The Mistake of Col. Ingersoll.
By Editor
Col. Ingersoll of Illinois is just now the prince of infidel ranters. A genuine orator, ready of speech and language, with a species of rollicking boldness which makes him quite at home with the atheists of the “Great West,” he has become suddenly famous for his attacks on Christianity and the Bible. His efforts in New York were a failure,—a “lamentable failure” to himself and special friends, but, which caused the lovers of truth and justice to rejoice. He has neither depth nor consistency, and he found himself stranded when he got beyond his admirers on the prairies. Recently he delivered a lecture entitled “The Mistakes of Moses.” In this, of course, he attempted to show by the errors of the Mosaic record that Moses was utterly unreliable. That lecture was reviewed, among others by Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, of Cincinnati, who very successfully punctured the bubble blown up by Col. Ingersoll. This review, which has been labeled “Mistakes of Col. Ingersoll,” was highly approved by all classes, both Protestant and Catholic. He conclusively proved as all agreed, the unreliability of Ingersoll as a critic, and his errors in dealing with matters of fact. We call the effort itself “the mistake of Col. Ingersoll.” In bitter denunciation,—in the use of sarcastic, malignant, abusive language, and in misrepresenting the Bible, Christianity, and Christians—the Colonel is a brilliant success. But when he attempted to deal with statements of facts, and put himself upon a record where thought and reason could be brought to bear upon him, he proved a failure. Ribald jeers and coarse sarcastic jokes, generally the stock in trade of infidelity, cannot be easily met with reason and facts. But whenever infidelity attempts to deal with facts it is sure to be met successfully. Voltaire had some excuse for his opposition to Christianity, in the dark and iniquitous form in which Christianity was presented to him by the papal church with which he came in contact. But his misrepresentations of the Bible are without excuse. They proceeded solely from a hatred of the things of God, growing out of the corruption of his own heart, which was manifested in the licentiousness of his life. And all opposition to the Bible is traceable to the same source.