Books: Lectures Of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Vol. I

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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
salvation 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 cannot 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 afford to damn
such a woman.

A woman in the State of Indiana forty or fifty 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 them 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 must do justice; even a God must worship justice;
and any form of superstition that 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 boughs, singing and swinging, and thinking
about four little speckled eggs, warmed by the breast of its mate--and
singing and swinging, and the music in 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 forenoon, 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
really 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
"Jenkyn on the Atonement." I used to read Jenkyn with a good deal of
pleasure, and I often thought that the atonement would have to be very
broad in its provisions to cover the case of a man that would I write
such a book for boys. Then I would look to see how the sun was getting
on, and sometimes I thought it had stuck from pure cussedness. Then I
would go back and try Jenkyn's again. Well, but it had to go down, and
when the last rim of light sank below the horizon, off 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 doesn'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 than going to a dry goods box with a steeple on top 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 thousands of people, and I would like to see an opera produced 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 symphonies
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 joy! 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 dimples 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. When 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
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 doctrine. 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--and
the next morning 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, and 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 faculty
for. Don't make that poor girl play ten years on a piano when she has
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 world than that, and if in another world I
can not live with the ones I loved here, then 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
raising 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 zigzag around the world, in which 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 birch, the spruce, the fir, and finally you come to little
dwarfed trees, that look like other trees seen through a telescope
reversed--every limb twisted as through pain--getting a scanty
subsistence 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 might as well try to raise oaks and elms where the
mosses grow, as to raise great men and 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 has been snow, and ordinarily decent Winter. 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 flowers that bloom in the drifted snow. You can't
have them anywhere else, and that is the 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 the 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 who have nothing
to be proud of except ancestors. I thought how terrible it 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
Chimpanzee. After thinking it all over I came to the conclusion that I
liked that doctrine. I became convinced in spite of myself. I read
about rudimentary bones and muscles. I was told that everybody had
rudimentary muscles extending from the ear into the cheek. I asked:
"What are they?" I was told: "They are the remains of muscles; that
they became rudimentary from the lack of use." They went into
bankruptcy. They are the muscles with which your ancestors used to flap
their ears. Well, at first, I was greatly astonished, and afterward 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
vulture, a hyena, and a jackal? How can you account for the religious
creeds of today? 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
commenced with the skull-less vertebrates in the dim Laurentian seas,
that wriggled without knowing why they wriggled, swimming without
knowing 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 dugout 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 looming up a
little grander and more splendidly, and finally produced Shakespeare,
who harvested all the field of dramatic thought and from whose day until
now there have been none but gleaners of chaff and straw. Shakespeare
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
skull-less vertebrate; that produced Shakespeare, 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 descended from a perfect pair
upon which the Lord has lost money every moment 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 our 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 slavery.
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 would never have been able to read the leaves of
Heaven.

COL. INGERSOLL'S REPLY TO DR. COLLYER.

Now, they tell me--and there are several gentlemen who have spoken on
this subject--the Rev. Mr. Collyer, a gentleman standing as high as
anybody, and I have nothing to say against him--because I denounced God
who upheld murder, and slavery and polygamy, he said that what I said
was slang. I would like to have 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 in 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 infidelity 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, that 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
respect--I 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 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 says
it is slang.

I want him to answer; and when he answers he will say he does not
believe the Bible 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 up his name 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
reverential hands. I deny it. We should 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.

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 Presbyterian church. He
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 Chicago whether he believes
the Bible is inspired in any sense except that in which Shakespeare was
inspired. Honor bright, I tell you that all the sweet and beautiful
things in the Bible would not make one play of Shakespeare; 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 Perditu or Imogene or Miranda. Not
one.

I want him to tell whether he believes the Bible was inspired in any
other way than Shakespeare 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, "Suffer 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.
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 here. 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 so 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 can not
have your children unless you will lose your liberty; and unless 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 and say
whether you love and worship a God that established slavery. Honest!
And love and worship a God that 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.

INGERSOLL GATLING GUN 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 certain 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; and 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 Christian world
the consolation naturally arising from the belief in Hell.

Dr. Ryder is mistaken. All the orthodox religion of the day is
Calvinism. It believes in the fall of man. It believes in the
atonement. It believes in the eternity of Hell, and it believes in
salvation by faith; that is to say, by credulity.

That is what they believe, and he is mistaken; and I want to tell Dr.
Kyder today, 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. I want to tell him that the Bible upholds the doctrine
of Hell. I want to tell Him that if there is no Hell, somebody ought to
have said so, and Jesus Christ 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.

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