The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Volume VIII Part 48

Honest commerce will do a thousand times more good than all the missionaries on earth. I do not believe that an intelligent Chinaman or an intelligent Hindoo has ever been or ever will be converted into a Methodist. If Methodism is good we need it here, and if it is not good, do not fool the heathen with it.

--_The Press_, Cleveland, Ohio, November 12, 1891.

MY BELIEF AND UNBELIEF.*

[* Col. Robert G. Ingersoll was in Toledo for a few hours yesterday afternoon on railroad business. Whatever Mr.

Ingersoll says is always read with interest, for besides the independence of his averments, his ideas are worded in a way that in itself is attractive.

While in the court room talking with some of the officials and others, he was saying that in this world there is rather an unequal distribution of comforts, rewards, and punishments. For himself, he had fared pretty well. He stated that during the thirty years he has been married there have been fifteen to twenty of his relatives under the same roof, but never had there been in his family a death or a night's loss of sleep on account of sickness.

"The Lord has been pretty good to you," suggested Marshall Wade.

"Well, I've been pretty good to him," he answered.]

_Question_. I have heard people in discussing yourself and your views, express the belief that way down in the depths of your mind you are not altogether a "disbeliever." Are they in any sense correct?

_Answer_. I am an unbeliever, and I am a believer. I do not believe in the miraculous, the supernatural, or the impossible.

I do not believe in the "Mosaic" account of the creation, or in the flood, or the Tower of Babel, or that General Joshua turned back the sun or stopped the earth. I do not believe in the Jonah story, or that G.o.d and the Devil troubled poor Job. Neither do I believe in the Mt. Sinai business, and I have my doubts about the broiled quails furnished in the wilderness. Neither do I believe that man is wholly depraved. I have not the least faith in the Eden, snake and apple story. Neither do I believe that G.o.d is an eternal jailer; that he is going to be the warden of an everlasting penitentiary in which the most of men are to be eternally tormented.

I do not believe that any man can be justly punished or rewarded on account of his belief.

But I do believe in the n.o.bility of human nature. I believe in love and home, and kindness and humanity. I believe in good fellows.h.i.+p and cheerfulness, in making wife and children happy.

I believe in good nature, in giving to others all the rights that you claim for yourself. I believe in free thought, in reason, observation and experience. I believe in self-reliance and in expressing your honest thought. I have hope for the whole human race. What will happen to one, will, I hope, happen to all, and that, I hope, will be good. Above all, I believe in Liberty.

--_The Blade_, Toledo, Ohio, January 9, 1892.

MUST RELIGION GO?

_Question_. What is your idea as to the difference between honest belief, as held by honest religious thinkers, and heterodoxy?

_Answer_. Of course, I believe that there are thousands of men and women who honestly believe not only in the improbable, not only in the absurd, but in the impossible. Heterodoxy, so-called, occupies the half-way station between superst.i.tion and reason. A heretic is one who is still dominated by religion, but in the east of whose mind there is a dawn. He is one who has seen the morning star; he has not entire confidence in the day, and imagines in some way that even the light he sees was born of the night. In the mind of the heretic, darkness and light are mingled, the ties of intellectual kindred bind him to the night, and yet he has enough of the spirit of adventure to look toward the east. Of course, I admit that Christians and heretics are both honest; a real Christian must be honest and a real heretic must be the same. All men must be honest in what they think; but all men are not honest in what they say. In the invisible world of the mind every man is honest.

The judgment never was bribed. Speech may be false, but conviction is always honest. So that the difference between honest belief, as shared by honest religious thinkers and heretics, is a difference of intelligence. It is the difference between a s.h.i.+p lashed to the dock, and on making a voyage; it is the difference between twilight and dawn--that is to say, the coming of the sight and the coming of the morning.

_Question_. Are women becoming freed from the bonds of sectarianism?

_Answer_. Women are less calculating than men. As a rule they do not occupy the territory of compromise. They are natural extremists.

