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I read Colonel Ingersoll's Lectures, and he proved to me that Moses made a lot of mistakes. So, weel, presently I got fond of whisky, and I came to the conclusion that releegion was not logical." "I reckon as you're none too logical," replied Tom. "Ay, man, but I was well groonded in the fundamentals! I could say the Shorter Catechism when I was a wee kiddie of seven years old!
It is the sum of all actual knowledge of man, and every man who discovers a new fact adds a new verse to this bible. It is different from the other bible, because that is the sum of all that its writers and readers do not know. Ingersoll's Lecture entitled "Some Reasons Why" Ladies and Gentlemen: The history of the world shows that religion has made enemies instead of friends.
The lecture was attentively listened to by the immense audience from beginning to the end, and the speaker's most blasphemous fights were the most loudly applauded. Ingersoll's Lecture on Hereafter My Friends: I tell you tonight, as I have probably told many of you dozens of times, that the orthodox doctrine of eternal punishment in the hereafter is an infamous one!
Men claiming to be quasi-decent, if not altogether respectable, will carry home day after day and suffer to be read by their young daughters such a paper as the Houston Post with its "w. y. o. d.," and "take off your things" advertisements, its puffs of abortion pills and syphilitic panaceas who would have a conniption fit and fall in it should a copy of Bob Ingersoll's eloquent lecture on Abraham Lincoln creep into their library.
After they had quite finished with the paper, I sometimes secured it for myself, and hurrying back to my office in the elevator pored over it with intense zeal. Undoubtedly my father as well as I was profoundly influenced by "The Mistakes of Moses." The faith in which we had been reared had already grown dim, and under the light of Ingersoll's remorseless humor most of our superstitions vanished.
He is big and rangey, good-natured and popular, and is president of the senior class. Joe Ingersoll's age is seventeen. He is Steve's junior by two months. He is of medium height, rather thin, light complexioned and has peculiarly pale eyes behind the round spectacles he wears. Joe is first baseman on the Nine, and a remarkably competent one.
As to Ingersoll's mental evolution we can not do better than to let him tell the story himself: Like the most of us, I was raised among people who knew who were certain. They did not reason or investigate. They had no doubts. They knew they had the truth. In their creed there was no guess no perhaps. They had a revelation from God. They knew the beginning of things.
Bolingbroke, ignorant of the law, "that the greatest good of the greatest number is to be sought after," even at the expense of the lives of a few wicked Canaanites, assailed the justice and the benevolence of the Bible God after Col Ingersoll's style, and boldly avowed that the miracles of the New Testament never transpired; said, "If they did occur they attested the Revelation."
The month of June I spent in New York city, where I attended several of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll's receptions and saw the great orator and iconoclast at his own fireside, surrounded by his admirers, and heard his beautiful daughters sing, which gave all who listened great pleasure, as they have remarkably fine voices.
Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." I was in a desperate way.
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