Robert G. Ingersoll

On the morning of Friday, 21 July 1899, a heavy man of sixty-five sat on the veranda of a country house above the Hudson River, reading and talking with his family. At about half past ten he went upstairs to rest, meaning to come down afterwards and play pool with his son-in-law. At a quarter to twelve he sat up on the bed to put on his shoes, smiled at his wife's remark about medicine, said "I am better now," closed his eyes and died.¹ His heart had been failing for two years. His doctors had told him it could stop at any moment, and he had asked them to tell no one.²

For a quarter of a century Robert Green Ingersoll had been the most famous public speaker in the United States, and the one most often attacked from the pulpit. He had filled the largest halls in every city, for two hours at a time, with a single subject: why he did not believe what he had been raised to believe.³ He was also the son of a minister. This chapter follows his unbelief from the revival tents of his childhood to the lecture hall, through the arguments he built up over forty years, and to the position he came to rest on at the end, which he put in a sentence in 1896: "Is there a God? I do not know. Is man immortal? I do not know. One thing I do know, and that is, that neither hope, nor fear, belief, nor denial, can change the fact. It is as it is, and it will be as it must be. We wait and hope."⁴

The world he was given

Ingersoll was born on 11 August 1833 at West Dresden, on the western shore of Seneca Lake in Yates County, New York.⁵ It was the part of the country that the revival preachers had set on fire in the decades before, and his father was one of them. The Reverend John Ingersoll was a Congregational minister who preached wherever a pulpit would have him. Within months of Robert's birth he moved the family to New York City, where he was installed as associate pastor of the Second Free Presbyterian Church, the church where the great revivalist Charles Grandison Finney had been pastor before him.⁶ Robert's mother died at Cazenovia when he was two.⁷ After that the family wandered from one small church to the next, through upstate New York, Ohio and southern Illinois, on salaries as low as two hundred dollars a year, with a father who preached, as one record has it, "from morning until nearly sunset."⁸

So the first thing to understand about Ingersoll's unbelief is what he was given to believe, and sixty years later he described it himself. "Like the most of you," he told an audience in 1896, "I was raised among people who knew — who were certain. They did not reason or investigate. They had no doubts."⁹ What they were certain of was very specific: that the world was six thousand years old, that there was one narrow path to heaven and one broad road to hell, and that salvation came by faith alone, so that an honest, generous, hard-working man who lacked faith was, as he put it, taking a respectable way of going to hell. Underneath all of it lay the doctrine on which every revival sermon was built, which was eternal punishment. He heard hundreds of those sermons as a boy, and he said the preachers were sincere.¹⁰

One sermon in particular marked him. On a Sunday he went with his brother to hear a Free Will Baptist preacher, "a large man, dressed like a farmer," who took for his text the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and painted, with real skill, the rich man begging in hell for a drop of water. It was a sermon, Ingersoll wrote, "that touched my heart, that left its mark, like a scar, on my brain."¹¹ But there was one thing in that house that mattered more than any sermon, and he put it on the record late in life when a minister blamed his unbelief on a harsh father. The truth, he said, was that his father did not entirely believe the doctrine either. "Long before my father died, he threw aside, as unworthy of a place in the mind of an intelligent man, the infamous dogma of eternal fire." The same father told him to read the Bible for himself, to be honest with himself, and to say so if he concluded it was not the word of God. The story that a cruel father had driven the boy into infidelity was, he said, "simply an orthodox lie."¹² When the old revivalist lay dying in Peoria in May 1859, he asked his son to read to him, not from Scripture, but from Plato on the immortality of the soul.¹³

So the sermons went in one ear while the father's doubts were already in the other, and the boy was left holding both at once. "I supposed that what I heard was true and yet I did not believe it," he wrote. "I said: 'It is,' and then I thought: 'It cannot be.'"¹⁴ It is worth asking what that "cannot" was about, because at first it was not an argument about evidence at all. It was a moral refusal. When he came, decades later, to write out why he was an agnostic, the first thing he stated was not that God does not exist but that this God could not be good: "Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie."¹⁵ That sentence is the foundation of everything that followed. Every argument he later made about the Bible, about science and about the design of the world was built on an earlier conviction, that a doctrine which makes the innocent suffer for ever cannot be true, whatever book says it. The boy did not grow up to be a believer. He grew up to be a man with an objection.¹⁶

The reading years

An objection is not a settled position. The position took him years of reading to build, and in his own account of those years he tells us the order in which the books arrived. The poets came first. After a childhood of books about "the degrading consequences of love, and the impossibility of getting to heaven by being honest and generous," he found Robert Burns: "Here was a natural honest man."¹⁷ Then Shakespeare, whom he compared to a forest where the oaks and elms toss their branches to the storm.¹⁸ Neither was an argument against religion. What they gave him was a picture of human life that did not seem to need one.

