Part 12

Can we believe that the inspired writer had any idea of the size of the sun? Draw a circle five inches in diameter, and by its side thrust a pin through the paper. The hole made by the pin will sustain about the same relation to the circle that the earth does to the sun. Did he know that the sun was eight hundred and sixty thousand miles in diameter; that it was enveloped in an ocean of fire thousands of miles in depth, hotter even than the Christian's hell? Did he know that the volume of the Earth is less than one-millionth of that of the sun? Did he know of the one hundred and four planets belonging to our solar system, all children of the sun? Did he know of Jupiter eighty-five thousand miles in diameter, hundreds of times as large as our earth, turning on his axis at the rate of twenty-five thousand miles an hour accompanied by four moons making the tour of his orbit once only in fifty years?

388. Something for Nothing

It is impossible for me to conceive of something being created for nothing. Nothing, regarded in the light of raw material, is a decided failure. I cannot conceive of matter apart from force. Neither is it possible to think of force disconnected with matter. You cannot imagine matter going back to absolute nothing. Neither can you imagine nothing being changed into something. You may be eternally damned if you do not say that you can conceive these things, but you cannot conceive them. Account but I cannot help it. In my judgment Moses was mistaken.

389. Polygamy

Polygamy is just as pure in Utah as it could have been in the promised land. Love and virtue are the same the whole world around, and justice is the same in every star. All the languages of the world are not sufficient to express the filth of polygamy. It makes of man a beast, of woman a trembling slave. It destroys the fireside, makes virtue an outcast, takes from human speech its sweetest words, and leaves the heart a den, where crawl and hiss the slimy serpents of most loathsome lust. Civilization rests upon the family. The good family is the unit of good government. The virtues grow about the holy hearth of home--they cluster, bloom, and shed their perfume round the fireside where the one man loves the one woman.

Lover--husband--wife--mother--father--child--home!--without these sacred words the world is but a lair, and men and women merely beasts.

390. The Colonel in the Kitchen--How to Cook a Beefsteak

There ought to be a law making it a crime, punishable by imprisonment, to fry a beefsteak. Broil it; it is just as easy, and when broiled it is delicious. Fried beefsteak is not fit for a wild beast. You can broil even on a stove. Shut the front damper--open the back one, and then take off a griddle. There will then be a draft down through this opening. Put on your steak, using a wire broiler, and not a particle of smoke will touch it, for the reason that the smoke goes down. If you try to broil it with the front damper open the smoke will rise. For broiling, coal, even soft coal, makes a better fire than wood.

391. Fresh Air

Make your houses comfortable. Do not huddle together in a little room around a red-hot stove, with every window fastened down. Do not live in this poisoned atmosphere, and then, when one of your children dies, put a piece in the papers commencing with, "Whereas, it has pleased divine Providence to remove from our midst--." Have plenty of air, and plenty of warmth. Comfort is health. Do not imagine anything is unhealthy simply because it is pleasant. This is an old and foolish idea.

392. Cooking a Fine Art

Cooking is one of the fine arts. Give your wives and daughters things to cook, and things to cook with, and they will soon become most excellent cooks. Good cooking is the basis of civilization. The man whose arteries and veins are filled with rich blood made of good and well cooked food, has pluck, courage, endurance and noble impulses. Remember that your wife should have things to cook with.

393. Scathing Impeachment of Intemperance

Intemperance cuts down youth in its vigor, manhood in its strength, and age in its weakness. It breaks the father's heart, bereaves the doting mother, extinguishes natural affections, erases conjugal loves, blots out filial attachments, blights parental hope, and brings down mourning age in sorrow to the grave. It produces weakness, not strength; sickness, not health; death, not life. It makes wives widows; children orphans; fathers fiends, and all of them paupers and beggars. It feeds rheumatism, nurses gout, welcomes epidemics, invites cholera, imports pestilence and embraces consumption. It covers the land with idleness, misery and crime. It fills your jails, supplies your almshouses and demands your asylums. It engenders controversies, fosters quarrels, and cherishes riots. It crowds your penitentiaries and furnishes victims to your scaffolds. It is the life blood of the gambler, the element of the burglar, the prop of the highwayman and the support of the midnight incendiary. It countenances the liar, respects the thief, esteems the blasphemer. It violates obligations, reverences fraud, and honors infamy. It defames benevolence, hates love, scorns virtue and slanders innocence. It incites the father to butcher his helpless offspring, helps the husband to massacre his wife, and the child to grind the parricidal ax. It burns up men, consumes women, detests life, curses God, and despises heaven. It suborns witnesses, nurses perjury, defiles the jury box, and stains the judicial ermine. It degrades the citizen, debases the legislator, dishonors statesmen, and disarms the patriot. It brings shame, not honor; terror, not safety; despair, not hope; misery, not happiness; and with the malevolence of a fiend, it calmly surveys its frightful desolation, and unsatisfied with its havoc, it poisons felicity, kills peace, ruins morals, blights confidence, slays reputation, and wipes out national honors, then curses the world and laughs at its ruin.

