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Show Beecher on Ingersoll. Both are popular and prominent men. Here is what the Brooklyn preacher said recently of the lecturer; "I have had occasion recently to listen ? the Brookly ? of music to Mr. Ingersoll and to admire the lambent ply of his wit and to form some idea of its lightening power when it is made to interpret the doctrines and creeds of the church. The mistake that Mr. Ingersoll makes it to take the excrescences? that are of human origin that have grown around and about the religion of Christ and represent them as the religion of Christianity and the religion of the church, and then, with his play of fancy at the same time sweep away the truth and influence of those who have lived and are living a true religious life. If I were to establish a new school of medicine, and if I were to collect all the idiots and all the men who had warts on their faces, and say, "there's humanity for you; what do you think of it?" I should be doing what Ingersoll is doing when he takes single instance from the old and new Testaments and represents himself, through them, as opposed to religion, and in so doing gives ? portrait use of it. There were such criticisms upon the Bible hundreds of years before Ingersoll was born. I am afraid he does not read his Bible very much, and when he does read it he does not find the honey and marrow of it. When I look upon the dove as she flies in the ambient air with her eye resting upon the fields and the inhabitants of man I see that which gives me joy, but when I see the vulture flying high I know that it is a bird that is looking for another harvest, and that there is nothing that is loathsome, nothing that is of the nature of carrion, that it fails to see. It is so with Mr. Ingersoll. |