Excerpt from Reply to Ingersoll: Stenographically Reported and Revised

It is one thing for a man to express his thoughts fresh from the heart and brain; it is another to try to recall and to present forcibly and satisfactorily again what was presented first in an entirely extemporaneous ad dress, excepting the four closing sentences.

The pastors of our churches are too busy to give time to the discussion of questions like this, and their work is too important for them to turn aside from it to answer a lecture such as that which I presume to criticise.

Now and then some resourceful man, like Dr. Car roll, may take an hour aside from the more pressing and important duties of his office and make reply, which he did last Sunday afternoon in an address, the first fifteen minutes of which completely wrecked the lecture of Colonel Ingersoll and tore his platform into so many splinters that it would be exceedingly uncomfortable for a free thinker to sit down upon it. (laughter.) But as I am fifteen years out of the active work of the ministry, a plain business man, and in that sense at least a man of the world, busy with the perplexing and difficult cares of every-day life, but with time that I may call my own, if I care (my work not being so im portant, my time not so precious) to devote a little of it to the lecture of Colonel Ingersoll, it is my privilege to do so.

I address you simply as a layman and a business man, one of yourselves, claiming no especial authority, no authority in fact but the authority of reason, to which you all appeal, and not attempting this evening even to appeal to the authority of the Bible, though I recognize it; but remembering that there are many before me who do not, I appeal to an authority to which you and I alike submit.

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