The Arkansaw traveler., 1885-06-06
INGERsoLL ON ORTHODOXY.
lExch hange.l

Colonel RSbeft G. lngersoll lectured upon Orthodoxy" in New York city, recently. The following are extracts from that discourse:
 After all, we know so little. Life is short; it is such little way from the lap of our mother to the lap of the mother of us all we are so hampered by the force of habit, so trammeled by custom, that 1t i3 impossible for us to know much and the more we learn the less we fnd we k=ow. It becomes us to have the modesty of mortality.
 In the graveyard of the ages, in the cemetery of time, there are thousands of dead gods. Many of them, in their day, were just as powerful, had just as many followers, as the Christian God of our day.
 In the natural course of human events the new attacks the old, and the old gives way to the new. Yet there are to-day men who, if you. differ from them, will denounce you as everything that is bad, will conceive that you are doing some thing, in thus differing from them, which is equivalent to crime. These are the kind of people who imagine that heaven is a kind of museum filled with Catholic curiosities, Baptist barnacles, Methodist mummies, and Presbyterian petrifac- tions.
 Yes, the new attacks the old, and the old gives way. There have been the as- trologer, pretending to forecast the fu- ture the prophet in rags and long of hair the alchemist, bent and wrinkled striving with pestle and mortar to con- vert the baser metals into gold-all these have gone, and have been replaced by the scientist, adding wealth to the world and giving new joys to the human race We have lost nothing by the exchange.
 There have been, teo, the soothsayer and the medicine-man, pretending that they knew something of the desires Of their deities. They also are gone. In their places we have popes, cardinals, bishops, parsons, and exhorters. We have gained nothing by that exchange. But they in their turn will have to 20, and in their places will come better teachers and truer in erpreters. We shall lose nothing by tha, exchange. We are tired of getting skinned milk here, and promise of butter by and by up in the clouds.
 No man has right to stand at the altar as high priest unless behind him he has fact-unless he can teach how there shall be less poverty, less unhappi- ness, less human agony more comfort, more happiness, more brightness. Let one Of the chief duties of inc priest be to show how to deepen the dimples ot joy in the cheek of mankind.
 Give expression to your doubts, beg of you. A doubt is the bud of an idea If you give it the sunlight of thought, it may blossom. The man who suppresses doubt is kind of Herod who kills a child of the brain.
 am doing my best for the clergy. They teach that you are to love your enc mics but, somehow, they don't seem to love me. Sometimes believe that this is because they know that know that they don't know, and these feelings to- ward me are, under the circumstances, quite natural, for there is just as much of human nature in a preacher-when you are not looking as him as ;2 any one else.
 The old-fAshioned preacher was a ter TOT. He used to go about the parish, bringing gloom into every place of joy he could find. To look at him you would think that joy had died, and that he was one of the pall-bearers. He went about talking of cofins. epitaphs, tortures, hell, and similar cheerful topics. These he characterized as "tidings of great joy" People in those days used to ask the preacher if they wanted to lmow about anything. Now they ask him if they i don't tell you the new is getting away 1 with the old.
 So many new forms of promotion, 90 | many new avenues to preierment to | fame, to glory, to wealth, have sprung up 1 for bright men to enter into, that the pull l pit has to put up with what is leh. You | all know how the clergyman is made. l Some good young man is selected He has not constitution enough to be very wicked he has not quite enough breadth l of chest to sit up late at night; at once l man he wculd nake!" So he is sent to |