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 God 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 God 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 nobility of human nature. I believe in love and home, and kindness and humanity. I believe in good fellowship 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.