In Re Colonel Ingersoll

( Originally Published 1922 )

IN many States of the Union there are laws on the statute books that penalize liberty of thought and speech. These laws are mostly derived from Colonial times and the barbarous intolerance of the Old World. They are an organic link between us and the British tyranny from which our patriot fathers appealed to the sword. No statesman or legislator has the courage to demand that they be repealed or annulled. It is supposed that the moral sense of the people is somehow concerned in their being kept alive—or at least in a state of suspended animation and potential menace.

I dare not slight his peculiar religious views, but I have touched the polemic side lightly and mainly to the end of bringing into relief the Man of Genius and the Humanitarian. Surely it is hardly warrantable to speak or think of the Colonel as a spent influence; his books sell always, his charm as a Personality, as an Orator and a Writer is saving him in spite of his—I grant—unpopular agnosticism. The great glowing heart of the man redeems his cold infidelity.

So these cruel old laws are not disturbed by pious legislators, who would make no bones at all of trading in public franchises, or of acting on any proposition with the "immoral majority". Hypocrisy and fraud respect in these ancient statutes the "wisdom" of our ancestors, and still affect to see in them a safeguard for religion. Hypocrisy and fraud unite to keep them on the law-books where they lie, asleep it may be, but ready-fanged and poisoned should they be evoked at any time to do their ancient office. Many people would be glad to have these infamous laws erased from the statute-books, but they do nothing about it. The public sense of hypocrisy stands in the way. Legislators fear the protest of what is called "organized religion". Liberty continues to be disgraced in the house of her friends.

New Jersey has laws of this kind. Some-thing over three decades ago one of them was waked from its long sleep in order to punish a man who had exercised the right of free speech. By a strange contradiction-the result of yoking the Era of Liberty with the Age of Oppression—this right of free speech is guaranteed in the Constitution of New Jersey, under which the old cruel Colonial law is allowed to operate.

That is to say, the Constitution both guarantees and penalizes the same privilege—a beautiful example of consistency arising from respect for the "wisdom of our ancestors".

The trial attracted universal attention be-cause the bravest and ablest advocate of free speech in our time appeared for the defence. Outside of the great principle involved, there was little in the case to engage the interest or sympathies of Colonel Ingersoll. The defend-ant was an obscure ex-minister named Reynolds, who had gone over to infidelity. Religion, it must be granted, lost less than Reynolds, who seems to have been unable to maintain himself as a preacher of liberal doctrine. No doubt many ministers have profited by his example and stayed where they were—the free thought standard of ability is perhaps not much lower than the evangelical. This Reynolds printed and circulated some literature about the Bible. It was merely puerile and foolish, but some people who looked upon Reynolds as a nuisance (which I fear he was) and wanted to punish him, thought it a good case for the old Colonial statute against blasphemy. Accordingly they invoked it, and hence the trial.

The result of this now famous trial for blas phemy proves that a law on the statute-book, no matter how antiquated, bigoted and absurd —and this was all three in the superlative degree—outweighs with a jury the utmost logic and eloquence of the ablest advocate. Such is the superstition of law, and such is our enlightened wisdom in jealously preserving these be-quests from the blind and tyrannous bigotry of the Old World.

We need not condemn the twelve Jersey jury-men for sinning against light—darkness was there in the law and demanded judgment at their hands. Of course, they enjoyed the Colonel's eloquence; his marvellous pleading; his logic that built up and buttressed a whole structure of argument, while his oratory ravished them; his flashes of wit that disarmed every prejudice; his persuasive power that almost convinced them they were free men with no slightest obligation to the servile past. Yes, it must have been like a wonderful play to these simple Jerseymen. No doubt they congratulated themselves that they were privileged spectators, seeing and hearing it for nothing; and they talked or will talk of it to their dying day. I think myself it was one of the most effective and powerful addresses ever made to a jury—one of the finest appeals ever uttered in behalf of liberty—and it will be honored as it deserves when this Nation shall be truly free.

