eternally damned. There is no hope for you. It is just as bad to deny Hell as it is to deny Heaven. It is just as much blasphemy to deny the devil as to deny God, according to the orthodox creed. He admits that the Jews were polygamists, but, he says, how was it they finally quit it? I can tell you — the soil was so poor they couldn't afford it. Prof. Swing says the Bible is a poem. Dr. Ryder says it is a picture. The Garden of Eden is pictorial ; a pictorial snake and a pictorial woman, I suppose, and a pictorial man, and maybe it was a pictorial sin. And only a pictorial atonement. Ingersoll's Reply to Rabbi Bien. Then there is another gentleman, and he a rabbi, a Rabbi Bien, or Bean, or whatever his name is, and he comes to the defense of the Great Law-giver. There was another rabbi who attacked me in Cincinnati, and I couldn't help but think of the old saying, that a man got off when he said the tallest man he ever knew, his name was Short. And the fattest man he ever saw, his name was Lean. And it is only necessary for me to add that this rabbi in Cincinnati was Wise. The rabbi here, I will not answer him, and I will tell you why. Be- cause he has taken liimself outside of all the limits of a gentleman; because he has taken it upon himself to traduce American women in language the beastliest I ever read; and any man who says that the American women are not j ust as good women as any God can make, and pick his mud lo-day, is an unappreciative barbarian. I will let him alone because he denounced all the men in this country, all the members of Congress, all the members of the Senate, and all the judges upon the Bench; in his lecture he denounced them as thieves and robbers. That won't do. I want to remind him that in this country the Jews were first admitted to tne privileges of citizens; that in this country they were first given all their rights, and I am as much in favor SKULLS AND REPLIES. 137 of their having their rights as 1 am in favor ol having my own. But when a rabbi so far forgets himself as to traduce the women and men of this country, I pronounce him a vulgar falsifier, and let him alone. Strange, that nearly every man that has answered me, has answered me mostly on the same side. Strange, that nearly every man that thought himself called upon to defend the Bible was one who did not believe in it himself. Isn't it strange? They are like some suspected people, always anxious to show their marriage cerliticate. They want at least to convince the world that they are not as bad as I am. Now, I want to read you just one or two things, and then I am going to let you go. I want to see if I have said such awful things, and whether I have got any scripture to stand by me. I will only read two or three verses. Does the Bible teach man to enslave his brother? If it does, it is not the word of God, unless God is a slaveholder. Moreover, all the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall j'e buy of their familiesi which are with you, which they beset in your land, and they shall be your possession. Ye shall take them as an inheritance lor your children after you to inherit them . They shall be your bondsmen forever. (Old Testament) Upon the limbs of unborn babes this fiendish God put the chains of slavery. I hate him. Both thy bondmen and bondwomen shall be of the heathen round about thee, and them shall ye buy, bondmen and bondwomen. Now let US read what the New Testament has. I could read a great deal more, but that is enough. Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters, according to the flesh in fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ. This is putting the dirty thief that steals your labor on an equality with God. Sei-vants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle but also to the froward. For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, siifleriug -wrongfully. The idea of a man on account of conscience toward God stealing another man, or allowing him nothing but lashes on his back as legal- tender for labor performed. Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and His doctrine be not blasphemed. How can you blaspheme the name of God by asserting your independ- ence? How can you blaspheme the name of a G(kI by striking fetters from the limbs of men? I wish some of your answers would tell you that. '' And they that have believing masters let them not despise them." That is to say, a good Christian could own another believer in Jesus Christ; could own a woman and her children, atid could sell the child away from its mother. That is a sweet belief. O, hypocrisy! 