I
In the history of religious controversy it has sometimes occurred that
a fool has risen and shouted out views so typical and representative as
to justify a particular attention denied to his less absurd partisans.
That was the situation relative to the logomachy that raged over the
ashes of the late Col. Robert Ingersoll. Through the ramp and roar
of the churches, the thunder of the theological captains and the
shouting, rose the penetrating treble of a person so artlessly pious,
so devoid of knowledge and innocent of sense, that his every utterance
credentialed him as a child of candor, and arrested attention like
the wanton shrilling of a noontide locust cutting through the cackle
of a hundred hens. That he happened to be an editorial writer was
irrelevant, for it was impossible to suspect so ingenuous a soul of
designs upon what may be called the Christian vote; he simply poured
out his heart with the unpremeditated sincerity of a wild ass uttering
its view of the Scheme of Things. I take it the man was providentially
“raised up”, and spoke by inspiration of the Spirit of Religion.
“Robert G. Ingersoll,” says this son of nature, “was not a _great_
atheist, nor a _great_ agnostic. Dissimilar though they are, he aspired
in his published lectures and addresses to both distinctions.”
As it is no distinction to be either atheist or agnostic, this must
mean that Col. Ingersoll “aspired” to be a great atheist and a great
agnostic. Where is the evidence? May not a man state his religious
or irreligious views with the same presumption of modesty and mere
sincerity that attaches to other intellectual action? Because one
publicly affirms the inveracity of Moses must one be charged with
ambition, that meanest of all motives? By denying the sufficiency of
the evidences of immortality is one self-convicted of a desire to be
accounted great?
Col. Ingersoll said the thing that he had to say, as I am saying
this—as a clergyman preaches his sermon, as an historian writes his
romance: partly for the exceeding great reward of expression, partly,
it may be, for the lesser profit of payment. We all move along lines
of least resistance; because a few of us find that this leads up to the
temple of fame it does not follow that all are seeking that edifice
with a conscious effort to achieve distinction. If any Americans have
appraised at its true and contemptible value the applause of the people
Robert Ingersoll did. If there has been but one such American he was
the man.
Now listen to what further this ineffable dolt had to say of him:
His irreverence, however, his theory of deistical brutality, was
a mere phantasy, unsustained by scholarship or by reason, and
contradicted by every element of his personal character. His love
for his wife and his children, his tenderness towards relatives and
friends, would have been spurious and repulsive if in his heart he
had not accepted what in speech he derided and contemned.
Here’s richness indeed! Whatever may be said by scholarship and reason
of a “theory of deistical brutality”, I do not think—I really have
not the civility to admit—that it is contradicted by a blameless
life. If it were really true that the god of the Christians is not a
particularly “nice” god the love of a man for wife and child would not
necessarily and because of that be spurious and repulsive. Indeed,
in a world governed by such a god, and subject therefore to all the
evils and perils of the divine caprice and malevolence, such affection
would be even more useful and commendable than it is in this actual
world of peace, happiness and security. As the stars burn brightest in
a moonless night, so in the gloom of a wrath-ruled universe all human
affections and virtues would have an added worth and tenderness. In
order that life might be splendored with so noble and heroic sentiments
as grow in the shadow of disaster and are nourished by the sense of
a universal peril and sorrow, one could almost wish that some malign
deity, omnipotent and therefore able to accomplish his purposes without
sin and suffering for his children, had resisted the temptation to do
so and had made this a Vale of Tears.
The Nineteenth Century has produced great agnostics. Strauss the
German and Renan the Frenchman were specimens of this particular
cult. But Robert G. Ingersoll belonged to a lower range of
scholarship and of thought. He had never studied the great German
and French critics of the Bible. His “Mistakes of Moses” were
pervaded by misapprehensions of the text of the Pentateuch.
