The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1899-10-28
INDICTMENT OF INGERsoLL.
From One Who Grants the Possibil-
ity of Honest Atheism

Harry Thurston Peck of Columbia
university, writing in a recent issue of
the Bookman about Robert Ingersoll,
grants, for arguments sake, that the
whole Christian system is wrong, and
that unbelief like Ingersolrs is justi-
| fed. What follows? Should he imi-
| tate Ingersoll by spreading his ideas?
| We let Mr.. Thurston speak for him
self:
The unquestioning believer never feels
the loneliness of isolation; he never
lacks the comfort that arises from eter
mai hope In sickness and in sorrow and
at the gates of death his faith sup
ports him as by an invisible hand with
in his own: while beyond the darkness
of the f1eeting moment there is always
seen the golden glimmer of that eter-
nal promise on which his soul relies
forever Grant, if you will. that he is
wrong; that his belief is a delusion;
that he is buoyed up by unrealities
and still it is not easy to explain just
why it is ones duty to destroy his
faith. to quench for him the light, to
cast him shudderng into darkness and
despair to rob him of his only source
of consolation. For if this life on earth
be all of life, then who shall dare to
say that duty bids the utterance of
single word to make it barer, blacker
and more dreadful to endure. So far
from doing this, the unbeliever who is
animated by a true benevolence should
hide his unbelief and keep it as a fear
full secret: for in the preaching of it to
the destruction of that faith which
gives serenity and happiness there is
something little less than devilish.
Grant Also if you WILL that all the
doctrines of revealed religion are with
out authority; yet who can fail to see
that the life which they inculcate is the
purest, noblest, most self-sacrificing life |
that men can live? Mercy and truth |
and honor and chastity and justice-aH !
find their most sublime expression in |
the Book which the believer reverences. |
How can it be the duty of a wise, far |
seeing man to foul with mockery and !
cynical contempt the source of so Won |
drouS an influence for good? What I
have you gained when you have taught /
the supplemented man to look with
doubt and mistruSt upon the volume
whence from childhood he has drawn
his motives for an upright, honest, hon
orable life? Will you supply an ethi-
cal system of your own? This you may
try to do, just as did Colonel IngerSoll;
for he at times put forth some general
tiles on the value of good works and of
good will toward men; yet when you
have succeeded in destroying that belief
which gives vitality to moral teaching
it is never easy to build up a substi-
tute. And if men begin to find it diff
cult to accept the doctrine of an om-
niscient Deity. they will find it quite as
difficult to pin their faith to an om-
niscient Ingersoll.
And so, whether we regard it a ques-
ton of mere happiness, or whether we
prefer to think of it upon its purely
ethical and moral side. there is only
0ne conclusion to be drawn. Let him
who cannot honestly believe hold to his
ioubt or to his unbelief: yet if he speaks
1ne word to shake the faith of others.
hen he assumes a terrible response
oility; for he is destroying that in
place Of which he can have absolutely
nothing to bestow
Robert Ingersoll is dead Death
,ame TO him with sMiftness and with
,ut a warning. Whether he was even
conscious of his end no man can say. 1t
nay be that before the spark grew quite
,Xtinct here was for him moment of
)erception-that one appalling moment {
when within a space Of time too brief
'or human computation the affrghted
mind, as it reels upon the brink of dis
olution, flashes its vivid thought i
through all the years of its existence.
md perceives the final meaning of
hem all. If such a moment came to c
i'm. and as the light of day grew dim 1
'efore his dying eyes his mind looked !
'ackward through the past, there can {
ave been small consolation in the {
hought that in all the utterances of
is public teaching and in all the
hrases of his fervid esoquence there s
vas nothing that could help to make !
he life of man on earth more noble or V
lore spiritual or more truly worth the
wing