133 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLR Let them not despise them, because they arc brethren, but rather do them service because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. Oh, what slush! Here is what they tell the poor slave, so that he will serve the man that stole his wife and children from him : For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. Having food and raiment let us be therewith content. Don't you think that it would do just as well to preach that to the thieving man as to the suflFering slave? I think so. Then this same Bible teaches witchcraft, that spirits go into the bodies of the man, and pigs ; and that God himself made a trade with the devil, and the devil traded him off — a man for a certain number of swine, and the devil lost money because the hogs ran right down into the sea. He got a corner on that deal. Now let us see how they believed in the rights of children : If a man have a stubborn and a rebellious son which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not barken unto them, then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place. And they shall say unto the elders of his city. This, our son, is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice, he is a glutton and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die, so shalt thou put evil away. That is a very good way to raise children. Here is the story of Jeph- thah. He went off and he asked the Lord to let him whip some people, and he told the Lord if He would let him whip them, he would sacrifice to the Lord the first thing that met him on his return ; and the first thing that met him was his own beautiful daughter, and he sacrified her. Is there a sadder story in all the history of the world than that? What do you think of a man that would sacrifice his own daughter ? What do you think of a God that would receive that sacrifice ? Now, then, they come to women in this blessed gospel, and let us see what the gospel says about women. Then you ought all to go to church, girls, next Sunday and hear it. " Let the woman learn in silence with all subjec- tion ; suffer not woman to think nor usurp authority over man, for Adam was formed first, not Eve." Don't you see ? "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgessiou. Notwithstanding all this she shall be saved in child- bearing if she continues in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety." (That is Mr. Timothy.) " But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God." I suppose that every old maid is acephalous. " For a man indeed ought not to cover head, forasmucli as he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. For the man is not of the woman, but woman of the man. Neither was the man SKULLS AND REPLIES. 139 created for the woman, but tbe woman for the man. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husband as unto the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the Church." Do you hear that ! You didn't know how much we were above you. When YOU go back to the Old Testament, to the great law-giver, you find that the woman lias to ask forgiveness for having borne a child. If it was a boy, thirty-three days she was unclean ; if it was a girl sixty-six. Nice lawsV Good laws! If there is a pure thing in this world, if there is a picture of perfect purity, it is a mother with her child in her arms. Yes, I think more of a good woman and achild than I do of all the gods I have ever heard these people tell about. Just think of this : When thou goest forth to war afiainst thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, and eeeet among the captive a beautiful woman and hast a desire unto her that ihou wonldst have her to thy wife, then thou shall bring her home to thine house, and she shall shave her bead, and pare her nails. Wherefore, ye must needs be subject not only for love, but for conscience sake, and for this cause pay ye tribute, for they are God's ministers. I despise this wretched doctrine. Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn in favor of the right, I am a rebel. I suppose Alexander, czar of Russia, was put there by the order of God, was he ? I am sorry he was not removed by the nihilist that shot at him the other day. I tell you in a country like that, where there are hundreds of girls not 16 years of age prisoners in Siberia, simply for giving their ideas about liberty, and we telegraphed to that country congratulating that wretch that he was not killed, my heart goes into the prison, my heart goes with the poor girl working as a miner in the mines, crawling on her hands and knees getting the precious ore out of the mines, and my sympathies go with her, and°ray svmphathies cluster around the point of the dagger. Does the Bible describe a God of mercy ? Let me read you a verse or two. I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh. Thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies. And the tongue of thy dogs in the same. And the Lord thy God will put cut those nations before ihce by little and little; thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the tield increase upon thee. But the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mishtv destruction, until they be destroyed. And He ^hall deliver their kings unto thine hand, and thou shalt destroy thc.r name from under Heaven ; then shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them . I can see what he iiad her nails pared for. Does the Bible teach polygamy? The Rev. Dr. Newman, consul general to all the world— had a discus- sion with Elder Heber or Kimball, or some such wretch in Utah- 140 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. ■whether the Bible sustains polygamy, aud the Mormons have printed that discussion as a campaign document. Read the order of Moses in the 31st chapter of Numbers. A great many chapters I dare not read to you. They are too filthy.