I daresay some of these Jerseymen were wavering when the Colonel sat down at last—how could they help it? But the prosecutor reminded them (without any eloquence) of their obligations to city, county and State. Above all, there is the Law—what are you going to do about that, gentlemen? No mat-ter whether it was passed some two hundred years ago and carried over from Oppression to Liberty—no matter whether it was made for a state of civilization or barbarism, if you please, which we have outgrown—there it stands, the Law which safeguards the Church and the Home—the law which you are sworn to maintain.

Something like this, no doubt, the prosecutor must have said, but his remarks were few—he did not care to invite a comparison. Besides, he knew his jurymen.

Colonel Ingersoll had made a speech that will live forever.

He lost his case.

New Jersey lost an opportunity.

A GREAT many people contend that we now enjoy in this country as much liberty (or toleration) as is good for us. To aim at the full measure which Colonel Ingersoll advocated is, in the opinion of these people, to advance the standard of Anarchy.

By this reasoning a man who is only half or three-quarters well is better off than one in perfect health.

Complete freedom is complete well-being.

Colonel Ingersoll was the foremost champion in our time of the rights of the liberal spirit.

It has been urged that he spent the best part of his life threshing out old theological straw, fighting battles that had been thoroughly fought out long before his day. Singularly enough, this position is usually taken by persons attached to the theological system against which Ingersoll waged a truceless war. There may be some virtue in the argument, but surely it is not that of consistency.

Let us be fair. Ingersoll was no mere echo and imitator of the great liberals who pre-ceded him. He had a message of his own to his own generation. He was the best-equipped, most formidable and persistent advocate of the liberal principle which this country, at least, has ever known; and it is extremely doubtful if his equal as a popular propagandist was to be found anywhere.

He took new ground. He carried the flag farther than any of his predecessors. He fought without compromise, neither seeking nor giving quarter. He believed in the sacredness of his cause—the holy cause of liberty. His was no tepid devotion, no Laodicean fervor, no timid acquiescence dictated by reason and half denied by fear.

That uncertain allegiance of the soul which Macaulay describes as the "paradise of cold hearts", was not for him. The temper of his zeal for liberty can be likened only to a consuming flame; it burned with ever-increasing ardor through all the years of his long life; it was active up to the very moment when jealous Death touched his eloquent lips with silence.

It was a grand passion, and, like every grand passion, it had grand results.

Heine has said that no man becomes greatly famous without passion; that it is the mark by which we know the inspired man from the mere servant or spectator of events.

I see this mark in Abraham Lincoln—in the Gettysburg speech, in the Proclamation, and some of the Messages. The divine passion that announces a man with a mission and a destiny beyond his fellows.

I see this mark in Robert G. Ingersoll. I have lately read the greater part of his work—lectures, speeches, controversial writings—and the cumulative sense I take from it is that of wonder at the passion of the man. Perhaps it never found better, never attained higher, expression than in these words:

"I plead for light, for air, for opportunity. I plead for individual independence. I plead for the rights of labor and of thought. I plead for a chainless future. Let the ghosts go—justice remains. Let them disappear—men and women and children are left. Let the monsters fade away—the world is here with its hills and seas and plains, with its seasons of smiles and frowns, its spring of leaf and bud, its summer of shade and flower and murmuring stream, its autumn with the laden boughs, when the withered banners of the corn are still and gathered fields are growing strangely wan; while death, poetic death, with hands that color what they touch, weaves in the autumn wood her tapestries of gold and brown.

"The world remains with its winters and homes and firesides, where grow and bloom the virtues of our race. Let the ghosts go—we will worship them no more.

"Man is greater than these phantoms. Humanity is grander than all the creeds, than all the books. Humanity is the great sea, and these creeds, and books, and religions are but the waves of a day. Humanity is the sky, and these religions and dogmas and theories are but the mists and clouds changing continually, des-tined finally to melt away.

"That which is founded on slavery, and fear, and ignorance cannot endure."

IT IS agreed by the opponents of Colonel Ingersoll that he was without influence upon the intelligent thought of his time—by which intelligent thought they perhaps mean to compliment themselves !

If this be true, we lack an explanation of the fact that his books and lectures are selling by the thousands, both in this country and in England. If the testimony of the bookstalls amounts to anything, then the great Agnostic did not cast his "seed of perdition" upon barren ground. Whether for right or wrong, whether for good or evil, his word is marching on.

