The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. / Interviews

by Robert Green Ingersoll

Back of every act and dream and thought and desire and virtue and crime is the efficient cause. If you wish to change mankind, you must change the conditions. There should be no such thing as punishment. We should endeavor to reform men, and those who cannot be reformed should be placed where they cannot injure their fellows. The State should never take revenge any more than the community should form itself into a mob and take revenge. This does harm, not good. The time will come when the world will no more think of sending men to the penitentiary for stealing, as a punishment, that it will for sending a man to the penitentiary because he has consumption. When that time comes, the object will be to reform men; to prevent crime instead of punishing it, and the object then will be to make the conditions such that honest people will be the result, but as long as hundreds of thousands of human beings live in tenements, as long as babes are raised in gutters, as long as competition is so sharp that hundreds of thousands must of necessity be failures, just so long as society gets down on its knees before the great and successful thieves, before the millionaire thieves, just so long will it have to fill the jails and prisons with the little thieves. When the "good time" comes, men will not be judged by the money they have accumulated, but by the uses they make of it. So men will be judged, not according to their intelligence, but by what they are endeavoring to accomplish with their intelligence. In other words, the time will come when character will rise above all. There is a great line in Shakespeare that I have often quoted, and that cannot be quoted too often: "There is no darkness but ignorance." Let the world set itself to work to dissipate this darkness; let us flood the world with intellectual light. This cannot be accomplished by mobs or lynchers. It must be done by the noblest, by the greatest, and by the best.

[The conversation shifting around to the Sunday question; the opening of the World's Fair on Sunday, the attacks of the pulpit upon the Sunday newspapers, the opening of parks and museums and libraries on Sunday, Colonel Ingersoll waxed eloquent, and in answer to many questions uttered these paragraphs: ]

Of course, people will think that I have some prejudice against the parsons, but really I think the newspaper press is of far more importance in the world than the pulpit. If I should admit in a kind of burst of generosity, and simply for the sake of making a point, that the pulpit can do some good, how much can it do without the aid of the press? Here is a parson preaching to a few ladies and enough men, it may be, to pass the contribution box, and all he says dies within the four walls of that church. How many ministers would it take to reform the world, provided I again admit in a burst of generosity, that there is any reforming power in what they preach, working along that line?

The Sunday newspaper, I think, is the best of any day in the week. That paper keeps hundreds and thousands at home. You can find in it information about almost everything in the world. One of the great Sunday papers will keep a family busy reading almost all day. Now, I do not wonder that the ministers are so opposed to the Sunday newspaper, and so they are opposed to anything calculated to decrease the attendance at church. Why, they want all the parks, all the museums, all the libraries closed on Sunday, and they want the World's Fair closed on Sunday.

Now, I am in favor of Sunday; in fact, I am perfectly willing to have two of them a week, but I want Sunday as a day of recreation and pleasure. The fact is we ought not to work hard enough during the week to require a day of rest. Every day ought to be so arranged that there would be time for rest from the labor of that day. Sunday is a good day to get business out of your mind, to forget the ledger and the docket and the ticker, to forget profits and losses, and enjoy yourself. It is a good day to go to the art museums, to look at pictures and statues and beautiful things, so that you may feel that there is something in this world besides money and mud. It is a good day, is Sunday, to go to the libraries and spend a little time with the great and splendid dead, and to go to the cemetery and think of those who are sleeping there, and to give a little thought to the time when you, too, like them, will fall asleep. I think it is a good day for almost anything except going to church. There is no need of that; everybody knows the story, and if a man has worked hard all the week, you can hardly call it recreation if he goes to church Sunday and hears that his chances are ninety-nine in a hundred in favor of being eternally damned.

So it is I am in favor of having the World's Fair open on Sunday. It will be a good day to look at the best the world has produced; a good day to leave the saloons and commune for a little while with the mighty spirits that have glorified this world. Sunday is a good day to leave the churches, where they teach that man has become totally depraved, and look at the glorious things that have been wrought by these depraved beings. Besides all this, it is the day of days for the working man and working woman, for those who have to work all the week. In New York an attempt was made to open the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday, and the pious people opposed it. They thought it would interfere with the joy of heaven if people were seen in the park enjoying themselves on Sunday, and they also held that nobody would visit the Museum if it were opened on Sunday; that the "common people" had no love for pictures and statues and cared nothing about art. The doors were opened, and it was demonstrated that the poor people, the toilers and workers, did want to see such things on Sunday, and now more people visit the Museum on Sunday than on all the other days of the week put together. The same is true of the public libraries. There is something to me infinitely pharisaical, hypocritical and farcical in this Sunday nonsense. The rich people who favor keeping Sunday "holy," have their coachman drive them to church and wait outside until the services end. What do they care about the coachman's soul? While they are at church their cooks are busy at home getting dinner ready. What do they care for the souls of cooks? The whole thing is pretence, and nothing but pretence. It is the instinct of business. It is the competition of the gospel shop with other shops and places of resort.

The ministers, of course, are opposed to all shows except their own, for they know that very few will come to see or hear them and the choice must be the church or nothing.

I do not believe that one day can be more holy than another unless more joyous than another. The holiest day is the happiest day— the day on which wives and children and men are happiest. In that sense a day can be holy.

Our idea of the Sabbath is from the Puritans, and they imagined that a man has to be miserable in order to excite the love of God. We have outgrown the old New England Sabbath—the old Scotch horror. The Germans have helped us and have set a splendid example. I do not see how a poor workingman can go to church for recreation—I mean an orthodox church. A man who has hell here cannot be benefitted by being assured that he is likely to have hell hereafter. The whole business I hold in perfect abhorrence.

They tell us that God will not prosper us unless we observe the Sabbath. The Jews kept the Sabbath and yet Jehovah deserted them, and they are a people without a nation. The Scotch kept Sunday; they are not independent. The French never kept Sunday, and yet they are the most prosperous nation in Europe.