Next came the arguments for God, which he read in order to believe them, and which failed him. By then he was a lawyer, admitted to the bar in 1855 with his brother Ebon and practising first at Shawneetown and then, from 1857, at Peoria,¹⁹ and he read William Paley the way a lawyer reads a brief. Paley's famous proof says that if you find a watch lying on a heath you must infer a watchmaker. Ingersoll's reply was that the argument proves too little and too much at once: "According to Paley there can be no design without a designer — but there can be a designer without a design. The wonder of the watch suggested the watchmaker, and the wonder of the watchmaker suggested the creator, and the wonder of the creator demonstrated that he was not created."²⁰ He also noticed something Paley had passed over, which was that the same ingenuity had gone into contriving the things that hurt us: the evidence of design in what is evil, he wrote, was at least equal to the evidence of intelligence in what is good.²¹

After the arguments came the facts. He studied astronomy, "just a little," as he put it, and then a little geology, and he compared what was known about the stars and the rocks with the account in Genesis. His conclusion was blunt: the writer of the inspired book "had no knowledge of astronomy." What struck him about the clergy was that they did not answer the astronomers; they attacked them.²² Only after all of that did he reach the books that attacked religion directly. "Up to this time I had read nothing against our blessed religion except what I had found in Burns, Byron and Shelley. By some accident I read Volney."²³ Volney's Ruins laid the religions of the world side by side, each with its own Christs, apostles, miracles and sacred books, and asked how anyone could tell which of them was true. After Volney came Gibbon, on how Christianity had actually spread, and then Thomas Paine, who said all of it plainly.²⁴

By his mid-twenties, then, he had come to believe four things. A God who sent people to hell for ever could not be good. Paley's argument from design did not prove what it claimed. The opening of Genesis did not describe the world as the astronomers and geologists had found it. And Christianity was one religion among many, with no better evidence behind it than the others had. This is where the doubt in his life properly belongs, in the 1850s rather than in his childhood. The boy had refused one doctrine while supposing the rest of the creed was true; the young lawyer had taken the whole creed apart, book by book, and found that none of it held. He had not yet said any of it in public.²⁵

Saying it out loud

The first time he spoke his mind in public was in 1860, when he was twenty-seven. In the same year that he ran for Congress as a Democrat and lost, he gave a lecture called "Progress" in the nearby town of Pekin, the earliest of his lectures against religion of which any report survives. The argument he made that night was the one he would go on making for the rest of his life: that the human race moves forward by knowledge, and that superstition holds it back.²⁶ Why did he speak at all, when he could have kept his opinions to himself? Part of the answer is temperament. As a boy under the Free Will Baptist preacher he had seen what a single voice could do to a crowd, and he wanted that power. He had the preacher's gift, and he had found a use for it that the preacher would have called the Devil's.¹¹

Two things happened next that did not change his mind but strengthened it. In February 1862 he married Eva Parker, of a family that had been freethinkers for generations. He had met her after defending a client at Groveland, and on the Parkers' shelves that same evening he had seen Volney, Voltaire and Paine; he would later dedicate his collected works to her as "a woman without superstition."²⁷ And he went to war. He raised and commanded the Eleventh Illinois Cavalry,²⁸ fought at Shiloh and Corinth,²⁹ was overrun and captured by Forrest's cavalry at Lexington, Tennessee, in December 1862, was paroled,³⁰ and resigned his commission the following June.³¹ He never turned the war into an argument about God. What it gave him was a title, Colonel Ingersoll, and an audience.

