n go back and get a second hearing.
Yet he did go back year after year, and crowds hung upon his utterances
and laughed with him at the scarecrow that had once filled their
day-dreams, made the nights hideous, and the future black with terror.
Through his influence the tears of pity put out the fires of hell; and
he literally laughed the devil out of court. This man, more than any
other man of his century, made the clergy free. He raised the standard
of intelligence in both pew and pulpit, and the preachers who denounced
him most, often were, and are, the most benefited by his work.

This man was Robert G. Ingersoll.

On the urn that encloses his ashes should be these words: Liberator of
Men. When he gave his lecture on "The Gods" at Cooper Union, New York
City, in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-two, he fired a shot heard 'round the
world.

It was the boldest, strongest, and most vivid utterance of the century.

At once it was recognized that the thinking world had to deal with a man
of power. Efforts were made in dozens of places to bring statute law to
bear upon him, and the State of Delaware held her whipping-post in
readiness for his benefit; but blasphemy enactments and laws for the
protection of the Unknown were inoperative in his gracious presence.
Ingersoll was a hard hitter, but the splendid good nature of the man,
his freedom from all personal malice, and his unsullied character, saved
him, in those early days, from the violence that would surely have
overtaken a smaller person.

The people who now seek to disparage the name and fame of Ingersoll
dwell on the things he was not, and give small credit for that which he
was.

They demand infinity and perfection, not quite willing yet to
acknowledge that perfection has never been incorporated in a single
soul.

Let us acknowledge freely that Ingersoll was not a pioneer in science.
Let us admit, for argument's sake, that Rousseau, Voltaire, Paine and
Renan voiced every argument that he put forth. Let us grant that he was
often the pleader, and that the lawyer habit of painting his own side
large, never quite forsook him, and that he was swayed more by his
feelings than by his intellect. Let us further admit that in his own
individual case there was small evolution, and that for thirty years he
threshed the same straw. And these things being said and admitted,
nothing more in truth can be said against the man.

But these points are neither to his discredit nor h