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Ingersoll and Religious Liberalism by Frank Smith
In Dresden, a village in the finger-lake district of New York, the birthplace of Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) is being restored as a freethought museum. It will rank with Thomas Paine's cottage in New Rochelle as a tourist attraction. Although Ingersoll died nearly a hundred years ago, he is not out of date. He was and is the greatest freethinker in American history. In religion as in other sectors of common life he caught the spirit of the timesÑthe Higher Criticism, based on the premise that the Bible is a human product and subject to critical study like any other earthly book, Darwinism placing man in nature along with his fellow-beings, German science-philosophy questioning not only the special creation of mankind but creationism itself. Against the religion of the gods he proposed the religion of humanity. These ideas have not withered with the years. Ingersoll was a pioneer and as a pioneer he did not close the door of discussion. Sometimes, as in The Gods and What Is Religion, he speaks like an atheist. More often, as in Why I Am An Agnostic, he says things like "I do not deny. I do not know and I do not believe." On immortality he was ambivalent. He could not believe or disbelieve, he hoped. "The idea of immortality," he poetized, "was born of human affection, will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. It is the rainbowÑhope shining against the tears of grief." Modern humanists by and large do not share that hope. They perceive the soul or spirit or mind as a function of the body and dying with it. Ingersoll summarized his creed: "Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so." "God," he said, "cannot hate anybody who is capable of loving anybody." He compared life to an orange. Get all the juice you can out of it and throw the dry peel away. He would have applauded Schweitzer's Reverence for Life. Ingersoll was not an armchair philosopher addressing an elite. He preached the new religion from hundreds of platforms all over the land up and down and from coast to coast. Everywhere he mesmerized audiences of thousands or hundreds with two-hour homilies abounding in common sense and folksy wit, running the gamut of emotions, soaring to purple heights. He was particularly vehement against the doctrine of eternal damnation. "Think of the lives it has blightedÑof the tears it has causedÑof the agony it has produced. Think of the millions who have been driven to insanity by this most terrible of dogmas." The firebrand aroused the ire of bigoted fundamentalists who panicked to save their creed. They called him "the champion blasphemer of America" and tried to have him denied a platform or thrown into prison, proclaiming that his listeners were endangering their souls. Anonymous letters advised him that unless he repented he might die suddenly and that he would surely broil in hell. They portrayed his vast crowds as "all the riffraff of societyÑprofane men and bad women, thieves and liars, and drunkards and debauchees, and adulterers and sportsmen" (American Christian Review, quoted in The Truth Seeker, April 28, 1883). What did they accomplish? They intensified his energy, increased his audiences, and, yes, barred him from public office. It is not to be supposed that Ingersoll's arch-adversary, the Rev. DeWitt Talmage, a Torquemada without teeth, typified the American ministry. The religious establishment had its liberal-minded members who regarded Ingersoll as a fellow-seeker of the truth and entitled to freedom of expression. Against Ingersollism they held that a religious view of mortal existence did not depend upon faith in the biblical story of creation or stonewalling the proofs of evolution, in swallowing the myths of Jonah and the Whale and Noah's Ark, in being resigned to eternal perdition, in blinking the religious persecutions of history. At a political rally in New York, Henry Ward Beecher, the most conspicuous churchman of the day, extended the hand of friendship to Ingersoll. Ingersoll took it in a clapping clasp that resounded through the hall. At a Sunday service in Chicago, Dr. John Rusk, pastor of The Church Militant (Presbyterian), introducing the guest speaker Ingersoll to a packed church of the most important people of the cityÑadmitted by card only (hundreds outside clamoring to get in)Ñprayed that "the arms of the Father be about him and his loved ones to the end." He averred, "No matter whether a man believed in God or not, if he expounded the truth, then the truth was there and God was there" (New York Sun, April 13, 1896). Cardinal Gibbons, Cardinal Manning, and Prime Minister Gladstone did not consider it beneath them to debate with Ingersoll in The North American Review. Ingersoll gave benefit lectures at the New York Ethical Society and predicted that the ethical societies would be the churches of the future. Lovejoy Elliott of the New York society officiated at Ingersoll's funeral. The anti-trinitarians, having taken the giant leap rejecting the divinity of Christ, were Ingersoll's gentlest critics. In 1891, Ingersoll wrote for the New York Telegraph a "Christmas Sermon" inveighing against hellfire and wishing rest and sunshine for all. The Rev. J. M. Buckley denounced this greeting as blasphemous and cried for a boycott of the Telegram. Almost all the ministers responding to a questionnaire sneered at Ingersoll, though some conceded that