His next decisive act was a refusal. By 1868 he was attorney general of Illinois,³² and the Republican state convention at Peoria wanted him as its candidate for governor on one condition: that he keep quiet about religion. His reply, as his biographer recorded it, was that his religious belief was his own. "It belongs to me, not to the State of Illinois. I would not smother one sentiment of my heart to be the emperor of the round globe."³³ He never held elected office. What he had decided in that moment was that his unbelief was not a private opinion to be managed but a public position to be defended, whatever it cost him. That is the difference between doubting something and declaring it, and in 1868 he crossed that line.³⁴

The lecture hall

What did he actually argue, from the stage, for the next thirty years? It came down to three propositions and a creed. The first proposition was that the gods are made by men. He published it in 1872 as "The Gods," and it opens with a line that is usually quoted on its own and that turns Alexander Pope upside down, since Pope had written that an honest man is the noblest work of God: "An honest God is the noblest work of man."³⁵ Every nation, he went on, had made a god who looked like itself, who hated its enemies, and who was invariably found on the side of those in power. It was Volney's argument turned into a lecture.³⁶

The second proposition was that the Bible is a human book. He gave the lecture called "Some Mistakes of Moses" for years before he wrote it down in 1879, and by his own account it was never delivered twice the same way. It went through the first five books of the Bible for their errors in natural history and their cruelties in law, and it was answered, he said, several hundred times.³⁷ The third proposition mattered most to him. It was that nature is governed by law, and that no one is listening to our prayers. He had taken the idea from Alexander von Humboldt, the subject of his first lecture at Peoria in 1869,³⁸ and he drew the moral from it in 1897: when a man reads the sacred stories as records, "he will know that man must rely on himself, — that the supernatural does not exist, and that man must be the providence of man."³⁹ Then there was the creed, which his critics almost never quoted. He put one line of it on the title page of a volume of his works, "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray,"⁴⁰ and in interviews he gave the whole of it in four short sentences: "Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so."⁴¹

What he did with these ideas was to take them on the road. In June 1876 a political speech nominating James G. Blaine for president, at the Republican convention in Cincinnati, made him famous overnight,³ and he spent that fame on his real subject. For twenty years he carried the three propositions and the creed into every large city in the country and sold tickets to hear them, which no American unbeliever had ever done before. People who would never have read a freethought pamphlet paid to listen to him for two hours, and they laughed while they listened.³⁷ By 1882 the press was calling him "the Great Agnostic."⁴²

The lectures also made money, and his enemies made the most of that. A Puck cover of May 1882 drew him on a stage with a preacher across the street under the title "A Sunday show — profit for pagan and preacher."⁴³ He never denied that he lived by his lectures. What he denied was that this made the argument any less true.

The critics and the courtroom

The replies came by the hundred. The best of them did not go after his character but after his argument, and what they attacked in the argument was his certainty. Professor David Swing of Chicago, who had himself been tried for heresy in 1874, was fair to the man ("kind, neighborly, humane") and hard on the lecturer: "If Calvin was too certain that he knew God's will, Mr. Ingersoll is too certain that he knows God not to exist. It often happens that the dogmatism of the bigot must await its exact parallel in the dogmatism of the atheist."⁴⁴ That charge is worth remembering, because Ingersoll spent the rest of his life answering it, and it is the reason he eventually insisted on a different word for himself.

Other replies were less careful. A Catholic answer by Father L. A. Lambert, which went through four editions by 1883, carried a preface by another priest calling him "that notorious little fraud — Ingersoll — who so loves to pose as a profoundly original thinker."⁴⁵ The Brooklyn preacher T. DeWitt Talmage gave six sermons against him in a single season, and Ingersoll answered them with a book of four hundred and thirty pages.⁴⁶

Then the argument turned into a case at law, and his position gained a new plank. In May 1887 a former Methodist minister named Charles B. Reynolds, whose freethought tent at Boonton had been wrecked by a mob, was tried at Morristown, New Jersey, under a colonial-era blasphemy statute for distributing a freethought pamphlet. It was the first such trial in the state. Ingersoll defended him without a fee.⁴⁷ "I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State," he told the jury, "to put a padlock on the lips — to make the tongue a convict."⁴⁸ And: "If you could only imprison a thought, then intellectual tyranny might succeed."⁴⁹ The jury convicted, because the law gave them no choice; the court imposed the minimum fine of twenty-five dollars, and Ingersoll paid it, with the costs, himself.⁴⁷ From then on his unbelief was bound up with a second commitment, to free speech, and he said so from every stage he stood on.

