Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ',': ''' the leading statesmen of all lands, the unanimous verdict of statesmanship being that civilization can not be carried forward without Christianity. ARTICLE V. Marvelous Power of Time and Circumstance—Tragic Effect of Iso-thermal Lines—Peoria Mud Necessarily the Seventh Heaven as Ingersoll Sees it. The fifth article of Ingersollism is, that gods and men are but evolutions of matter and circumstance, the difference between heathen gods and the Christian's God being the result of a difference in their worshippers, and the difference in men being the result of varying soils and surroundings. He says : " No god was ever in advance of the nation that created him." In answer to this last statement, which is true, of course, of all imaginary deities, but not of the One True God, it is only necessary to ask any candid and intelligent man to read the description of God given in the Bible, where both Testaments declare Him to be " merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, but will by no means spare the guilty," and then say whether this God is nothing more than the reflection of the stiff-necked and perverse people who held to this conception of Deity. The fact is, God as described in the Bible is infinitely loftier and purer than the Jewish people, or any people of any age. It is still more absurd, if possible, for Mr. Ingersoll to assert that " men are but the creatures ot their surroundings, made what they are wholly by material causes, such as soil and climate." It is one of the characteristic contradictions of history, such as are found so frequently in Mr. Ingersoll's lectures, when he asserts that great minds have never been found except in the " lands of respectable winters," with the intimation that no great achievements in... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.