The woman who is not dominated by superst.i.tion is apt to be absolutely free, and when a woman has broken the shackles of superst.i.tion, she has no apprehension, no fears. She feels that she is on the open sea, and she cares neither for wind nor wave. An emanc.i.p.ated woman never can be re-enslaved. Her heart goes with her opinions, and goes first.

_Question_. Do you consider that the influence of religion is better than the influence of Liberalism upon society, that is to say, is society less or more moral, is vice more or less conspicuous?

_Answer_. Whenever a chain is broken an obligation takes its place.

There is and there can be no responsibility without liberty. The freer a man is, the more responsible, the more accountable he feels; consequently the more liberty there is, the more morality there is. Believers in religion teach us that G.o.d will reward men for good actions, but men who are intellectually free, know that the reward of a good action cannot be given by any power, but that it is the natural result of the good action. The free man, guided by intelligence, knows that his reward is in the nature of things, and not in the caprice even of the Infinite. He is not a good and faithful servant, he is an intelligent free man.

The vicious are ignorant; real morality is the child of intelligence; the free and intelligent man knows that every action must be judged by its consequences; he knows that if he does good he reaps a good harvest; he knows that if he does evil he bears a burden, and he knows that these good and evil consequences are not determined by an infinite master, but that they live in and are produced by the actions themselves.

--_Evening Advertiser_, New York, February 6, 1892.

WORD PAINTING AND COLLEGE EDUCATION.

_Question_. What is the history of the speech delivered here in 1876? Was it extemporaneous?

_Answer_. It was not born entirely of the occasion. It took me several years to put the thoughts in form--to paint the pictures with words. No man can do his best on the instant. Iron to be beaten into perfect form has to be heated several times and turned upon the anvil many more, and hammered long and often.

You might as well try to paint a picture with one sweep of the brush, or chisel a statue with one stroke, as to paint many pictures with words, without great thought and care. Now and then, while a man is talking, heated with his subject, a great thought, sudden as a flash of lightning, illumines the intellectual sky, and a great sentence clothed in words of purple, falls, or rather rushes, from his lips--but a continuous flight is born, not only of enthusiasm, but of long and careful thought. A perfect picture requires more details, more lights and shadows, than the mind can grasp at once, or on the instant. Thoughts are not born of chance.

They grow and bud and blossom, and bear the fruit of perfect form.

Genius is the soil and climate, but the soil must be cultivated, and the harvest is not instantly after the planting. It takes time and labor to raise and harvest a crop from that field called the brain.

_Question_. Do you think young men need a college education to get along?

_Answer_. Probably many useless things are taught in colleges.

I think, as a rule, too much time is wasted learning the names of the cards without learning to play a game. I think a young man should be taught something that he can use--something he can sell.

After coming from college he should be better equipped to battle with the world--to do something of use. A man may have his brain stuffed with Greek and Latin without being able to fill his stomach with anything of importance. Still, I am in favor of the highest education. I would like to see splendid schools in every State, and then a university, and all scholars pa.s.sing a certain examination sent to the State university free, and then a United States university, the best in the world, and all graduates of the State universities pa.s.sing a certain examination sent to the United States university free. We ought to have in this country the best library, the best university, the best school of design in the world; and so I say, more money for the mind.

_Question_. Was the peculiar conduct of the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, of New York, justifiable, and do you think that it had a tendency to help morality?

_Answer_. If Christ had written a decoy letter to the woman to whom he said: "Go and sin no more," and if he had disguised himself and visited her house and had then lodged a complaint against her before the police and testified against her, taking one of his disciples with him, I do not think he would have added to his reputation.

--_The News_, Indianapolis, Indiana, February 18, 1892.

PERSONAL MAGNETISM AND THE SUNDAY QUESTION.