394. Liberty Defined

The French convention gave the best definition of liberty I have ever read: "The liberty of one citizen ceases only where the liberty of another citizen commences." I know of no better definition. I ask you to-day to make a declaration of individual independence. And if you are independent, be just. Allow everybody else to make his declaration of individual independence. Allow your wife, allow your husband, allow your children to make theirs. It is a grand thing to be the owner of yourself. It is a grand thing to protect the rights of others. It is a sublime thing to be free and just.

395. Free, Honest Thought

I am going to say what little I can to make the American people brave enough and generous enough and kind enough to give everybody else the rights they have themselves. Can there ever be any progress in this world to amount to anything until we have liberty? The thoughts of a man who is not free are not worth much--not much. A man who thinks with the club of a creed above his head--a man who thinks casting his eye askance at the flames of hell, is not apt to have very good thoughts. And for my part, I would not care to have any status or social position even in heaven if I had to admit that I never would have been there only I got scared. When we are frightened we do not think very well. If you want to get at the honest thoughts of a man he must free. If he is not free you will not get his honest thought.

396. Ingersoll Prefers Shoemakers to Princes

The other day there came shoemakers, potters, workers in wood and iron, from Europe, and they were received in the city of New York as though they had been princes. They had been sent by the great republic of France to examine into the arts and manufactures of the great republic of America. They looked a thousand times better to me than the Edward Alberts and Albert Edwards--the royal vermin, that live on the body politic. And I would think much more of our government if it would fete and feast them, instead of wining and dining the imbeciles of a royal line.

397. Sham Dignity

I hate dignity. I never saw a dignified man that was not after all an old idiot Dignity is a mask; a dignified man is afraid that you will know he does not know everything. A man of sense and argument is always willing to admit what he don't know--why?--because there is so much that he does know; and that is the first step towards learning anything--willingness to admit what you don't know, and when you don't understand a thing, ask--no matter how small and silly it may look to other people--ask, and after that you know. A man never is in a state of mind that he can learn until he gets that dignified nonsense out of him.

398. A Good Time Coming!

The time is coming when a man will be rated at his real worth, and that by his brain and heart. We care nothing now about an officer unless he fills his place. The time will come when no matter how much money a man has he will not be respected unless he is using it for the benefit of his fellow-men. It will soon be here.

399. Who is the True Nobleman?

We are a great people. Three millions have increased to fifty--thirteen States to thirty-eight. We have better homes, and more of the conveniences of life than any other people upon the face of the globe. The farmers of our country live better than did the kings and princes two hundred years ago--and they have twice as much sense and heart. Liberty and labor have given us all. Remember that all men have equal rights. Remember that the man who acts best his part--who loves his friends the best--is most willing to help others--truest to the obligation--who has the best heart--the most feeling--the deepest sympathies--and who freely gives to others the rights that he claims for himself, is the true nobleman. We have disfranchised the aristocrats of the air and have given one country to mankind.

400. Wanted!--More Manliness

I had a thousand times rather have a farm and be independent, than to be President of the United States, without independence, filled with doubt and trembling, feeling of the popular pulse, resorting to art and artifice, inquiring about the wind of opinion, and succeeding at last in losing my self-respect without gaining the respect of others. Man needs more manliness, more real independence. We must take care of ourselves. This we can do by labor, and in this way we can preserve our independence. We should try and choose that business or profession the pursuit of which will give us the most happiness. Happiness is wealth. We can be happy without being rich--without holding office--without being famous. I am not sure that we can be happy with wealth, with office, or with fame.

401. Education of Nature

It has been a favorite idea with me that our forefathers were educated by nature; that they grew grand as the continent upon which they landed; that the great rivers--the wide plains--the splendid lakes--the lonely forests--the sublime mountains--that all these things stole into and became a part of their being, and they grew great as the country in which they lived. They began to hate the narrow, contracted views of Europe. They were educated by their surroundings.