he had a right to be heard. The Rev. C. H. Eaton (Universalist) said, "He who attacks the doctrine of endless punishment as cruel or absurd is in my opinion more essentially Christian than he who defends it." (He stood with the Rev. Peter M. Queen of the Dutch Reformed Church, who said, "The Christianity of Jesus Christ has been cruel, arrogant, bigoted, selfish. She has shed more blood to defend her doctrines than would float all the navies of the world" (Telegram, Jan. 11, 12, 1892). In the spring of 1896, being in Kansas City, Ingersoll chatted with some friends, including J. E. Roberts, minister of All Souls' Unitarian Church. As Ingersoll departed, a reporter inquired whether Roberts had converted him. "Convert him? Convert him?" Roberts spluttered. "He don't need conversion. I wish all men were like him. He is the greatest apostle of liberty and reason and fraternity. He is a pillar of goodness and kindness in the world" (Kansas City Star, May 4, 1896) . Minot Savage, leading Unitarian spokesman, recorded that he once delivered a sermon in Washington, D.C. which the whole Ingersoll family attended. "Naturally I watched him through my sermon, and was astonished to see how simple and absorbed a listener he was. At any sharp remarks that impressed him, a smile would break out and broaden over his face, and at any touching or tender thing, tears would run down his cheeks, and he was so unconscious of it that he did not even wipe them away" (Boston Globe, Sept. 1899). On Jan. 15, 1892, Ingersoll was a guest speaker at the Unitarian Club dinner in New York City. His opening words are a perfect example of his irresistible style as an after-dinner speaker: "In the first place, I wish to tender my thanks to this club for having generosity and sense enough to invite me to speak this evening. It is probably the best thing the club has ever done. You have shown that you are not afraid of a man simply because he does not happen to agree entirely with you, although in a very general sense it may be said that I come within one of you." In January, 1896, Ingersoll visited the People's Church in Kalamazoo. It had no creed and its Bond of Union welcomed all who "desired to develop in themselves and the world honest, reverent thought, and faithfulness to our highest conceptions of the right living and love and service to our fellowmen." Delighted, Ingersoll said that if there was such a church near his home he would certainlyjoin it "if permitted." Outside the churches Ingersoll the infidel received a memorable compliment. The Civil Rights Act passed by a Reconstruction Congress provided for equal accommodation regardless of race in all public places. In 1883, the Supreme Court invalidated the Act, thereby sanctioning Jim Crow down the shameful years to the 1960s. An immediate protest mass meeting was held in Washington. Frederick Douglass was the chairman, Ingersoll the main speaker. Douglass recited Leigh Hunt's household poem about Abou Ben Adhem, who, when told by the angel writing in a book of gold that he was not listed among those who loved the Lord, asked that his name be written as one who loved his fellow-men:
The name of Ingersoll is enrolled in the march of Unitarians and Universalists towards a primary faith in human brotherhood. John H. Dietrich, distinguished Unitarian leader, described Ingersoll as "the most outstanding opponent of orthodox religion, and the most ardent champion of freedom from superstition, that we have ever had in this country, if not anywhere in the world" (Robert G. Ingersoll, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, Jan. 29, 1929). In 1933, Dietrich was one of the Unitarian ministers joining with John Dewey and others in signing Humanist Manifesto I. The document asserts: "First, Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created." This is pure atheism. Whether or not Ingersoll and Dietrich called themselves atheists did not trouble A. Powell Davies, probably the greatest Unitarian minister of our time. who said, "He who loves, worships." And this: "Upon a man who can say that, I have nothing to urge. Certainly no word of reproach. Nor do I have a wish to better his thinking or improve his creed. If he will not kneel beside me, I will stand beside him" (The God of the Atheist, All Souls' Church, Washington, D.C., Jan. 18. 1948). The Unitarian-Universalist church of today has room in pulpit and congregation for deists, theists, agnostics, atheists. A whimsical Unitarian friend of mine says that the Unitarian must believe in "at most one God." Prominent among out-and-out humanists in the contemporary Unitarian pulpit is Roger E. Greeley, recently retired as minister of the historic church in Kalamazoo, who has written books on Ingersoll and puts on vibrant one-man shows impersonating him. The idea defining God as Love is not unique with Unitarianism- Universalism. In Honest to God, the Rev. John Robinson (Bishop of Woolwich) says that God is not "up there" (Ptolemaic) or "out there" (post-Copernican). God is Love. Robinson traces the idea through Tillich and Bonhoeffer. Ingersoll served in the Union Army, and the ashes of the Ingersolls are interred in Arlington Cemetery. On the stone are inscribed his words:
Dr. Smith. former professor of history at Georgetown Washington University, is author of books on Ingersoll and Thomas Paine. An attorney who lives in Washington, D.C., he is a Contributing Editor of The Human Quest.
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