^ I leave all that to the clergy. Read the 31st chapter of Exodus, the 31st chapter of Deuteronomy, the life of Abra- ham, and the life of David, and the life of Solomon, and then tell me that the Bible does not uphold polygamy and concubinage ! Let them answer. Then I said that the Bible upheld tyranny. Let me read you a little: "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers the powers that be are ordained of God." George III. was king by the grace of God, and when our fathers rose in rebellion, according to this doctrine, they rose against the power of God ; aud if they did they were successful. And so it goes on telling of all the cities that were destroyed, and of the great-hearted men, that they dashed their brains out, and all the little babes, and all the sweet women that they killed and plundered— all in the name of a most merciful God. Well, think of it ! The Old Testament is filled with anathemas, and with curses, and with words of revenge, and jealousy, and hatred, and meanness, and brutality. Have 1 read enough to show that what I said is so ? I think I have. I wish I had time to read to you further of what the dear old fathers of the church said about woman — wait a minute, and I will read you a little. We have got them running. St. Augustine in his 22d book says : " A woman ought to serve her husband as unto God, aflBrming that woman ought to be braced and bridled betimes, if she aspire to any dominion, alleging that dangerous and perilous it is to suffer her to precede, although it be in temporal and corporeal things. How can. woman be in the image of God, seeing she is subject to man, and hath no authority to teach, neither to be a witness, neither to judge, much less to rule or bear the rod of empire." Oh, he is a good one. These are the very words of Augustine. Let me read some more. "Woman shall be subject unto man as unto Christ." That is St. Augustine, and this sentence of Augustine ought to be noted of all women, for in it he plainly affirms that women are all the more subject to man. And now, St. Ambrose, he is a good boy. " Adam was deceived by Eve— called Heva— and not Heva by Adam, aud there- fore just it is that w^oman receive and acknowledge him for governor whom she called sin, lest that again she slip and fall with w^omanly facility." Don't you see that woman has sinned once, and man never ? If you give woman an opportunity, she will sin again, whereas if you give it to man, who never, never, never betrayed his trust in the world, nothing bad can happen. " Let women be subject to their own husbands as unto the Lord, for man is the head of w^oman, and Christ is the head of the SKULLS AND liEPLIES. 141 congregation." They are all real good men, all of them. "It is not permitted to woman to speak; let lier be in silence; as the law said: unto thy husband shalt thou ever be, and he shall bear dominion over thee." So St. Chrysostom. He is another good man. "Woman," he says, "was put under the powder of man, and man was pronounced lord over her; that she should obey man, that the head should not follow the feet. False priests do commonly deceive women, because they are easily per- suaded to any opinion, especially if it be again given, and because they lack prudence and right reason to judge the things that be spoken; which should not bo the nature of those that are appointed to govern others. For they should be constant, stable, prudent, and doing every- thing with discretion and reason: which virtues woman can not have in equality with man." I tell you women are more prudent than men. I tell you, as a rule, women are more truthful then men. I tell you that women are more faithful than men— ten times as faithful as man. I never saw a man pursue his wife into the very ditch and dust of degradation and take her in his arms. I never saw a man stand at the shore where she had been morally wrecked, waiting for the waves to bring back even her corpse to his arms; but I have seen woman do it. I have seen woman with her white arms lift man from the mire of degradation, and hold him to her bosom as though he were an angel. And these men thought woman not fit to be held as pure in the sight of God as man. I never saw a man that pretended that he didn't love a woman; that pretended that he loved God better than he did a woman, that he didn't look hateful to me, hateful and unclean. I could read you twenty others, but I haven't time to do it. Tliey are all to the same eflect exactly. They hate woman, and say man is as mucii above her as God is above man. I am a believer in absolute equality. I am a be- liever in absolute liberty between man and wife. I believe iti liberty, and 1 say, " Oh, libertv, float not forever in the far horizon-remain not forever in the dream oVthe enthusiast, the philanthropist and poet; bu come and make thy home among the children of men." I know not what discoveries, what inventions, what thoughts may leap from the brain of the world. I know not what garments of glory may be woven by the years to come. I can not dream of the vict<.rics to be won upon the field ot thought ; but I do know that, coming down the infinite sea of the future, there will never toucli this " bank and shoa of time " a richer gift, a rarer blessing than liberty for man, woman and "^ I never addressed a more magnificent audience in my life, and I thank you, I thank you a thousand times over. 142 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. IngersoU's Catechism and Bible Class. Nothing is more gratifying than to see ideas that were received