Atheist

"Priest Ingersoll talked intimately of Hell Fire," but his son talked intimately of God.* Such was his son's intimacy that he scoffed at his Creator on all possible occasions, scoffed also at other creations of his Creator. Remembered now mainly for a tag about one born a minute which has been tied to his name, he was once notorious for his irreligion, notable for his oratory, famed for his political victories, defamed for drunken outbursts of atheism. Son of a Congregational minister, the future spellbinder was taken from Dresden, N.Y., to Wisconsin at 10, in 1843. The Illinois bar admitted him in 1854 and soon the juries were his almost before he addressed them. He organized his own cavalry troop in 1861 but led it into Confederate captivity in 1862. His political fame followed his election as Attorney General of Illinois in 1867. His oratorical prowess became nationally known when he arose to nominate James G. Blaine at the Republican presidential convention of 1876. Thereafter his career became a succession of orations on politics and Tom Paine's brand of godlessness--a succession of vermilion episodes, epigrams, epistles.

Episodes: Candidate for Governor of Illinois, Atheist Ingersoll is asked to state his allegiance to the Christian Church. "Man to man, Bob!" "What?" "What about it?" "Why, damn it, just this. My beliefs are my own and I wouldn't sacrifice one of them to be president of the whole rolling earth. Going? Well, take another cigar."

Epistles: To deny he will accept nomination for Attorney General--"When I say I am a candidate for a particular office I mean it; and when I say I am not a candidate for a particular office, I mean that, too. When I became candidate for Governor, I renounced my candidacy for Attorney General; and other candidates were invited into the field. I would despise myself forever were I now to become a candidate against any of these men whom, by my action, I have invited to become candidates."

Epigram,: "To plough is to pray, to plant is to prophesy, and the harvest answers and fulfills."

Epistles: (answering Gladstone's rebuke) ". . . and after all, it may be that 'to ride an unbroken horse with the reins thrown upon his neck'--as you charge me with doing--gives a greater variety of sensations, a keener delight, and a better prospect of winning the race than to sit solemnly astride of a dead one in a deep reverential calm, with the bridle firmly in your hand."

The Significance. After contemplating Walt Whitman, styled by him The Magnificent Idler, Author Rogers steps up to look at another post-Civil War celebrity, styled "perfect man," " drunken atheist, "equal of Demosthenes. The biographer's literary luggage is this time a collapsible suitcase full of modern stylistic, analytical, rhetorical tricks which make Ingersoll's oldtime silver -tongued bombast seem, by contrast, like the noises of a nickleplated nickleodeon. Undeniably, Colonel Bob was once important. He was, by force of personality, a sun about which minor political planets moved, forming an Ingersollar system. Now, no longer important, his outmoded heresies make him a handy quicksilver tongue in the thermometer of changing ideas.

* COLONEL BOB INGERSOLL--Cameron Rogers -Doubleday, Page ($3.00). 30