The Great Agnostic Read Online Free PDF

“occupied the place in his home where, inmost of the homes in this country, the Bible rests” (presumably to his disgrace).
    Ingersoll’s funeral was simple, attended only by family and close friends, even as Eva Ingersoll received hundreds of telegrams and letters from famous and unknown men and women whose lives and thought had been changed by her husband’s arguments. There was no music, although Ingersoll was a passionate lover of classical music and a generous donor to orchestral groups. A week after Ingersoll’s death, the forty-member St. Nicholas Orchestra paid tribute to one of their major patrons with one of his favorite pieces of music, Siegfried’s “Funeral March” from
Götterdämmerung.
When it was proposed that the music be played at his funeral, Eva Ingersoll said she could not bear to hear it while she was grieving so deeply. There was no eulogy, although the words Robert had spoken over his brother Ebon Clark’s grave, when he died at age forty-seven in 1879, were read by a friend. Robert’s tribute to his brother applied just as strongly to the Great Agnostic himself, who had used the lines in many of his speeches: “He believed that happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.” 3 Robert had also set forth his own philosophy of peaceful death when he described his brother’s final moments. “He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the returnof health, whispered with his latest breath, ‘I am better now.’ Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas, of fears and tears, that these dear words are true of all the countless dead.” 4
    Ingersoll was cremated, according to his wishes, after the memorial service, and his wife kept his ashes on her bedroom mantel in their townhouse, in a vase with the inscription
L’urne garde la poussière, le coeur le souvenir
(“The urn guards the dust, the heart the memory”). At the time, cremation itself was an eloquent statement of Ingersoll’s rejection of religion, since nearly all Christian denominations, as well as Judaism, not only frowned on but forbade the practice. In 1923, when Eva Ingersoll died, her ashes were mingled with her husband’s. The urn was interred in 1932 by the family in Arlington National Cemetery, in what Ingersoll had often described as “the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust.” 5 Coincidentally, the grave of William Jennings Bryan, who died shortly after the Scopes trial, is nearby.
    Because Ingersoll died on a Friday, many ministers—especially in the cities where he had spoken most frequently—devoted their Sunday sermons to what they considered his blasphemous and unproductive life. Many of the divines shed crocodile tears at the distinguished career that Ingersoll might have had as a politician, a diplomat,or a judge—if only he had not wasted his life trying to destroy the religious foundation of society. One Presbyterian minister, quoted in the
Chicago Tribune,
predicted that “it is as an opponent of Christianity that he will be remembered … when he is remembered at all. Here his work was destructive solely, without the desire to build.”
    The coverage of Ingersoll’s death and its aftermath was particularly extensive in Chicago, where Ingersoll first rose to national prominence as an orator with his “Plumed Knight” speech in 1876 and where he had returned many times to preach the gospel of reason during his decades as a resident of Washington and New York. A telling characteristic of the
Tribune
roundup of comments from the clergy was that it consisted almost entirely of sermons by Protestant ministers. There was no comment by a rabbi—a half-century would pass before public figures began to pay reflexive homage to “our Judaeo-Christian heritage”—and only one