with scorn, flourishing iu tlie sunshine of approval. Only a few weeks ago I stated that the Bible was not inspired'; that Moses was mistaken, that the "flood " was a foolish myth; that the Tower of Babel existed only incredulity; that God did not create the universe from nothing, that He did not start the first woman with a rib; that He never upheld slavery ; that He was not a polj^gamist ; that He did not kill people for making hair-oil : that He did not order His Generals to kill the dimpled habes ; that He did not allow the roses of love and the violets of modesty to be trodden under the brutal feet of lust; that the Hebrew language was written without vowels ; that the Bible was composed of many books written by unknown men ; that all translations difiered from each other, and that this book had filled the world with agony and crime. At that time I had not the remotest idea that the most learned clergy- men in Chicago would substantially agree with me — in public. I have read the replies of the Rev. Robert Collyer, Dr. Thomas, Rabbi Kohler, Rev. Brooke Herford, Prof Swing, and Dr. Ryder, and will now ask ' them a few questions, answering them in their own words : First, Rev. Robert Collyer : Question. What is your opinion of the Bible ? Answer. " It is a splendid book. It makes the noblest type of Catholics and the meanest bigots. Through this book men give their hearts for good to God, or for evil to the Devil. The best argument for the intrinsic greatness of the book is that it can touch such wide extremes, and seem to maintain us in the most unparalleled cruelty, as well as the most tender mercy; that it can inspire purity like that of the great saints and aflford arguments in favor of polygamy. The Bible is the text book of ironclad Calvinism and sunny Universalism. It makes the Quaker quiet and the Millerite crazy. It inspired the Union soldier to live and grandly die for the right, and Stonewall Jackson to live nobly and die grandly for the wrong." Q. But, Mr. Collyer, do you really think that a book with as many passages in favor of wrong as right, is inspired? A. " I look upon the Old Testament as a rotting tree. When it falls it will fertilize a bank of violets." Q. Do you believe that God upheld slavery and polygamy? Do you believe that He ordered the killing of babes and the violation of maidens? A. "There is three-fold inspiration in the Bible, the first peerless and perfect, the Word of God to man ; the second simply and purely human, and then below this again, there is an inspiration born of an evil heart, ruthless and savage there and then as anything well can be. A three-fold inspiration, of Heaven first, then of the Earth, and SKULLS AND REPLIES. 143 then of Hell, all iu the same book, all sometimes iu the same chapter, and then, besides, a i^reat many things that need no inspiration." Q. Then, after all, you do not pretend that the Scriptures are really inspired ? A. " The Scriptures make no such claim for themselves as the Church makes for them. They leave me free to say this is false, or this is true. The truth even within the Bible dies and lives, makes on this side and loses on that." Q. What do you say to the last verse in the Bible, where a curse is threatened to any man who takes from or adds to the book ? A. "I have but one answer to this question, and it is: Let who will have writ- ten this, I can not for an instant believe that it was written by a divine inspiration. Such dogmas and threats as these are not of God, but of man, and not of any man of a free spirit and heart eager for the truth, but a narrow man who would cripple and confine the human soul in its quest after the whole truth of God, and back those who have done the shameful things in the name of the Most High." Q. Do you not regard such talk as "slang?" (Supposed) Answer. If an infidel had said that the writer of Revela- tions was narrow and bigoted, I might have denounced his discourse as " slang," but I think that Unitarian ministers can do so with the greatest propriety. Q. Do you believe in the stories of the Bible, about Jael, and the sun standing still, and the walls falling at the blowing of horns ? xV. "They may be legends, myths, poems, or what they will, but they are not the Word of God. So I say again, it was not the God and Father of us all who inspired the woman to drive that nail crashing through the king's temple after she had given him that bowl of milk and bid him sleep in safety, but a very mean Devil of hatred and revenge that I should hardly expect to find in a squaw on the plains. It was not the ram's horns and the shouting before which the walls fell flat. If they went down at all, it was through good solid pounding. And not for an in- stant did the steady sun stand still or let his planet stand still while bar- barian fought barbarian. He kept just the time then he keeps now. They might believe it who made the record. I do not. And since the whole Christian world might believe it, still we do not who gather in this church. A free and reasonable mind stands right in our way. Newton might believe it as a Christian and disbelieve it as a philoso- pher. We stand then with the philosopher against the Christian, for we must believe what is true to us in the last test, and these things arc not true." Second, Rev. Dr. Thomas. Question. What is your opinion of the Old