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For centuries Christendom was a madhouse. Popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks and heretics were all insane.

Only a few–four or five in a century–were sound in heart and brain. Only a few, in spite of the roar and din, in spite of the savage cries, heard Reason’s voice. Only a few, in the wild rage of ignorance, fear and zeal, preserved the perfect calm that wisdom gives.

We have advanced. In a few years the Christians will become humane and sensible enough to deny the dogma that fills the endless years with pain.

* * * * *

The world is getting better. We are gradually growing honest, and men everywhere, even in the pulpit, are acknowledging they do not know all about things. There was little hope for the race so long as an individual was disgraced if he did not pretend to believe a thing at which his reason revolted. We are simplifying life–simplifying truth. The man who serves his fellowmen best is he who simplifies. The learned man used to be the one who muddled things, who scrambled thought, who took reason away, and instead, thrust upon us faith, with a threat of punishment if we did not accept it, and an offer of reward if we did.

We have now discovered that the so-called learned man had no authority, either for his threat of punishment or his offer of reward. Hypocrisy will not now pass current, and sincerity, frozen stiff with fright, is no longer legal tender for truth. In the frank acknowledgment of ignorance there is much promise. The man who does not know, and is not afraid to say so, is in the line of evolution. But for the head that is packed with falsehood and the heart that is faint with fear, there is no hope. That head must be unloaded of its lumber, and the heart given courage before the march of progress can begin.

Now, let us be frank, and let us be honest, just for a few moments. Let us acknowledge that this revolution in thought that has occurred during the last twenty-five years was brought about mainly by one individual. The world was ripe for this man’s utterance, otherwise he would not have gotten the speaker’s eye. A hundred years before we would have snuffed him out in contumely and disgrace. But men listened to him and paid high for the privilege. And those who hated this man and feared him most, went, too, to listen, so as to answer him and thereby keep the planet from swinging out of its orbit and sweeping on to destruction.

Wherever this man spoke, in towns and cities or country, for weeks the air was heavy with the smoke of rhetoric, and reasons, soggy and solid, and fuzzy logic and muddy proof were dragged like siege-guns to the defense.

They dared the man to come back and fight it out. The clouds were charged with challenges, and the prophecy was made and made again that never in the same place could this man go back and get a second hearing. Yet he did go back year after year, and crowds hung upon his utterances and laughed with him at the scarecrow that had once filled their day-dreams, made the nights hideous, and the future black with terror. Through his influence the tears of pity put out the fires of hell; and he literally laughed the devil out of court. This man, more than any other man of his century, made the clergy free. He raised the standard of intelligence in both pew and pulpit, and the preachers who denounced him most, often were, and are, the most benefited by his work.

This man was Robert G. Ingersoll.

On the urn that encloses his ashes should be these words: Liberator of Men. When he gave his lecture on “The Gods” at Cooper Union, New York City, in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-two, he fired a shot heard ’round the world.