From the Silence that comes to all men he has gained a higher claim upon our attention, a more valid right to plead. We remember that he was faithful unto death. With the cessation of that defiant personality, about which so long raged the din of controversy, men have leave to study his best thought in the dry light of reason. He that is dead overcometh.

During his life Colonel Ingersoll gave and took many hard blows-that is, he fought his adversaries with the weapons of their choice.

Often it seemed to those who were in sympathy with much that he said, with much that he contended for, that he might have used softer words; that he might have dealt less brutally with inherited beliefs and prejudices; in short, that he might have employed rosewater instead of vitriol.

The answer to this is, Colonel Ingersoll fought without compromise. From his first public utterance he made his position plain. He never faltered, shuffled or equivocated. He knew that mutual compliments cloud the issue; he asked none, gave none.

But the fact really is, he was far kinder and more charitable toward his adversaries than they were toward him. Besides, they had a great advantage in unkindness: they were al-ways sending him to their Hell—and he had no Hell to send them to !

However, I do not believe that Colonel Ingersoll would have fared much better at the hands of the clergy had he, while professing infidelity, made his declaration of unfaith in the mildest and most colorless terms. Euphemism would not have saved the Colonel, and this he well knew, having one of the most logical minds in the world.

No infidel was ever so tender toward the sensibilities of the orthodox as Ernest Renan, who, though he left the altar, yet (as Ingersoll shrewdly said) carried the incense a great part of his journey with him.

Renan's attitude toward the old Faith which he had renounced was that of a sentimental iconoclast—but an iconoclast, for all that. He wrote his "Life of Jesus" with a kind of pious infidelity, coloring it with such euphemism, handling it with such precaution, that some persons took it for an orthodox account. He discloses his motive in the prefaces, but almost suppresses it in the body of the book. His criticism is the best in the world, his romance no better than Chateaubriand's—a woman said that the "Life of Jesus" read as if it were going to end with a marriage ! In my poor opinion, one or two chapters of Renan's "Recollections" are worth "The Life of Jesus".

Renan loved the grand old Church which had educated him, as his "dearest foe". His mind had been formed by contact with her at a hundred points. The poetry of her ritual, the pomp of her service, the grandeur of her titles, the majesty of her spiritual dominion, never quite lost their power to impress his soul—even when he was prophesying that the days of her greatness were numbered. He spoke of the clergy always with respect, often with compliment, declaring in his latest book that he had never known a bad priest. He abhorred all coarseness, all invective, all vulgarity, all violence. Nothing common, low or brutal was ever suffered to mar the translucent mirror of his perfect style. In theory a democrat, he had the mental manners which are fostered by a clerical aristocracy. Every faculty of his mind paid homage to the Church, except his reason. Renan never lost his feeling of reverence for the sacred mysteries of the Faith in which his youth was cradled—but he wrote the "Prayer on the Acropolis". He rebuked Strauss and Feuerbach for the ruthless way in which they attacked the Christian legend—he pleaded for tenderness in demolishing a religion which had been the hope of the world. He confessed that he never could wholly put off the cassock, and he seemed like an unfrocked bishop on the heights of science. If ever an infidel deserved charity at the hands of the clergy, that infidel was Renan.

Did he get it? The answer is, that not even Voltaire was assailed with a greater virulence of ecclesiastical rancor—the most infernal malice ever planted in the heart of man.

Alas, the ecclesiastical spirit too often seems the same in all ages ! It crucified Jesus of Nazareth, it burned Giordano Bruno. When Servetus writhed at the stake in his death agony, Calvin, his murderer, drew nearer, saluted him as the son of the Devil and piously committed his soul to Hell.

Renan was cursed and slandered with that special ingenuity which has always belonged to the custodians of Divine Truth, and the priests whom he was in the habit of complimenting, with great fervor of unanimity saluted him as the Anti-Christ!

Colonel Ingersoll's reasoning was good. Compliments are vain in an irreconcilable conflict.

