ing can be good who knowingly
and, as one may say, willfully created myriads of human beings,
knowing that they would be eternally miserable. In other words,
the civilized man is greater, tenderer, nobler, nearer just than
the old idea of God. The ideal of a few thousand years ago is far
below the real of to-day. No good man now would do what Jehovah
is said to have done four thousand years ago, and no civilized
human being would now do what, according to the Christian religion,
Christ threatens to do at the day of judgment.

_Question_. Has the Christian religion changed in theory of late
years, Colonel Ingersoll?

_Answer_. A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of
the Bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped
what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we are
convinced that Nature is as cruel as the Bible; so that, if the
God of Nature did not write the Bible, this God at least has caused
earthquakes and pestilence and famine, and this God has allowed
millions of his children to destroy one another. So that now we
have arrived at the question--not as to whether the Bible is inspired
and not as to whether Jehovah is the real God, but whether there
is a God or not. The intelligence of Christendom to-day does not
believe in an inspired art or an inspired literature. If there be
an infinite God, inspiration in some particular regard would be a
patch--it would be the puttying of a crack, the hiding of a defect
--in other words, it would show that the general plan was defective.

_Question_. Do you consider any religion adequate?

_Answer_. A good man, living in England, drawing a certain salary
for reading certain prayers on stated occasions, for making a few
remarks on the subject of religion, putting on clothes of a certain
cut, wearing a gown with certain frills and flounces starched in
an orthodox manner, and then looking about him at the suffering
and agony of the world, would not feel satisfied that he was doing
anything of value for the human race. In the first place, he would
deplore his own weakness, his own poverty, his inability to help
his fellow-men. He would long every moment for wealth, that he
might feed the hungry and clothe the naked--for knowledge, for
miraculous power, that he might heal the sick and the lame and that
he might give to the deformed the beauty of proportion. He would
begin to wonder how a being of infinite goodness and infin