Colonel Robert Ingersoll is a man of about sixty, six feet high, and strongly built, a colossus physically and intellectually; the eyes sparkle with wit and beam with the joy of life; the mouth is humorous and smiling; the head large and well planted on broad shoulders; the face shaven; the brain bristling with great thoughts; a man with the heart of a lion to fight the battles of life, but the heart of a woman in presence of human suffering.
He has substituted for the love of religion the religion of love and of the family. According to him, religion should have but one aim: to teach us how to be happy in this life. He repeats, with Christ: "Love one another; do not to others what you would not have others do to you." And he adds: "A God that is represented as weaving webs to catch the souls of men whom he has created is not adorable." As to a future life, the Colonel does not commit himself. He says: "We do not know, we cannot tell, whether death is a door or a wall: a spreading of pinions to soar or the folding of wings for ever." In the eyes of many pious people his theories are abominable, and he is the Antichrist: but the Americans are unanimous in admitting his extraordinary talents; and among the dear friends of the Colonel and his family are many Presbyterians, some of them ministers.
Antichrist, if you will—that is, if you can imagine such a personage endowed with every moral and intellectual faculty. In his presence, men feel themselves small, and women put their hands over their eyes, being careful to keep the fingers well apart. A decidedly dangerous Antichrist, this.
Mr. Ingersoll is not only America's greatest living orator, he is a great writer and a great thinker: an infusion, as it were, of Johnson, Voltaire, and Milton. He possesses the logic of the first, the persiflage of the second, and some of the sublimity of the third. His arguments are constructed like geometrical propositions; his style is vigorous, as clear as it is graceful, as poetic as it is humorous; and his verve is inexhaustible.
The trinity that he worships is the trinity of Science: Reason, Observation, and Experience.
His enemies call him Atheist, because he does not believe in their God. Man has made unto himself a God in his own image, and is apt to treat as Atheists all who do not worship him.
But Voltaire himself, who said that "if a God did not already exist, it would be necessary to invent Him," is still called an Atheist by many ignorant people.
I never heard Mr. Ingersoll say he did not believe in a God.
He will not acknowledge the existence of Jehovah, the God of the Jews: a God who commanded the people of His choice to exterminate their enemies, sparing neither old men, women, nor children. In his eyes Jehovah is a myth, the creation of a cowardly, ungrateful, and bloodthirsty race.
Mr. Ingersoll is not the only earnest seeker after truth who has been puzzled to reconcile the idea of this cruel, revengeful, implacable deity with that of the gentle, merciful Saviour who taught the doctrine of love and forgiveness in Palestine, and bade His disciples put up their swords in the presence of His persecutors.