[Colonel Ingersoll was a picturesque figure as he sat in his room at the Gibson House yesterday, while the balmy May breeze blew through the open windows, fluttered the lace curtains and tossed the great Infidel's snowy hair to and fro. The Colonel had come in from New York during the morning and the keen white sunlight of a lovely May day filled his heart with gladness. After breakfast, the man who preaches the doctrine of the Golden Rule and the Gospel of Humanity and the while chaffs the gentlemen of the clerical profession, was in a fine humor. He was busy with cards and callers, but not too busy to admire the vase full of freshly-picked spring flowers that stood on the mantel, and wrestled with clouds of cigar smoke, to see which fragrance should dominate the atmosphere.

To a reporter of _The Commercial Gazette_, the Colonel spoke freely and interestingly upon a variety of subjects, from personal magnetism in politics to mob rule in Tennessee. He had been interested in Colonel Weir's statement about the lack of gas in Exposition Hall, at the 1876 convention, and when asked if he believed there was any truth in the stories that the gas supply had been manipulated so as to prevent the taking of a ballot after he had placed James G. Blaine in nomination, he replied: ]

All I can say is, that I heard such a story the day after the convention, but I do not know whether or not it is true. I have always believed, that if a vote had been taken that evening, Blaine would have been nominated, possibly not as the effect of my speech, but the night gave time for trafficking, and that is always dangerous in a convention. I believed then that Blaine ought to have been nominated, and that it would have been a very wise thing for the party to have done. That he was not the candidate was due partly to accident and partly to political traffic, but that is one of the bygones, and I believe there is an old saying to the effect that even the G.o.ds have no mastery over the past.

_Question_. Do you think that eloquence is potent in a convention to set aside the practical work of politics and politicians?

_Answer_. I think that all the eloquence in the world cannot affect a trade if the parties to the contract stand firm, and when people have made a political trade they are not the kind of people to be affected by eloquence. The practical work of the world has very little to do with eloquence. There are a great many thousand stone masons to one sculptor, and houses and walls are not constructed by sculptors, but by masons. The daily wants of the world are supplied by the practical workers, by men of talent, not by men of genius, although in the world of invention, genius has done more, it may be, than the workers themselves. I fancy the machinery now in the world does the work of many hundreds of millions; that there is machinery enough now to do several times the work that could be done by all the men, women and children of the earth. The genius who invented the reaper did more work and will do more work in the harvest field than thousands of millions of men, and the same may be said of the great engines that drive the locomotives and the s.h.i.+ps. All these marvelous machines were made by men of genius, but they are not the men who in fact do the work.

[This led the Colonel to pay a brilliant tribute to the great orators of ancient and modern times, the peer of all of them being Cicero. He dissected and defined oratory and eloquence, and explained with picturesque figures, wherein the difference between them lay. As he mentioned the magnetism of public speakers, he was asked as to his opinion of the value of personal magnetism in political life.]

It may be difficult to define what personal magnetism is, but I think it may be defined in this way: You don't always feel like asking a man whom you meet on the street what direction you should take to reach a certain point. You often allow three or four to pa.s.s, before you meet one who seems to invite the question. So, too, there are men by whose side you may sit for hours in the cars without venturing a remark as to the weather, and there are others to whom you will commence talking the moment you sit down. There are some men who look as if they would grant a favor, men toward whom you are unconsciously drawn, men who have a real human look, men with whom you seem to be acquainted almost before you speak, and that you really like before you know anything about them. It may be that we are all electric batteries; that we have our positive and our negative poles; it may be that we need some influence that certain others impart, and it may be that certain others have that which we do not need and which we do not want, and the moment you think that, you feel annoyed and hesitate, and uncomfortable, and possibly hateful.

I suppose there is a physical basis for everything. Possibly the best test of real affection between man and woman, or of real friends.h.i.+p between man and woman, is that they can sit side by side, for hours maybe, without speaking, and yet be having a really social time, each feeling that the other knows exactly what they are thinking about. Now, the man you meet and whom you would not hesitate a moment to ask a favor of, is what I call a magnetic man.

This magnetism, or whatever it may be, a.s.sists in making friends, and of course is a great help to any one who deals with the public.