Testament? Answer. "My opinion is that it is not one book, but many — thirty-nine books bound up in one. The date and authorship 144 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. of most of these books are wholly unknown. The Hebrews wrote with- out vowels and without dividing the letters into syllables, words or sen- tences. The books were gathered up by Ezra. At that time only two of the Jewish tribes remained. All progress had ceased. In gathering up the sacred book, copyists exercised great liberty in making changes and additions." Q. Yes, we know all that, but is the Old Testament inspired ? A. '* There may be the inspiration of art, of poetry, or oratory ; of patriot- ism — and there are such inspirations. There are moments when great truths and principles come to men. They seek the man and not the man them." Q. Yes, we all admit that, but is the Bible inspired ? A. " But still I know of no way to convince any one of spirit and inspiration and God only as His reason may take hold of these things." Q. Do you think the Old Testament true ? A. " The story of Eden may be an allegory; the history of the children of Israel may have mis- takes." Q. Must inspiration claim infallibility ? A. " It is a mistake to say that if you believe one part of the Bible you must believe all. Some of the thirty-nine books may be inspired, others not; or there may be degrees of inspiration." Q. Do you believe that God commanded the soldiers to kill the chil- dren and the married women and save for themselves the maidens, as recorded in lumbers 31 : 3? Do you believe that God upheld slavery? Do you believe that God upheld polygamy? A. "The Bible may be wrong in some statements. God and right can not be wrong. We must not exalt the Bible above God. It may be that we have claimed too much for the Bible, and thereby given not a little occasion for such men as Mr. Ingersoll to appear at th« other extreme, denying too much." Q. What then shall be done? A. " We must take a middle ground. It is not necessary to believe that the bears devoured the forty-two chil- dren, nor that Jonah was swallowed by the whale." Third. Rev. Dr. Kohler. Question. What is your opinion about the Old Testament? Answer. "I will not make futile attempts of arti- ficially interpreting the letter of the Bible so as to make it reflect the philosophical, moral and scientific views of our time. The Bible is a sacred record of humanity's childhood." Q. Are you an orthodox Christian ? A. "No. Orthodox}^ with its face turned backward to a ruined temple or a dead Messiah, is fast becoming like Lot's wife, a pillar of salt." Q. Do you really believe the Old Testament was inspired ? A. "I greatly acknowledge our indebtedness to men like Voltaire and Thomas Paine, whose bold denial and cutting wit were so instrumental in bring- SKtiLLS AND REPLtES. i45 ing about this glorious era of freedom, so congenial and blissful, par ticularly to the long-abused Jewish race." Q. Do you believe in the inspiration of the Bible ? A. " Of course there is a destructive axe needed to strike down the old building in order to make room for the grander new. The divine origin claimed by the Hebrews for their national literature was claimed by all nations for their old records and laws as preserved by the priesthood. As ]\Ioses, the Hebrew law-giver, is represented as having received the law from God on the holy mountain, so is Zoroaster, the Persian, Manu,the Hindoo, Minos, the Cretan, Lycurgus, the Spartan, and Numa, the Roman." Q. Doj^ou believe all the stories in the Bible? A. "All that can and must be said against them is that they have been too long retained around the arms and limbs of grown-up manhood to check the spiritual progress of religion; that by Jewish ritualism and Christian dogmatism they became fetters unto the soul, turning the light of Heaven into a misty haze to blind the eye, and even into a Hell fire of fanaticism to consume souls." Q. Is the Bible inspired? A. "True, the Bible is not free from errors, nor is any work of man and time. It abounds in childish views and offensive matters. T trust that it will, in a time not far off, be pre- sented for common use in families, schools, synagogues and churches, in a refined shape, cleansed from all dro.s3 and chaff, and stumbling- blocks on which the scoffer delights to dwell." Fourth, Rev. Mr. Herford. Question. Is the Bible true ? Answer. " Tngersoll is very fond of saying ' The question is not, is the Bible inspired, but is it true ?' That sounds very plausible, but you know as applied to any ancient book it is simply nonsense." Q. Do you think the stories in the Bible exaggerated ? A. " I dare say the numbers are immensely exaggerated." Q. Do you think that God upheld polygamy ? A. " The truth ot which simply is, that four thousand years ago polygamy existed among the Jews, as everywhere else on earth then, and even their prophets did not come to the idea of its being wrong. But what is there to be indig- nant about in that?" Q. And so 5^ou really wonder why any man should be indignant at the idea that God upheld and sanctioned that beastliness called polyg- amy ? A. " What is there to be indignant about in that?" Fifth, Prof. Swing. Question. What is your idea of the Bible? Answer. " I think it a poem." Sixth, Rev. Dr. Ryder. Question. And what is your idea of the sacred Scriptures? Answer. "Like