MOST speeches are not literature—they M do not read as they were heard, as they were spoken. Lacking the living voice, the speaking eye, the personality from which they derived their force, they seem cold, inanimate, without that vital principle which is the product of genius and art.

The orator's triumphs are usually short-lived, like those of an actor. They are the children of the time, not of the eternities.

But there are exceptions, though rare, and among these we may reckon the best speeches of Colonel Ingersoll.

Our American literature has nothing better of their kind than the Decoration Day Oration, the lectures on Ghosts, Orthodoxy, Superstition, Individuality, Liberty for Man, Woman and Child, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Humboldt, Thomas Paine, and some others.

These are so vital, so charged with intellectual power, so instinct with a passionate love of truth and justice, so eloquent and logical, so clear and convincing—above all, so readable —that they can afford to dispense with the living voice—that is, they are, in a true sense, literature.

I doubt if this enviable distinction belongs in equal measure to the work of any other American orator.

The explanation is, that Colonel Ingersoll was an artist as well as an orator: he knew that without the preserving touch of art, the most impassioned oratory soon goes back to common air. He was one of the great masters of our English speech, never seeking the abstruse or the obsolete, believing that the tongue of Shakespeare was adequate to every necessity of argument, every excursion of fancy, every sentiment of poetry, every demand of oratory.

His skill in construction, in antithesis, in balancing periods, in leading up to the lofty climax which crowned the whole, was that of a wizard of speech. He never fell short or came tardy off—his means were always adequate to his ends and the close of every speech was like a strain of music. Rich as his mind was, immense his intellectual resources, undaunted the bravery of his spirit, there was yet manifest in all his work the wise husbandry of genius. His power never ran to excess; never dwindled to impotence.

Nature, too, is economical and dislikes to double her gifts: yet this man was a true poet as well as a great orator. I have quoted above a paragraph from one of his orations, which is the fine gold of sterling poetry.

Charles Lamb tells us that "Prose hath her harmonies no less than Verse", and we know that the speech of every true orator is rhythmic. It was eminently so with Colonel Ingersoll, who, like Dickens, often fell unconsciously into blank verse. Here are a few examples taken at random; and first this bit of what we are now calling "nature poetry" :

The rise and set of sun,
The birth and death of day,
The dawns of silver and the dusks of gold,
The wonders of the rain and snow,
The shroud of winter and
The many-colored robes of spring;
The lonely moon with nightly loss or gain,
The serpent lightning and the thunder's voice,
The tempest's fury and the breath of morn,
The threat of storm and promise of the bow.

Nothing could excel in beauty and metrical grace this description of the old classic myths :

They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous desire,
Made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home of Love;
Filled Autumn's arms with sun-kissed grapes and gathered sheaves;
And pictured Winter as a weak old king
Who felt, like Lear, upon his withered face,
Cordelia's tears.

This on Shakespeare, reveals the poet in the orator:

He knew the thrills and ecstasies of love,
The savage joys of hatred and revenge.
He heard the hiss of envy's snakes
And watched the eagles of ambition soar.
There was no hope that did not put its star above his head
No fear he had not felt
No joy that had not shed its sunshine on his face.

The critics, I am aware, make this kind of writing a fault in prose, but we should be glad to get real poetry, wherever we may find it. Colonel Ingersoll's greatest distinction as a poet is, that he never fails to interest us :—in this particular, at least, the regular metre-mongers may well envy him.

I LIKE his distinct literary style—the style of his miscellanies, of his controversial papers, of his occasional bits of wisdom and fancy and criticism. Perhaps the thoroughly human side of the man is best seen in these unrelated efforts—these vagrant children of his mind. You know that this man thought before he took the pen in hand. He writes without pretence, without the vices of the literary habit, without artifice or evasion,—clearly, frankly, as a gentleman should speak. In written controversy he was relentless in his logic,—pressing the point home, but unfailing in courtesy. As he himself would have said, his mental manners were good—they were at any rate "sweetness and light" compared with those of his adversaries.

He did not profess to love his enemies, yet he treated them more humanely than many who made that profession.

We are never to forget that the chief article of his offending was, that he made war upon the Dogma of an everlasting Hell.