It is indubitably true that Ingersoll was inferior in scholarship to
Strauss and Renan, and in that and genius to the incomparable Voltaire;
but these deficiencies were not disabilities in the work that he
undertook. He knew his limitations and did not transgress them. He was
not self-tempted into barren fields of scholastic controversy where
common sense is sacrificed to “odious subtlety”. In the work that he
chose he had no use for the dry-as-dust erudition of the modern German
school of Biblical criticism—learned, ingenious, profound, admirable
and futile. He was accomplished in neither Hebrew nor Greek. Aramaic
was to him an unknown tongue, and I dare say that if asked he would
have replied that Jesus Christ, being a Jew, spoke Hebrew. The “text
of the Pentateuch” was not “misapprehended” by him; he simply let it
alone. What he criticised in “The Mistakes of Moses” is the English
version. If that is not a true translation let those concerned to
maintain its immunity from criticism amend it. They are not permitted
to hold that it is good enough for belief and acceptance, but not
good enough to justify an inexpert dissent. Ingersoll’s limitations
were the source of his power; at least they confined him to methods
that are “understanded of the people”; and to be comprehended by the
greatest number of men should be the wish of him who tries to destroy
what he thinks a popular delusion. By the way, I observe everywhere
the immemorial dog’s-eared complaint that he could “tear down” (we
Americans always prefer to say this when we mean pull down) but could
not “build up.” I am not aware that he ever tried to “build up.”
Believing that no religion was needful, he would have thought his work
perfect if all religions had been effaced. The clamor of weak minds for
something to replace the errors of which they may be deprived is one
that the true iconoclast disregards. What he most endeavors to destroy
is not idols, but idolatry. If in the place of the image that he breaks
he set up another he would be like a physician who having cured his
patient of a cramp should inoculate him with an itch. It is only just
to say that the devout journalist whose holy utterance I am afflicting
myself with the unhappiness of criticising nowhere makes the hoary
accusation that Ingersoll could “tear down” but not “build up.” He must
have overlooked it.
What Ingersoll attacked was the Bible as we have it—the English
Bible—not the Bible as it may, can, must, might, would or should be in
Hebrew and Greek. He had no controversy with scholars—not only knew
himself unable to meet them on their own ground (where is plenty of
room for their lonely feet) but was not at all concerned with their
faiths and convictions, nor with the bases of them. Hoping to remove or
weaken a few popular errors, he naturally examined the book in which he
believed them to be found—the book which has the assent and acceptance
of those who hold them and derive them from it. He did not go behind
the record as it reads—nobody does excepting its advocates when it
has been successfully impugned. What has influenced (mischievously,
Ingersoll believed) the thought and character of the Anglo-Saxon race
is not the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Testament, but the English
Bible. The fidelity of that to its originals, its self-sufficiency and
independence of such evidences as only scholarship can bring to its
exposition, these, as Aristotle would say, are matters for separate
consideration. If God has really chosen to give his law to his children
in tongues that only an infinitesimal fraction of them can hope to
understand—has thrown it down amongst them for ignorant translators to
misread, interested priesthoods to falsify and hardy and imaginative
commentators to make ridiculous—has made no provision against all this
debauching of the text and the spirit of it, this must be because he
preferred it so; for whatever occurs must occur because the Omniscience
and Omnipotence permitting it wishes it to occur. Such are not the
methods of our human legislators, who take the utmost care that the
laws be unambiguous, printed in the language of those who are required
to obey them and accessible to them in the original text. I’m not
saying that this is the better and more sensible way; I only say that
if the former is God’s way the fact relieves us all of any obligation
to “restore” the text before discussing it and to illuminate its
obscurities with the side-lights of erudition. Ingersoll had all the
scholarship needful to his work: he knew the meaning of English words.
Says the complacent simpleton again:
It was idle for a man to deny the existence of God who confessed
and proclaimed the principle of fraternity.... The hard conception
of annihilation had no place in sentences that were infused with
the heat of immortality.
As logic, this has all the charm inhering in the syllogism, All cows
are quadrupeds; this is a quadruped; therefore, this is a cow. The
author of that first sentence would express his thought, naturally,
something like this: All men are brothers; God is their only father;
therefore, there is a God. The other sentence is devoid of meaning, and
is quoted only to show the view that this literary lunatic is pleased
to think that he entertains of annihilation. It is to him a “hard
conception”; that is to say, the state of unconsciousness which he
voluntarily and even eagerly embraces every night of his life, and in
which he remained without discomfort for countless centuries before his
birth, is a most undesirable state. It is, indeed, so very unwelcome
that it shall not come to him—he’ll not have it so. Out of nothingness
he came, but into nothingness he will not return—he’ll die first! Life
is a new and delightful toy and, faith! he means to keep it. If you’d
ask him he would say that his immortality is proved by his yearning for
it; but men of sense know that we yearn, not for what we have, but for
what we have not, and most strongly for what we have not the shadow of
a chance to get.