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Show INDICTMENT OF INGERSOLL. Prom One Who Grants the Possibility Possibil-ity of Honest Atheism. Harry Thurston Peck of Columbia j university, writing in a recent issue of j the Bookman about Robert Ingersoll, grants, for argument's sake, that the whole Christian system is wrong, and that unbelief like Ingersoll's is justified. justi-fied. What follows? Should he imitate imi-tate Ingersoll by spreading his ideas? We let Mr. Thurston speak for himself: him-self: Th unquestioning believer never feels the loneliness of isolation; he never lacks the comfort that arises from eternal eter-nal hope. In sickness and in sorrow and at the gates of death his faith supports sup-ports him as by an invisible hand within with-in his own: while bevond the darkness of the fleeting moment there is always seen the golden glimmer of that eternal eter-nal promise on which his soul relies forever. Grant, if you will, that he is wrong; that his belief is a delusion; that he is buoyed up by unrealities, and still it is not easy to explain just why it Is one's duty to destroy his faith, to quench for him the light, to cast him shuddering into darkness and despair, to rob him of his only source of consolation. For if this life on earth be all of life, then who shall dare to say that duty bids the utterance of a single word to make it barer, blacker and more dreadful to endure. So far from doing this, the unbeliever who is animated by a true benevolence should hide his unbelief and keep it as a fearful fear-ful secret; for in the preaching of it to the destruction of that faith which gives serenity and happiness there is something little less than devilish. Grant also, if you will, that all the doctrines of revealed religion are without with-out authority; yet who can fail to see that the life which they inculcate is the purest, noblest, most self-sacrificing life that men can live? Mercy and truth and honor and chastity and justice all find their most sublime expression in the 'Book which the believer reverences. How can it be the duty of a wise, far-seeing far-seeing man to foul with mockery and cynical contempt the source of so wondrous won-drous an influence for good? What have you gained when you have taught the simple-minded man to look with doubt and mistrust upon the volume whence from childhood he has drawn his motives for an upright; honest, honorable hon-orable life? Will you supply an ethical ethi-cal system of your own? This you may try to do, just as did Colonel Ingersoll; for he at times put forth some generalities general-ities on the value of good works and of good will toward men; yet when you have succeeded in destroying that belief which-gives vitality to moral teaching it is never easy. to build up a substitute. substi-tute. And if men begin to find it difficult diffi-cult to accept the doctrine of an om niscient Deity, they will find it quite as difficult to pin their faith to an omniscient om-niscient Ingersoll. And so, whether we regard it a question ques-tion of mere happiness, or whether we prefer to think, of it upon its purely ethical and moral side, there is only one conclusion to be drawn. Let him who cannot honestly believe hold to his doubt, or to his unbelief; yet if he speaks one word to shake the faith of others, then he assumes a terrible responsibility; responsi-bility; for he is destroying that in place of which he can have absolutely nothing to bestow. Robert Ingersoll is dead. Death came to him with swiftness and without with-out a warning. Whether he was even conscious of his end no man can say. It may be that before the spark grew quite extinct '.here was for him a moment of perception that one appalling moment when within a space of time too brief for human computation, the affrighted mind, as It reels upon the brink of dissolution, dis-solution, flashes its vivid thought through all the years of its existence, and perceives the final meaning of them all. If such a moment came to him. and as the light of day grew dim before his dying eyes his mind looked DacKwaru tnrough tne past, there can have been .small consolation in the thought that in all the utterances of his public teaching and in all the phrases of his fervid eloquence there was nothing that could help to malce the life of man on earth more noble or more spiritual or more truly worth the living. |