In his controversies he was never worsted, from a rational standpoint (sic), and his victories seem not less due to his own fairness in argument and tenacity of logic than to the weakness and confusion of his opponents. The natural and supernatural can not maintain a profitable argument. They can never agree and, strictly speaking, one can not overcome the other—they occupy separate realms.

It is useless for a man who believes in miracles to argue with a man who does not—a miracle and a fact are in the nature of things irreconcilable.

Renan said to the theologians, "Come, gentlemen, let us have one miracle here before the savants in Paris—that will end the dispute forever." He asked in vain—miracles are no longer granted for the conversion of infidels, and if they occur at all, it is before witnesses whose faith predisposes them to belief. It may be hazarded that no one ever believed in a miracle who did not wish to believe in.

In a purely rational view it must be allowed that the honors of controversy usually fell to Colonel Ingersoll. His apparent victories were, of course, easily waived by those who believed that they had Divine Truth on their side. Yet they must have regretted that the supernatural can be so ill defended. That all the advantage of reason would seem to be with the enemy of light. That one who can make himself understood should prevail over the champion of Revealed Truth, which is in its nature incomprehensible. That it should be so hard to square reason with revelation, fact with fable, method with miracle, dreams with demonstrations.

Of all these tourneys of skill and wit and logic, Colonel Ingersoll is seen at his best in his reply to Gladstone. Perhaps nothing that he ever did more thoroughly certifies the power and keenness of his mind, the bed-rock of his convictions. He was like an athlete rejoicing in his strength; merciful to his adversary, as feeling that the victory was sure; always conscious of his power, but ruling himself with perfect poise. The one touch of malice he allowed himself was when he quoted for Mr. Gladstone's benefit the saying of Aristotle, that "clearness is the virtue of style" :—this arrow pierced the heart of the British behemoth.

In truth Mr. Gladstone, the master of many languages, the world-famed orator, the "most learned layman of Europe", appeared at a manifest disadvantage in his duel with the American. He tried to write in the "Bishop's voice", to overawe his adversary with Greek and Latin quotations, omitting to give the English equivalent. He begged the question, floundered about it, did everything but argue it, and finally took refuge behind the "exuberance of his own verbosity". Colonel Ingersoll, cool, urbane, inflexible, asked only for the facts; Mr. Gladstone, flustered, irritated, conscious of his weakness, had apparently none to give and raised a cloud of words. The world waited eagerly for Mr. Gladstone's rejoinder: it never came, and the trophies of debate seemed to rest with the American. Needless to say, this left the great Question still at issue.

COLONEL INGERSOLL has been so slandered and defamed by the intemperate friends of orthodox religion that many people have no just idea of the man or of the principles for which he contended. Slander is too often the favorite weapon of persons who claim to love their enemies as themselves. It was used so effectively against Voltaire that even at this late day many liberal Christians are afraid to read him.

Separating the odium theologicum from the argument and the slanderous motive of those who libel a sublime cause by their uncharity, let us see how the matter really stands.

Did Ingersoll say there is no God?

No; he said he did not know.

What did he deny as to God?

He denied the existence of the personal Jewish God—the Jehovah of the Hebrew Scriptures.

He denied and repudiated the dogma of an eternal Hell, said to have been made by Jehovah in order to gratify his revenge upon the great majority of the human race.

Did he attack Christianity?

He attacked only what he conceived to be the evil part of it, in so far as it justified and continued the curses of the Old Testament. He made a distinction between the real and the theological Christ: the first he honored as a great moral teacher and a martyr of freedom, killed by the orthodox priests of his day; the second he denied and repudiated as a creation of men.

Did he believe in a Hereafter?

He believed that no one could know whether there is or is not a future life of the soul. But he was not without the hope of immortality which has in all ages cheered and fortified the heart of man.

It follows from all this that he did not accept the Revelation of the Hebrew Bible, its cosmogony, geology or morality; nor the New Testament with its Scheme of Atonement and threat of Eternal Damnation—God suffering in his own person for the sins of the world, yet condemning the far greater number of his children to everlasting pain.

What positive effect had his example and teaching?