402. The Worker Wearing the Purple

I want to see a workingman have a good house, painted white, grass in the front yard, carpets on the floor and pictures on the wall. I want to see him a man feeling that he is a king by the divine right of living in the Republic. And every man here is just a little bit a king, you know. Every man here is a part of the sovereign power. Every man wears a little of purple; every man has a little of crown and a little of sceptre; and every man that will sell his vote for money or be ruled by prejudice is unfit to be an American citizen.

403. Flowers

Beautify your grounds with plants and flowers and vines. Have good gardens. Remember that everything of beauty tends to the elevation of man. Every little morning-glory whose purple bosom is thrilled with the amorous kisses of the sun tends to put a blossom in your heart. Do not judge of the value of everything by the market reports. Every flower about a house certifies to the refinement of somebody. Every vine, climbing and blossoming, tells of love and joy.

404. Be Happy--Here and Now!

The grave is not a throne, and a corpse is not a king. The living have a right to control this world. I think a good deal more of to day than I do of yesterday, and I think more of to-morrow than I do of this day; because it is nearly gone--that is the way I feel. The time to be happy is now; the way to be happy is to make somebody else happy and the place to be happy is here.

405. The School House a Fort

Education is the most radical thing in the world.

To teach the alphabet is to inaugurate a revolution. To build a school house is to construct a fort. A library is an arsenal.

406. We are Getting Free

We are getting free. We are thinking in every direction. We are investigating with the microscope and the telescope. We are digging into the earth and finding souvenirs of all the ages. We are finding out something about the laws of health and disease. We are adding years to the span of human life and we are making the world fit to live in. That is what we are doing, and every man that has an honest thought and expresses it helps, and every man that tries to keep honest thought from being expressed is an obstruction and a hindrance.

407. The Solid Rock

I have made up my mind that if there is a God He will be merciful to the merciful. Upon that rock I stand. That He will forgive the forgiving; upon that rock I stand. That every man should be true to himself, and that there is no world, no star, in which honesty is a crime; and upon that rock I stand. An honest man, a good, kind, sweet woman, or a happy child, has nothing to fear, neither in this world nor the world to come; and upon that rock I stand.

INGERSOLL'S FIVE GOSPELS

408. The Gospel of Cheerfulness

I believe in the gospel of cheerfulness; the gospel of good nature; in the gospel of good health. Let us pay some attention to our bodies; take care of our bodies, and our souls will take care of themselves. Good health! I believe the time will come when the public thought will be so great and grand that it will be looked upon as infamous to perpetuate disease. I believe the time will come when men will not fill the future with consumption and with insanity. I believe the time will come when with studying ourselves and understanding the laws of health, we will say we are under obligations to put the flags of health in the cheeks of our children. Even if I got to Heaven, and had a harp, I would hate to look back upon my children and see them diseased, deformed, crazed, all suffering the penalty of crimes that I had committed.

409. The Gospel of Liberty

And I believe, too, in the gospel of liberty,---of giving to others what we claim. And I believe there is room everywhere for thought, and the more liberty you give away the more you will have. In liberty extravagance is economy. Let us be just, let us be generous to each other.

410. The Gospel of 'Good Living

I believe in the gospel of good living. You cannot make any God happy by fasting. Let us have good food, and let us have it well cooked; it is a thousand times better to know how to cook it than it is to understand any theology in the world. I believe in the gospel of good clothes. I believe in the gospel of good houses; in the gospel of water and soap.

411. The Gospel of Intelligence

I believe in the gospel of intelligence. That is the only lever capable of raising mankind. I believe in the gospel of intelligence; in the gospel of education. The school-house is my cathedral; the universe is my Bible. Intelligence must rule triumphant. Humanity is the grand religion. And no God can put a man into hell in another world who has made a little heaven in this. God cannot make miserable a man who has made somebody else happy. God can not hate anybody who is capable of loving his neighbor. So I believe in this great gospel of generosity. Ah, but they say it won't do. You must believe. I say no. My gospel of health will prolong life; my gospel of intelligence, my gospel of loving, my gospel of good-fellowship will cover the world with happy homes. My doctrine will put carpets upon your floors, pictures upon your walls. My doctrine will put books upon your shelves, ideas in your mind. My doctrine will relieve the world of the abnormal monsters born of the ignorance of superstition. My doctrine will give us health, wealth, and happiness. That is what I want. That is what I believe in.