other nations, the Hebrews had their patriotic, descriptive, didactic and lyrical jjocms in the same varieties as other nations; but with them, unlike other nations, what- 10 14() MISTAKES OF TNOERSOLL. ever may be the form of their poetry, it always possesses the character- istic of religion." Q. I suppose you fully appreciate the religious characteristics of the Song of Solomon ? No answer. Q. Does the Bible uphold polygamy ? A. " The law of Moses did not forbid it, but contained many provisions against its worst abuses, and such as were intended to restrict it within narrow limits." Q. So you think God corrected some of the worst abuses of polyg- amy, but preserved the institution itself? I might question many others, but have concluded not to consider those as members of my Bible class who deal in calumnies and epithets. From the so-called " replies " of such ministers it appears that, while Christianity changes the heart, it does not improve the manners, and that one can get into Heaven in the next world without having been a gentleman in this. It is difficult for me to express the deep and thrilling satisfaction I have experienced in reading the admissions of the clergy of Chicago. Surely the battle of intellectual liberty is almost won when ministers admit that the Bible is filled with ignorant and cruel mistakes ; that each man has the right to think for himself, and that \X is not necessary to believe the Scriptures in order to be saved. From the bottom of my heart I congratulate my pupils on th^ advance they have made, and hope soon to meet them on the serene heights of perfect freedom. I^GERSOLL AT HIS BROTHER'S GYRATE The funeral of Hon. Ebon C. Ingersoll, brother of Col. Robert G. Inger- soll, of Illinois, took place at his residence in Washington, D. C, June 2, 1879. The ceremonies were extremely simple, consisting merely of viewing the remains by relatives and friends, and a funeral oration by Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, brother of the deceased. A large number of distinguished gentlemen were present, including Secretary Sherman, Assistant Secretary Hawle>', Senators Blaine, Voorhees, Paddock, Alli- son, Logan, Hon. Thomas Henderson, Gov. Pound, Hon. Wm. M. Mor- rison, Gen. Jeffreys, Gen. Williams, Col. James Fishback, and others. The pall-bearers were Senators Blaine, Voorhees, David Davis, Paddock and Allison, Col. Ward, H. Lamon, Hon. Jeremiah Wilson of Indiana, and Hon. Thomas A. Boyd of Illinois. SKULLS AND REPLY. 147 Soon after Mr. IngersoU began to read his eloquent characterization of the dead, his eyes filled with tears. He tried to hide them behind his eye-glasses, but he could not do it, and finally he bowed his head upon the dead man's coffin in UDControhible grief. It was after some delay and the greatest efibrts at self-mastery, that Col. Ingersoll was able to finish reading his address, which was as follows: Colonel Ingersoll's Funeral Oration. My Friends: I am going to do that which the dead often promised he would do for me. The loved and loving brother, husband, father, friend, died where manhood's morning almost touches noon, and while the shadows still were falling toward the West. He had not passed on life's highway the stone that marks the highest point, hut lieing weary for a moment he laid down l)y the wayside, and, using his burden for a pillow, fell into that dreamless sleep that kisses down his eyelids still. While yet in love with life and raptured with the world, he passed to silence and pathetic dust. Yet, after all, it may be best, just in the hap- piest, sunniest hour of all the voyage, while eager winds are kissing every sail, to dash against the unseen rock, and in an instant hear the billows roar a sunken ship. For, whether in mid-sea or among the breakers of the farther shore, a wreck must mark at last the end of each and all. And every life, no matter if its every hour is rich with love and every moment jeweled with a joy, will, at its close, become a tragedy, as sad, and deep, and dark as can be woven of the warp and woot of mystery and death. This brave and tender man in every storm of life was oak and rock, but in the sunshine he was vine and fiower. He was the friend of all heroic souls. He climbed the heights and left all superstitions far below^ while on his forehead fell the golden dawning of a grander day. He loved the beautiful and w^as with color, form and music touched to tears. He sided with the weak, and with a willing hand gave alms ; with loyal heart and with the purest hand he faith- fully discharged all public trusts. He was a worshipper of liberty and a friend of the oppressed. A thousand times I have heard him quote the words : "For justice all place a temple and all season summer." He believed that happiness \vas the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worsiiipper, humanity the only religion, and love tlie priest. He added to the sum of human joy, and were every one for whom he did some loving service to bring a blosscmi to his grave he would sleep to-night beneath a Avilderness of flowers. Life is a niirrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is tlic echo of our wailing cry. From the v(ncele.ss lips of the unrei)lying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing. He who sleeps here, when dyincr, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered with his lat^^st breath, " I am better now." Let us l)elieve, in spite of doubts and dogmas and tears and fears that these dear words are true of all the countless dead. And now. to you who have been chosen from among the many men he loved to do the last sad office for the dead, we give his sacred dust. Speech can not contain our love. There was— there is— no gentler, stronger, manlier man. POPULAR BOOKS PDBLISHED BY RHODES & McCLURE, CIIICAG-O. TWENTIETH THOUSAND. MISTAKES of INGERSOLL (No. 1,) AS SHOWN BY Prof. Swing; W. H. Ryder, D.D.; Brooke Herford, D.D.; J. Monro Gibson, D.D.; Rabbi Wise, and Others, Including also Mr. IngersoWs Lecture, entitled "THE MISTAKES OF MOSES." 