was that he might never compromise with the error for the sake of mental
ease, or accept a belief simply because it was pleasant.

Huxley once wrote this terse sentence of Gladstone: "It is to me a
serious thing that the destinies of this great country should at present
be to a great extent in the hands of a man who, whatever he may be in
the affairs of which I am no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in
those that I do understand." Gladstone crossed swords with Huxley,
Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, and in each case his blundering intellect
looked like a raft of logs compared with a steamboat that responds to
the helm. Gladstone was a man of action, and silence to such is most
becoming.

He had a belief, that was enough; he should have hugged it close, and
never stood up to explain it. Let us vary a simile just used: Lincoln
once referred to an opponent as being "like a certain steamboat that
ran on the Sangamon. This boat had so big a whistle that when she blew
it, there wasn't steam enough to make her run, and when she ran she
couldn't whistle."

Huxley, Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, all made Gladstone cut for the
woods and cover his retreat in a cloud of words. Ingersoll once said
that in replying to Gladstone he felt like a man who had been guilty of
cruelty to children.

If one wants to see how pitifully weak Gladstone could be in an
argument, let him refer to the "North American Review" for Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-two.

Yet Ingersoll was surely lacking in the passion for truth that
characterized Huxley. Ingersoll was always a prosecutor or a defender:
the lawyer habit was strong upon him. Just a little more bias in his
clay and he would have made a model bishop.

His stock of science was almost as meager as was that of Samuel
Wilberforce, and he seldom hesitated to turn the laugh on an adversary,
even at the expense of truth. When brought to book for his indictment of
Moses without giving that great man any credit for the sublime things he
did do, or making allowances for the barbaric horde with which he had to
deal, Bob evaded the proposition by saying, "I am not the attorney of
Moses: he has more than three million men looking after his case."

Again, in that most charming lecture on Shakespeare, Ingersoll proves
that Bacon did not write the plays, by picking out various detached
passages of Bacon, which no one for a moment ever claimed revealed the
genius of the man.

With equal plausibility w