412. The Gospel of Justice

I believe in the gospel of justice,--that we must reap what we sow. I do not believe in forgiveness. If I rob Mr. Smith, and God forgive me, how does that help Smith? If I by slander cover some poor girl with the leprosy of some imputed crime, and she withers away like a blighted flower, and afterwards I get forgiveness, how does that help her? If there is another world, we have got to settle; no bankruptcy court there. Pay down. Among the ancient Jews if you committed a crime you had to kill a sheep; now they say, "Charge it. Put it on the slate." It won't do. For every crime you commit you must answer to yourself and to the one you injure. And if you have ever clothed another with unhappiness as with a garment cf pain, you will never be quite as happy as though you hadn't done that thing. No forgiveness, eternal, inexorable, everlasting justice--that is what I believe in.

And if it goes hard with me, I will stand it. And I will stick to my logic, and I will bear it like a man.

GEMS FROM THE CONTROVERSIAL GASKET

Latest Utterances of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, in a Controversy with Judge Jere 8. Black, on "The Christian Religion"

413. The Origin of the Controversy

Several months ago, _The North American Review_ asked me to write an article, saying that it would be published if some one would furnish a reply. I wrote the article that appeared in the August number, and by me it was entitled "Is All of the Bible Inspired?" Not until the article was written did I know who was expected to answer. I make this explanation for the purpose of dissipating the impression that Mr. Black had been challenged by me. To have struck his shield with my lance might have given birth to the impression that I was somewhat doubtful as to the correctness of my position. I naturally expected an answer from some professional theologian, and was surprised to find that a reply had been written by a "policeman," who imagined that he had answered my arguments by simply telling me that my statements were false. It is somewhat unfortunate that in a discussion like this any one should resort to the slightest personal detraction. The theme is great enough to engage the highest faculties of the human mind, and in the investigation of such a subject vituperation is singularly and vulgarly out of place. Arguments cannot be answered with insults. It is unfortunate that the intellectual arena should be entered by a "policeman," who has more confidence in concussion than discussion. Kindness is strength. Good nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm. Intelligence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice. Candor is the courage of the soul. Leaving the objectionable portion of Mr. Black's reply, feeling that so grand a subject should not be blown and tainted with malicious words, I proceed to answer as best I may the arguments he has urged.

414. What is Christianity?

Of course it is still claimed that we are a Christian people, indebted to something we call Christianity, for all the progress we have made. There is still a vast difference of opinion as to what Christianity really is, although many wavering sects have been discussing that question, with fire and sword through centuries of creed and crime. Every new sect has been denounced at its birth as illegitimate, as something born out of orthodox wedlock, and that should have been allowed to perish on the steps where it was found.

415. Summary of Evangelical Belief

Among the evangelical churches there is a substantial agreement upon what they consider the fundamental truths of the gospel. These fundamental truths, as I understand them, are:--That there is a personal God, the creator of the material universe; that he made man of the dust, and woman from part of the man; that the man and woman were tempted by the devil; that they were turned out of the garden of Eden; that, about fifteen hundred years afterward, God's patience having been exhausted by the wickedness of mankind, He drowned His children, with the exception of eight persons; that afterward He selected from their descendants Abraham, and through him the Jewish people; that He gave laws to these people, and tried to govern them in all things; that He made known His will in many ways; that He wrought a vast number of miracles; that He inspired men to write the Bible; that, in the fullness of time, it having been found impossible to reform mankind, this God came upon earth as a child born of the Virgin Mary; that He lived in Palestine; that He preached for about three years, going from place to place, occasionally raising the dead, curing the blind and the halt; that He was crucified--for the crime of blasphemy, as the Jews supposed, but, that as a matter of fact, He was offered as a sacrifice for the sins of all who might have faith in Him; that He was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven, where He now is, making intercession for His followers; that He will forgive the sins of all who believe on Him, and that those who do not believe will be consigned to the dungeons of eternal pain. These--(it may be with the addition of the sacraments of Baptism and the Last Supper)--constitute what is generally known as the Christian religion.

416. A Profound Change in the World of Thought

A profound change has taken place in the world of thought. The pews are trying to set themselves somewhat above the pulpit. The layman discusses theology with the minister, and smiles. Christians excuse themselves for belonging to the church by denying a part of the creed. The idea is abroad that they who know the most of nature believe the least about theology. The sciences are regarded as infidels, and facts as scoffers. Thousands of most excellent people avoid churches, and, with few exceptions, only those attend prayer meetings who wish to be alone. The pulpit is losing because the people are rising.

417. The Believer in the Inspiration of the Bible has too Much to Believe