Ingersoll Answered; An Examination of His Discourse Entitled "What Must I Do to Be Saved?"

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881. Excerpt: ... INGERSOLL ANSWERED. The edition of Colonel Ingersoll's lecture quoted in this answer is called the Bijou Edition. It was issued in England by Mr. Sugden. The pages refer to that edition. I had not seen any other edition until my reply was practically finished. WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED? Under this title a remarkable lecture has been delivered in America by Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, who is announced as a minister of the Gospel of Freethought. About the lecturer I know nothing more than he has told me himself in his eloquent lecture. I judge him to be a man of rare power as a speaker, and probably one of those rhetoricians who would take any cut to a climax, and sacrifice whatever stood in the way of immediate impression and effect. He appears from this lecture to be a man who is determined to secure the laughter and applause of his hearers at all costs. The lecture reads as if reported, and is very largely charged with such expressions as laughter and applause, and renewed laughter. On almost every page these expressions occur, and others stronger still, such as loud applause, loud applause and laughter, loud laughter, roars of laughter, and the like. When you know that the subject was, What must I do to be saved? and when I tell you that in twenty-four pages you find twenty-seven notes of laughter, loud laughter, and roars of laughter, and when the lecturer himself acknowledges, as he does on page 17, that for thousands of years the world has been asking that question, What shall we do to be saved? you will see that either the subject cannot have been treated with intellectual dignity or that the audience must have been of the basest moral type. Laughter, loud laughter, renewed laughter, roars of laughter, are hardly t...