Arizona republican., 1899-09-29
THE DEAD ATHEIST.

It is irdispUtably true that Ingers2ll held his place as the most conspicuous
 antagonist of Christianity in our time
 mainly if not entirely by virtue of the
 charm which this sansibility impaTt-
 ed to his rhetoric, and not by his
 scholarship or logic. Under the spell
 of his 1owery tongue the listeners were
 swept luxuriously away, but it was not safe tc. come coolly back and read him,
 or attempt to adjust his eloquence to 1 the impiaca.ble arbitrament of facts.
 In the ferYor of his feelings he was often betrayed into declar ations which
 took him years to deny, as when ne said in Chicago, in his lecture on Skulls, that he could write a better book than the Bible himself This
 was such an egregicus declaration that it was sure to haunt him tauntingly for long time afterward, and then he publicly denied that he ever said it and attributed it to the d. reporters. When the late George Sheridan went cut with lecture to reply to IngersoII, he made ,ai great point of this Chicago Incident, and one night, when he had
 delivered very fine eulogium on the Bible, he sapped the climax by say ing, But Colonel Ingersoll says he can write better book himself'' Where upon 9 siX-foOt, broad shouldered man rose up in the audience and casually remarked to George Sheridan that ne was. a liar; tIngersoH never said it, 7 and then stood there waiting for some thing to happen. Fortunately. Sheri- dan was equal to the occasion taMy friend. he said, I'll tell you why I think IngersoIl said it and we'll leave 1t to the audience to decide In the first place, I've got the printed pamph- let with it in, which 1 bought at the door when MT. 1ngersoll was delivering enc Of his lectures, and I'll read it to you" which Sheridan proceeded to do. ''In the second place. there is internal evidence that he said it. It agrees with everything else he has said and no other man on earth is capable of il. Now, I'll give you third reason why I think he said it, which may not count much, but I give it for what it's worth. I heard him say it." Amid the storm of applause and laughter which fol- lowed, the broad shouldered man sat down and subsided
 When afterward, Ingersoll colIated and published a corrected revis:Gn of his western lectures, he left out a great many things that he had said on the platform, and this passage about the Bible was one of them. When he came to New York in 18S7 his style gradu- ally took on a less pronounced type His entrance into the North Ameri- can Review" straightened up his dia- lectics considerably. The then editor of that periodical was an ardent ad- mirer of his and arranged the discus c ion wifi Io0 In oT1d h.a subsequent tilt at Gladstone, Ingers0H vindicated nothing but his own mag nificent rhetoric. The assault upon Christianity was on antique, and for the most part. abandoned lines, and to have answered the old charges that ne
 made would have been to traverse ne apologetics of nearly two centuries. But he exhibited in 8 brilliant manner, his felicity Of dictiOn, his effuSive deX- terity Of thought and his effective cleverness in turning a phrase against an antagonist without regard to the fairness of the method
 Probably Ingersoll never appeared to better advantage as a quick-witted and humorous orator than when Tal- mage came athWart his bows. That Brooklyn clergyman was then in the height of his fame. Alden Of the Times had kept the country laughing with absurd descriptions of his mouth, and these descriptions had been fol- lowed by the caricaturists until the