The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1903-11-29


him. "Ohi Colonel Ingersoll, don't you
recognize that our only hope of safety
is in the mercy of Providence?" No,
sir" replied IngersoT. My hope and
trust is in the genius of man, which has
constructed this strong and splendid
ship, and in the skill of its officers to
battle the efforts of your Providence,
which seems at present to be doing its
best to drown u.s. ..Oh! Colonel Inger-
SOIL" pleaded his terrified cuestioner,
don't, don't talk in that way or YOU
may bring upon US judgment that will
send us all to the bottom What
replied Ingersoll, will Providence
drown all the rest of you, merely to get
at me? / think better of Providence
than that"
Robert G.. Ingersoll was my personal
friend in years long gone, and have
ever been an ardent admirer of his
splendid intellectually, but I should be
disloyal to his own broad standard of
liberal thought and speech, if while
speaking of him I failed to say that he
was-in my opinion-utterly wrong in
his belief that death ends all. For this
belief and for his earnest and continued
expression of it, not laurel leaf the
less should be laid upon his tomb. 1t
is difficult by any process of mere rea-
soning to demonstrate that there is any
individual conscious existence that sur
wives the death Of the body. When
TyndalI looked upon the glory of the
Alps at sunrise, his companion said:
.'Ah Professor, don't you feel that
there is a God?" Yes replied the
great scientist, IF you don't try to
grove it,
At last it is the spiritual sense of
man that perceives his spiritual life,
and those who have not this sixth sense
cannot be convinced of the truth of an
after life by argument, any more than
a man born blind could be taught by
means of raised letters to comprehend
the difference between pink and blue.
Ingersoll regarded human life as
merely a perishing sound between two
eternal silences, yet he was not SO
strenuous in his advocacy of this op1n-
ion as he was in assailing the creeds
of orthodoxy; for orthodoxy letters the
freedom of thought and speech that he
loved, and it Furnishes men here, and
assumes to punish them hereafter, not
only for their acts, but for their opin-
ions.
He assailed church creeds because
they asserted that there was an Infinite
Creator, who created in order to eniov
the pleasure of destroying his crea-
tionS-that there was an Infinite rather
who delighted to torture his children.
Ingersolfs philosophy of Life and
Death resembled, in some respects that
of Socrates, who said, II am to die, oh
Judges, and We are to live, and which is
best the Gods alone do know
Who is there SO wise as to he able
to say-''There is no longer any In
gersoll?' We cannot see him, but how
do we know that he cannot see US!
We are able to reproduce his life and
actions through the process of mental
reckoning, which we ca,H memory. Can
it be logically claimed that the origi-
mating power goes into nothingness?
Is it in the economy of the Universe
that any power is irretrievably lost?
Does not every force find form and
| energy in some of the processes of
Nature and it's laws? If it be true
that God geometrizes, is it not also
true that he dips his pen in Infinitude
to write the answer?
Take the human faculties and at
tributes, and find me in adj the lexi-
cons of bioplasm a formula to account
for their origin or define their essence.
What is Hope? 1t is the rustic of the
wings of futurity against the walls
of our prison house. What is Fear?
| 1t is only retroactive condition with
out which Hope should beat its wings
against futile air. What is Memory?
| 1t is a picture gallery of the brain,
| the photographs in which are iodized
| by "the light that never shone on sea
| or Shore and sensitized by the essen
| tial bromides of thought and feeling
arising from the soul of man. What
| is Consciousness? 1t is the pulse of
God-the telephone answering back the
story of the eternities. What is Con-
| science? 1t is toll house on the way
to justification, a reminder that we
| are answerable to a law. What is
Will? 1t is a helmsman self-consti-
tuted who yet steers with his eye
forever fixed on the polar star Of des-
| tiny. What are intuitions? They are
| pickets on the outpost of reason. What
| is aspiration? 1t is a finger board
| pointing upward to a state of perfect
ness to which there is no earthly road.
| And are not aspirations, and intui-
tons, and will, and conscience, and
consciousness, and memory, and hope,
! and fear, each as real and as answer
able as a mathematical problem? And
| yet which of these conditions-the most
common TO humanity-fnds it's type or
| its predicate in matter? Can you put
| paddock upon hope, or dissolve fear
| by the use of acids? Can you tie up
| in pocket handkerchief, the promises,
! and the prophecies and the PRESENT.
ments, which at one time or another,
fall into every life?
Is there no longer any IngersoH?
Has that mighty intellect, which fed
upon both the visible and the occult,
which gathered wisdom alike from the
leaves of books and the lips of hui
mainly, which drew inspiration from
the wash OF seas, and the blaze of suns,
and the glitter of stars, which voiced
it's knowledge with sorcery that
swayed the minds and souls of men,
and carried them from earth to hea-