Pity for Preachers.

The lecture opens with commiseration for preachers. These conies are but a feeble folk. They are a class of unlearned, insipid, narrow-minded, slack-twisted, hair-brained, half-witted, ill-constructed, bigoted, egotistic dullards. They would not do for doctors, lawyers, or politicians, and the ministry is therefore the only market open to these unfortunates. With such thoughts, the bowels of the orator yearn towards these helpless victims of superstition, and he deluges them with his overflowing sympathy until they are covered quite out of sight. Kind man that he is.

What a critique is all this sentimental saliva on the millions of church-goers in our own land. And when we think that the best minds of all civilized nations are under the control of these clergymen, and willing to listen to them week after week and year after year, and support them with their influence and money, Mr. Ingersoll's grimaces, distortions, and wailings should not be wondered at. If these men could only be won away from these old theological dogmas that demand so much sacrifice of worldly charms, and their hope of future rewards, and he had to look up and behold the beauty and grandeur of the new gospel of frog-spawn and protoplasm, they might even yet attain to some of the lower rounds of mental independency before they go to the land of forgetfulness, from whence comes no cheering ray of light, nor word of promise. But how sad, how inexpressibly sad must be the thought that when they have been gotten to hear a dozen or a half dozen of the world-regulating lectures from the most astonishing orator of which the present age can boast, they grow sick and tired and return to the old story about Jesus of Nazareth.

Ministers are a set of goodish weaklings, with neither the ability nor the inclination to make any progress. The majority of them may be men of extensive reading; many thousands may have graduated from institutions in which Mr. Ingersoll would not be a respectable sophomore; but what boots it—as they are Christians, and not infidels, they are unlearned and ignorant men.

On the other hand, as soon as a man becomes an infidel, he is learned. It is not necessary for him to graduate in any institution of learning, that he should have a knowledge of classics or history, or any branch of science; let him avow infidel views, and read some lectures on geology, the flood, and the origin of man, and he will be ready to placard himself—Prof. Shoddy, from Boston. He can then look wisely, talk of the pious-incompetent in our Universities, criticise believers, and pronounce the whole religious world a race of unlearned and narrow-hearted bigots.