It liberalized the creeds in spite of themselves.

It made the preaching of Hell unpopular. It made for sanity in religion and enlarged the province of honest doubt.

It caused men to think more of the simple human virtues and less of the theological ones.

There is no doubt at all that it saved many from the madhouse who might have accused themselves of committing the Unpardonable Sin.

It helped to make better husbands, kinder fathers, more loyal and loving sons.

It was a great step toward freedom and light. It enlarged the horizon of hope—it advanced the standard of liberty.

Colonel Ingersoll was a free man, talking in a country where all are presumed to be free, yet his courage, more than the laws, protected him.

He upheld public and private morality and was himself an exemplar of both.

He loved only, one woman as his wife and lived with her in perfect honor and fidelity. He loved his children and was idolized by them.

His abilities and services reflected honor upon the state.

It is agreed that but for his religious views, he might have reached the greatest honor in the Nation's gift. As it is, he has gained a place in the Republic of Intellect to which few of our Presidents may aspire.

His crime was, that he had elected to exercise his reason, had interrogated Revelation, put Moses in the witness-box, and asked for the facts.

IT IS claimed by certain critics that Colonel Ingersoll, being defective in scientific equipment as well as in exact scholarship, was unable to produce such effects by his teaching as might otherwise have been feared by the orthodox. It seems to me the contention is quite unsupported by logic or fact. True, Colonel Ingersoll was neither a Darwin nor a Huxley, neither a Tyndall nor a Spencer. He lacked the special training and scientific grasp of all these, as well as the searching erudition and ripened philosophic spirit of Ernest Renan, in our- time the chief protagonist in the domain of liberal thought. But had Colonel Ingersoll been other than he was, it is doubtful if he would have achieved so distinct an effect. In mere scholar-ship he was at least equal if not superior to Thomas Paine, and he was no more unscientific than Voltaire. As a propagandist of liberal opinions, and as a living force, he was far greater than the former by virtue of the free play accorded to his vigorous and persuasive eloquence. That his influence in no way approaches that of Voltaire, is not a fact which demands explanation. A stream can not rise higher than its source. The whole liberal movement may almost be said to have proceeded from the great Frenchman, whose portentous eminence remains secured to him alone.

But if Ingersoll was neither scientific in a profound sense, nor cultured in a scholastic one, he was not the less manifestly cut out for his work. He gave his audiences just what they expected to get and were glad to pay for—oratory, which it serves no purpose now to disparage and which, in spite of all disparagement, often rose to a noble height and strain. Wit that played like lambent lightning about the old structures of belief, showing many an obscure niche and cranny that, mayhap, had escaped the torches of earlier investigators. Pathos that proved the poet in the orator and needed only a metrical expression—nay, sometimes unconsciously attained it. Humor that evinced this man's sympathetic touch with his fellow men and that not seldom won their regard when all the protean resources of his eloquence had failed to persuade. Lastly, a gracious and noble presence,

Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man;

and a voice whose thrilling organ melody it will long be the solace of many thousands to have heard.

How much of the Colonel will live as a permanent legacy, is a graver question than that of his influence upon his contemporaries. Littera scripta manet, and the Ingersollian word is, essentially, the spoken word. Most 'of his writings are cast in the form of speeches; were obviously written to be delivered as such. John Morley notes this as a sensible depreciation of a great part of Macaulay's brilliant work.

The finer note addressed to the mental ear is more palpably lacking in the American. One sees this at once by turning from Colonel Ingersoll's speeches to the papers of his controversy with Gladstone, to which I have already referred. In these letters Colonel Ingersoll displays a closeness of reasoning, a dialectic fence, an analytic subtlety, which are quite foreign to his ordinary processes. The fact is, that Colonel Ingersoll, being a born pleader and skilled, moreover, in a long course of forensic training, adopted too much, perhaps, in his speeches, the lawyer's plan of making the most of the adversary's weak points. Hence, the brutality, at times, of Ingersoll's philippics against the Christian religion, and hence, also, the unlikelihood of their being permanently em-bodied in the canon of liberal faith. The keenness of the critical spirit was in Colonel Ingersoll; in its charity he was often wanting.