In the same year the argument reached its highest level. The Reverend Henry M. Field, a Presbyterian editor who had spent a long evening at Ingersoll's house in Washington, wrote him an open letter in the North American Review that conceded almost everything about the man ("I am glad that I know you, even though some of my brethren look upon you as a monster because of your unbelief") and disputed the conclusion.⁵⁰ Field made the case that serious believers made: that the order of the heavens points to a mind behind it, and that Ingersoll's creed had nothing to offer the grieving. "But what support does your hollow creed supply?"⁵¹ William Gladstone, four times prime minister of Britain, took up the scientific point the following year. Ingersoll had claimed that Darwin's discoveries, carried to their conclusion, destroy the creeds and scriptures of mankind; Gladstone replied that there was "no colorable ground for assuming evolution and revelation to be at variance with one another," and that Ingersoll's method was too tumultuous for a doctrine that "can only be approached in a deep, reverential calm."⁵²

So there were three charges against him in his lifetime: that he was as dogmatic as the preachers, that he left people with nothing, and that he claimed more for science than science had proved. His last fifteen years were, in part, an answer to all three.⁵³

Hope without belief

The revision began at a grave. At the end of May 1879 his brother Ebon, his law partner and closest companion, died at the house they shared in Washington, and Robert spoke at the funeral.⁵⁴ "Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities," he said. "We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing."⁵⁵

His critics seized on the line about hope seeing a star as the beginning of a conversion, and Field quoted the "narrow vale" back at him as proof that his creed was "a doom of annihilation."⁵⁶ Ingersoll's answer drew a distinction that he kept for the rest of his life, between believing a thing and hoping for it. Asked about the gossip that his views had changed, he said: "I never willingly will destroy a solitary human hope. I have always said that I did not know whether man was or was not immortal."⁵⁷ That was also his answer to Professor Swing. He would not claim to know that there was no God; he would say instead that he saw no evidence for one, and he would take the word that meant exactly that. From the 1880s he called himself an agnostic, and he never called himself an atheist in print; when he summed up his views in 1896 he gave the essay the title "Why I Am an Agnostic."⁵⁸

But while the word softened, the content underneath it hardened, because the late Ingersoll was a materialist. In the same essay he set out what he called the corner-stones of his theory: that matter cannot be destroyed, that force cannot be destroyed, that neither can exist without the other, and that what cannot be destroyed could never have been created. "Matter and force were not created. They have existed from eternity. They cannot be destroyed. There was, there is, no creator."⁵⁹ So at the end his position had two halves, and he held on to both deliberately. On the question of a creator he had reached a flat conclusion. On the ultimate questions he refused to pretend to knowledge he did not have: "I do not deny. I do not know — but I do not believe. I believe that the natural is supreme — that from the infinite chain no link can be lost or broken — that there is no supernatural power that can answer prayer."⁶⁰

Three months before he died, a friend wrote to him with great confidence about the afterlife. His reply, from his house on Gramercy Park in April 1899, put the whole of his late position into a few sentences. There was no evidence that human beings are immortal, he said, and in his opinion the supernatural did not exist. "Still, we can wish in spite of, or against, evidence, and we can hope without it."⁶¹ The way he lived his last years matched what he wrote. He kept lecturing with a failing heart and told no one.² His last letter, written at Walston the day before he died, corrected some words that had been printed under his name: "The words attributed to me I never uttered or wrote."⁶² On the Tuesday after his death his family held a funeral in the room where he had died, with no clergyman present, and read three of his own pieces aloud, the last of them the tribute to his brother.⁶³ Two days later his body was cremated at Fresh Pond on Long Island and the ashes brought back to Walston in a bronze urn.⁶⁴

So did his unbelief change shape? It did, in two ways that pulled against each other. The argument grew stronger over his life, from a boy's feeling that hell could not be true to a materialism with no creator in it at all. But the claim grew humbler, from "I shall deny with all my strength" to "I do not know, but I do not believe," with hope left standing outside the argument, which is where he said it belonged. The one thing that never moved was a sentence he had written in 1872: "If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect."⁶⁵

Afterwards

After his death his wife and his brother-in-law, Clinton P. Farrell, gathered everything he had said into the twelve volumes of the Dresden Edition, published between 1900 and 1902,⁶⁶ and dedicated the first of them in his own words to "a woman without superstition."²⁷ Ingersoll's unbelief was formed in a revival tent and expressed in a lecture hall, and the two were never as far apart as he liked to pretend. He was his father's son. In the same year he was born, a boy was born in London who would carry the same argument into Parliament instead of onto the stage, and who would win the right to take his seat there without swearing to God. His name was Charles Bradlaugh, and he has his own chapter in this book.

