St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1885-05-24

Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, the silver
tOngued orator, successful advocate and
famous agnostic, arrived in Minneapolis
yesterday afternoon. He was accompanied
by A. n. Baker, his business manager, and
by Miss Maud, his youngest daughter, a
pleasing and accomplished young lady, yet
in her teens. The party drove to the West
hotel, and after late dinner the colonel
retired to his room on the second
floor and was invisible until the
hour for the lecture. About dusk
a GLOBE reporter was admitted to the room
and found the distinguished infidel up to
his elbows in interviews. 1t is one of his
inyariable rules when visited by a newspa-
per searcher for truth to conduct the s'con-
versation" strictly in writing. The newspa-
per man who wants to get the colonel must
know exactly what he wants and have his
questions succinctly stated. whereupon the
interviewed reads them and appends his an
swers or strikes out the question, as the
case may be.
Since his last visit here Col. Ingersoll has
changed but little. His large, round and
closely-cropped head shows a few more
streaks of silver, and perhaps a couple of
stone have been added to his weight,
but otherwise he is unchanged.
Not even the overthrow of the
party Of his love has taken from his eye its
merry twinkle or added another to the few
wrinkles that outline the character in his
face. He said he had nothing new in the
line Of an interview to give, but offered,
with cheerful resignation, to answer a few
of the old stere0typed questions, if written,
such as: What do you think of Cleveland's
oil sc& hoc hn Lotto
attack on you? Where do you find the
most liberalism? What is your opinion of
Beecher, Talmage and other leading min
listers? And these, he remarked, are always
and invariably showed at him wherever he
goes.
At S:15 o'clock the Grand opera house
was packed to its utmost capacity to hear
him in his latest theme, Which Way? 1t
was fairly representative audience and in
Guided an unusually large number of ladies.
The lecturer appeared unattended and at
once, without introduction, launched into
his subject For the first ten minutes the
audience was quiet and eXpectant, but
after the ice was broken by the first hearty
laugh, the house was kept in perfect up
roar and the lecture was punctured by al
ternated laughter and applause. For two
and half hours Col. Ingersoll talked,
banging away at the Old Testament and re-
ligious belief in his old familiar way. What
he said was in substance as follows:
THE LECTURE.
1t is the imagination of most people that
their belief is the one essential thing in this
world; and that unless a man agrees with
them in what they please to call the essen
tials he must necessarily be bad man in
thai he denies what they are certain is true.
And the less man knows the more he is
certain that If he denies he is actuated by
the worst of motives. Now in what little
l have read and experienced [ have found
that belief does not dominate the character.
Some men who have believed in their re-
ligion have been very bad men. Some men
who have wOrshiped our God have been
very far from respectable. The religion
lists Of other countries have not all been
good. The gentlemen who made Socrates
drink hemlock were all believers in God.
The men who crucified according to the
Christian religion, the one snless being
who ever touched this globe, were believers
and worshipers of our God. The gentle
men who founded the inquisition- in
vented and used
INSTRUMENTS OE TORTURE,
who built prisons for the body and dun
geons for the mind, were worshipers of
and believers in our God and religion. Ac-
cording to the Bible the devil is a believer:
and the only influence it has had upon his
moral character-Or the only influence it
has had upon him is, according to the Bible,
that he trembled. But the belief has never
made him any better. You see, after all,
there is no reforming power in fear. You
n W. hot H.
not do certain thing; but you cannot
want to. Laughter. On the other hand,
some of the best men who have ever lived
have been unbelievers. Some of the great
held in supreme contempt
THE SUGGESTIONS OF MANKIND.
The greatest produced by Rome laughed
at the Roman gods. And the greatest of
Christendom have not been believers; and
the leaders of the intellectual hosts of this
world tonight are not believers in what we
call the Christian religion. Bruno, the
martyr, was not a believer; Humboldt, the
greatest of naturalistS, was not believer;
Darwin, the greatest man produced by the
nineteenth century-and this century will
be knOwnas ''Darwin's century, long after
every minister who has ever answered him
will have been forgotten-he was not be-
lever, but he was an honest man. And I
cannot convince myself that there is in the
infinite expanse of this universe God who
who will punish any human being for the
expression of his honest thought.
WE HAVE BEEN TAUGHT
that it was crime to differ from the
religious majority. There is reason in
nature for that doctrine. There was time
when man believed that the heavens were
filled with gods; and all these gods were
extremely quick-tempered. Barbarianism
is egotistic. And the less man knows the
more important he thinks he is. Conse-
squently, when one of our forefathers saw
an eclipse he said, "That means me-" When
some vagrant comet shot through the sky,
distributing pestilence from its horrid train,
he said, 81 have done something, or my
neighbor has done neutrality-suspicious.
my neighbOr-but all this has been brought
about by myself" Or when the lightning