COLONEL INGERSOLL belongs with the select company of the great Americans.

He is of the fellowship of Jefferson and Franklin, of Lincoln and Sumner. His patriotism was second only to his passion for universal liberty. He loved his country beyond everything except freedom. He was not a fire-side patriot—the temper of his devotion had been proved in the baptism of battle. His patriotic speeches rank with the best in our literature : the Vision of War is as high an utterance as Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech and as surely immortal.

He was a great American, loving liberty, fraternity, equality. He hated the spirit of Caste which he saw rising among our people, and he struck at it with all the force of his honest anger.

He despised the worship of titles among the rich, their tuft-hunting, aping of aristocratic airs and mean prostration before the self-styled nobility of the Old World. To him the most loathsome object in the world was an American ashamed of his country.

He urged that the representatives of republics should have precedence at Washington. He condemned the flummery of our diplomatic etiquette, the foolish kow-towing designed to flatter the ambassadors of servile nations.

His patriotism was purer than that of our Christian statesmen who wish to subjugate in the name of liberty—to expand in territory and contract in honor.

He was an individualist, believing that equal rights and equal opportunities hold the solution of every social problem.

He saw no evil in wealth, save the abuse of it, and he did not think it a virtue to be poor.

He believed that everyone was entitled to comfort, well-being, happiness in this world. He denied that God has purposely divided his children into rich and poor; he saw in this the teaching of a false religious system which has sanctioned every oppression and injustice, and has cursed the earth with misery.

He regarded pauperism not as a proof of the special favor of God, but as an indictment of man.

He was a lover of justice, of mercy, of humanity. He was a true friend of the toiling millions and in their behalf pleaded for a working day of eight hours. Christianity had long suffered it, but he was unwilling that a single overburdened creature should "curse God and die".

He pleaded for the abolition of the death penalty, that relic of savagery. He hated all forms of cruelty and violence, but especially those that claim the sanction of law. He denounced the whipping post in Delaware—and Delaware replied by a threat to indict him for blasphemy.

He pleaded for the abolition of poverty and drunkenness, for the fullest liberation of woman, for the rights of the child.

His great heart went out in sympathy to everything that suffers—to the dumb animals, beaten and overladen; to the feathered victims of caprice and cruelty.

The circle of this man's philanthropy was complete. He filled the measure of patriotism, of civic duty, of the sacred relations of husband and father, of generosity and kindness toward his fellow men. But he had committed treason against the Unknown, and this, in spite of the fame and success which his talents commanded, made of him a social Pariah. The herd admired and envied his freedom, but for the most part they gave him the road and went by on the other side.

THIS country is freer and better for the life of Colonel Ingersoll. There is more light, more air in the prison-house of theology.

God may be a guess, but man is a certainty; men are thinking more of their obligations toward those about them—the weak, the helpless, the fallen,—and less about securing for themselves a halo and a harp in the New Jerusalem.

Ingersoll's great lesson that men can not love one another if they believe in a God of hate, is bearing fruit.

The hypocrite shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven!

Truth will yet compel all the churches to cease libelling God and to honor humanity... .

The great man whose worth and work I have barely glanced at in these pages, said bravely, that he cared less for the freedom of religion than for the Religion of Freedom. When that larger light shall flood the world—and not until then—his services to the cause of Truth, of Liberty and Humanity will be fitly honored.

As for his literary testament, I find it easy to believe that many a noble sentence winged with the utmost felicity of speech, many a fine sentiment, the fruit of his kindlier thought, many a tender word spoken to alleviate the sorrow of death, will long remain. Even the professed critics who make so small ado of the Colonel's literary merits, may well envy him the noble essay on Shakespeare, the more powerful one on Voltaire, or the beautiful memorial tribute to Walt Whitman. And it may be that "so long as love kisses the lips of death", so long shall men and women, in the nighted hour of grief and loss, bless the name of him who touched the great heart of humanity in that high and unmatched deliverance at his brother's grave. . . .

From a sunken Syrian tomb long antedating the Christian era, Ernest Renan brushed away the dust and found inscribed thereon the single word,

"Courage !"