Ingersoll and Moody.

The gospel of despair preached Ingersoll has brought many men to suicide’s grave, while Moody’s exhortations have enabled weak men to bear the burden of life more cheerfully. Ingersoll is a rhetorician, a phrase-maker, and his philosophy contains nothing of inspiration.

“That man!” says Moody, speaking of the great infidel, and declining to discuss him in an interview.

“Moody is an old-fashioned orthodox Christian, about three-fourths of a century behind the Times,” comments Ingersoll. And the latter continues: “I do not think it possible to reform the world except through the development of the brain. You cannot do this by singing psalms. You must give to the world new facts, new truths. You must change physical and mental conditions if you wish for improvement. Characters are not formed in a moment. Men often stop and say: ‘I have gone on this road far enough. I am going to change.’ If this happens during a revival they call it conversion, the work of the Holy Ghost, but after all it is natural.”

But the fact remains that men of the stamp of Whitefield and Moody do start men on the right road; do stop them short in their careers of wickedness and turn them into new paths. They say it is prayer and the gospel that does this great work. Ingersoll denies this and remarks that “there comes a time in the life of a horse, when he stops kicking the whiffletree, pulls his share of the load, and contentedly munches his oats, but nobody thinks this is the work of the Holy Ghost!” And Ingersoll adds, “Moody is a supernaturalist.” Very true, but can Ingersoll point to any world-wide schemes for the reformation and betterment of mankind that are not inspired by a belief in the supernatural—in what is above nature?

Ingersoniallism will never found asylums, provide shelter for the orphan, build great hospitals, and send devoted men to carry morality and religious instruction to tribes of benighted men. Christianity is a tremendous moral force in the world today. It outlived a Voltaire , and it has no need to fear the jibes of a man vastly his intellectual inferior. Voltaire has a power in the great European world of thought. He did good in his day an generation; his powerful scorn drove judicial torture out of Europe; he was a force for enlightenment for all his infidelity. That great sceptic, hated by all bigots, was a giant among men. a powerful intellect, he never attempted to rival the dime-museum and the kinetescope at 50 cents a head admission.—Mex. Herald