8vo., 128 Pages. Edited by. J. B. McCLURE. Price in Paper Cover, 35 Cents. Sent by Mail, post paid, on receipt of price, by the publishers. "The collection is timely and creditable, and its fairness in presenting both the text and comments is commendable." — Chicago Evening Journal. "An interesting book ; it is not often th^t a public character like this famous lecturer is subjected to criiicism, which is at once so fair and so acute, so civil in manner, and yet so iust, as in these instances." — Advance. Ingersoll's Answers TO Prof. Swing; W. H. Ryder, D.D. ; Dr. Thomas; Dr. Collyer; Brooke Herford, D.D.; Dr. Koehler; aud INGERSOLL'S LECTURE ON "SKULLS" INCLUDING ALSO MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL (No. S.) AS SHOWN BY Bishop Cheney; Chaplain McCabe; Rev. W. F. Crafts; Robert Collyer, D.D. ; Arthur Swazey, D.D. ; Fred. Perry Powers, aud others. 8vo , 150 Pages. Edited by J. B. McClure, Price in Paper Cover. 35 Cents. Sent by mail, post paid, on receipt of pi ice, by 'be. publishers. " MISTAKES OF IXGEKSOLL," ' INGEESOLL'S ANSWERS." 8 vo., 270 pages. Including full contents of No. i and No. 2 (two volumes in one), bound in cloth ; fine, Prjce, $1.00. Sent by mail, post paid, on receipt of price, by the j)ublishers. RHODES & McCLURE. Publishers, 1879. Methodist Church Block, Chicago. POPULAR BOOKS PUBLISHED BY RHODES & M^CLURE TENTH THOUSAND. "Edison and his Inventions; S vo,, 178 pages. Illustrated, Edited by J. B. McCLUKE. Price in Cloth, fine, $1.00, Paper CoTers, 50 els. This book contains the many interesting incidents, and all ihe fe5<4ca- tial facts, connected with the life of the great inventor, together »vith a lull explanation of his principal inventions, including the phonograph, tele- phone, and electric light, which are explained by the aid of diagrams. OPINIONS OF THE PHESS. "Edison and His Inventions'' is one of tne latest and most entortainin? books that has been laid in our table. A glance at the title-page assures us that the book cannot fail to be interesting when we -ee that it has been comi'iled by Mr. J. B. McClure, of the well known firm of Rliodes ct McClure. Mr. McClure has spent months in correspondence with parties who were acquainted with Edison in hi.s box hood days, and al>o wiih the parents of the great inventor, who have fur- nished numerous amusing anecdotes which have not as yet hei-n ma :e public. The tasimeter. phonograph, telephone, and all his inventions, are illu^traied, and the details explained in such a manner that they can be understood by every one. — The Interior. " If Mr Edison's head is not turned by his numerous successes in wonderful discovery and invention, he must have a level head. Just as the announcement arrives that the electric light is to be tested in the Capitol at ^\ashlllgton a book is laid on our table, entitled "Edison and his Inventions.' which, as the tide implies, relates to the man as well as his work. It gives many interesting anec- dotes of this odd genius, with full explanations of the telephone, phonogripn, tasimiter and last, and per .aps most important of all, the results ot his electric light iriumph. Numerous cuts make it ■ ompar lively easy for even the unscien- titic to understand the descriptive parts ."—Editorial in the Advance. "This volume of Mr. McOlure's is one that will interest every reader It is a irraphic sketch of the incidents, anecdotes, and inte'cstiiig particulars of his life. He L'ives a clear and concise explanation of tiie tel.'plione, phonngraph. and many others of the leading discoveries. The volume has many ilhi.strations. Not onlv those older will read it with interest, but it is a book ml ot yuluable in.struction to the young, for its facts and for its suggesti\;e thoughts. -The Imter- Ocean. " There can be no doubt that Edison is a remarkable man. He has already accomplished more in the way of invemi-m than any man UM..n record, at so early an age-thirty-two. His career has been full of adventure of a certain kind, and the story of it is exeecdingly interesting. Mr. MrClure h.is guthen"^. his material with great industry, and so used it as to make a very r.adable book. An excellent idea is given bolii of the man and ot his work. —The standard. Mr McClun- h'ls done a good thing in bringing together so much anthentic niation that relates to the man and his work. It is the story of the pa^^^^^^ jtion of i;en personality to gi\ "Presents in _.- ^ ^, . . , , * inventor of the present iima."