Footnotes

1. Herman E. Kittredge, Ingersoll: A Biographical Appreciation, 2nd ed. (New York: Dresden Publishing Co., 1915; 1st ed. 1911), pp. 218–219. Kittredge is the only source for this, as for the other details in this chapter cited to that source alone. ↩

2. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 217, 219. ↩ ↩²

3. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 76, 81–82; The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Dresden Edition, 12 vols. (New York: Dresden Publishing Co., C. P. Farrell, 1900–1902), vol. IX pp. 55–60. ↩ ↩²

4. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 64. ↩

5. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 1, 17. ↩

6. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 16–18. ↩

7. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 19. ↩

8. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 19–20, 22. ↩

9. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 7. ↩

10. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, pp. 7, 15 ("Why I Am an Agnostic"). ↩

11. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, pp. 15–17. ↩ ↩²

12. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. V, pp. 148–149; Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 9–10. ↩

13. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 10, 15. ↩

14. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 15. ↩

15. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 22. ↩

16. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 15. ↩

17. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 38. ↩

18. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, pp. 38–39; Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 150 quoting Works III. ↩

19. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 41–42, 515. ↩

20. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, pp. 25–26. ↩

21. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 25. ↩

22. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, pp. 30–32. ↩

23. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 40. ↩

24. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 40. ↩

25. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 42. ↩

26. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 49–50, 510. ↩

27. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 51–54, 417–418; Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. I dedication. ↩ ↩²

28. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 55. ↩

29. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 56–57. ↩

30. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 57–61; Forrest's report quoted there. ↩

31. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 63. ↩

32. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 63. ↩

33. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 64. Checked in the biographer's reprint. Not a contemporary transcript. ↩

34. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 63–66. ↩

35. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. I, p. 7. Often quoted without its context: it is the lecture's opening motto, a play on Pope's "An honest man's the noblest work of God.". ↩

36. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. I, p. 7; Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 72. ↩

37. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. II, pp. v–vi. ↩ ↩²

38. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 72. ↩

39. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 80 (section I). ↩

40. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 418; title-page epigraph of Works IV. ↩

41. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. XII (interview on Cuba and Spain). Wording varies across his restatements (Works I 86; VIII 478; XII title page has "to help make others so"). ↩

42. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 15, 117, 491. ↩

43. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 120–125. ↩

44. Prof. David Swing (1879): J. B. McClure, ed., Mistakes of Ingersoll, as shown by Prof. Swing, J. Monro Gibson, W. H. Ryder, Rabbi Wise, Brooke Herford and others (Chicago: Rhodes & McClure, 1879), pp. 16–17. ↩

45. Rev. Patrick Cronin, editor of the Catholic Union and Times, Buffalo, prefacing Father Lambert: Rev. L. A. Lambert, Notes on Ingersoll, 4th ed., preface by Rev. Patrick Cronin (Buffalo: Buffalo Catholic Publication Co., 1883), 1883. ↩

46. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 117. ↩

47. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. XI, pp. 55–57 (New York Times report reprinted); Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 132–138. ↩ ↩²

48. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. XI, pp. 56–57. ↩

49. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. XI, p. 65. ↩

50. Field (1887): Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. VI, p. 121. ↩

51. Rev. Henry M. Field (1887): Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. VI, p. 128. ↩

52. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. VI, pp. 149, 233–234. ↩

53. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. VI, p. 121. ↩

54. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 105 and note; Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. XII, pp. 389–391. ↩

55. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. XII, pp. 390–391. ↩

56. Rev. Henry M. Field (1887): Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. VI, p. 130. Field slightly misquotes Ingersoll ("Life is but a narrow vale"); keep Field's wording when quoting Field. ↩

57. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. VIII, p. 18. ↩

58. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 223–224. ↩

59. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, p. 55. ↩

60. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. IV, pp. 63–64. ↩

61. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 356. Checked in the biographer's reprint. ↩

62. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 216 (Works XII, 286). Checked in the biographer's reprint. ↩

63. Kittredge, Ingersoll, pp. 220–221. ↩

64. Kittredge, Ingersoll, p. 221. ↩

65. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. I, p. 86. ↩

66. Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, title pages; Kittredge, Ingersoll, back matter. ↩