— Northwestern Christian Advocate. Sent by mail, post paid, on receipt of prie<- b;i the Publiuhers. Liberal discount to the Trade. i^vohTtioVrof I'emihm taie^it."its"dVscourag"ements and triuinpl.s, with en. .ugh of .ersonality to give additional zest to the narrative"— c7i«-a.cro Lvcning Journal. Presents in an interesting manner the account of the life of the greatest AND HIS INVENTIONS. 171 Edison's Electric Light. Jj^ntertaining ^necdotes. INCLUDING Anecdotes of Noted Persons, Amusing Stories, Animal Stories, Love Stories, Falling Leaves. FROM EVERY AVAILABLE SOURCE. " THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY." Edited by J. B. McCLURE. H vo. 25B pages— Handsomely Illustrated. Price, in cloth, fine, $1.00 Paper cover, 50 cents. Sent by mail post-paid on receipt of price RHODES <& McCLURE, ruhlishers, METHODIST CHURCH BLOCK. CHICAGO Daniel Webster and the Farmer. (From "Entertaining Anecdotes.'") Webster was out one day on the Marshes near Marsh field, busily shooting birds. It was a hot afternoon in August. The farmers were getting their salt hay on the marshes: He came, in the course of his rambles, to the Green Harbor River, which he wished to cross. He beckoned to one of the men on the opposite bank to take him over in his boat, which lay moored in sight. 1 he man at once lelt his work came over, and paddled Mr. Webster across the stream. He de- clined the payment offered him, but lingered a moment, with Yankee curios- ity, to question the stranger. He surmised who Mr. Webster was, and with some hesitation remarked : '♦This is Daniel Webster, I believe," "That is my name," replied the sportsman. "Well, now," said the farmer, "I am told you can make from three to five dollars a day, pleading cases up in Boston." Mr. Webster replied that he was sometimes so fortunate as to receive tliat amount for his services. "Well, now," returned the rustic, "it seems to me, I declare, if I could get as much in the city pleadin' law-cases, I would not be a-wadin' oyer these marshes this hot weather, shootin' little birds." l:^IFTI23TII TUOtrSAlT^- MOOBT'S lIlCBOflS AMD Compiled by REV. J. B. McCLURE, Chicago. Comprising all of Mr. Moody's Anecdotes and Illustrations used by him in hi? revival work in Europe and America, including his recent work in J^>oston, Also, Engravings of Messrs. Moody, Sankey, Whittle and Bliss. ' Moody's Church, Chicago Tabernacle, Farwell Hall, etc. OPINIONS OF THE PRESS AND EMINENT DIVINES : " The wonderful sale of ' Moody's Anecdotes,' compiled by the Rev. J. B. McClu^y of Chicago, is the best evidence of the ^reat value of this popular book. Thirty-fuar thousand copies have already been issued, reaching the seventh edition in thr^^e months. This is, perhaps, unparalleled in the historv of Western literature ; at leu.^t we Icnow of no library book that has met with so large a sale in so short a time. It bids fair to sell right along, until everybody is supplied with a co-pj,"— St. Louis EvangeluL " 'Moody's Anecdotes' is a handsome and handy volume, which many will prize as highlv characteristic of the great Evangelist. Throughout its two hundred pages the truth is keenly applied by the aids of wit and a peculiarly vivid and pictorial pathos." —New York Evangelist. " The book is handsomely printed and well compiled as to matter. It contains ihe pith of Moody's theology^ methods and eloquence, and consists of a selection of the great preacher's best stories, drawn from his personal experience. It is a good insight into the workings and teachings of the great Evangelist and Christian Preachei ^- New Orleans Daily Democrat. "The incidents are related in character— it is Mr. Moody that speaks. They are short, pointed, peculiarly apt, as are all the illustrations of the Evangelist Thev form the arrows of the great marksman, and have done much of the execution of h'is ser- mons."— Zion's Herald (Boston). "A book of anecdotes which have thrilled hundreds of thousands. During the last three months thirty-four thousand copies have been issued. Mr. McClure has done a good work in preparing this volume, which we commend to ministers, Sabbath- school workers and p&Tents."— Presbyterian Banner (Pittsburg). " It comprises the most striking stories, told in Mr. Moody's well-known concise and graphic style, and arranged in alphabetical order, according to the theme illustriUed or set forth in the anecdote. The book has been compiled by Rev. J. B. McClure, whose 6cholar.-hip and journalistic experience perfectly fit him to do the work discrim- inatingly and well."— iV. W. Christian Advocate (Methodist). "The book is handsomely printed, the matter is well classified, and will form an uncommonly interesting book. A capital book for the Sunday-school."— ^cZra?ice (Con- gregational). iii'x-^^"^^^^ *^® P^*^ °^ Moody's theology, methods and eloquence, all in one, and will be found agreeable for home reading and useful to the Sunday-school teacher and minister."— interior (Presbyterian) "Excellent reading, and by their brevity and point will be found especially good for that occasional and, perhaps, hasty reading, which is all that many persons can hope to find opportunity for. "Standard (Baptist), "It is an attractive volume, including all the really Interesting matter of Mr. Moody s discourses. A very valuable publication ; is selling rapidly."- CVitca.(70 Evening Journal Price in Cloth, Fine, $1.00. Paper Cover, 50 cts. RHODES & McCLURE, Publishers, Chicago. 1 DATE DUE „i^« ■■"'■■"' W^ ' 1 GAYLORD PRINTED INUS A mmmmmi^m^m' H ''.V.L' 1 1012 01017 9093