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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 42

The Mistakes of Ingersoll

The Mistakes of Ingersoll.

"And right here," let me note page 4, paragraph 2, where he says, "Moses never wrote one word of the Pentateuch; not one word was written until he had been dust and ashes for hundreds of years." Now, it is absolutely impossible for any living man to demonstrate the accuracy of this statement. Ingersoll I defy to do so. For this there are two reasons. It is a negative proposition, and there is no evidence which bears in its favour. Surely, then, Ingersoll has "made a mistake." He is not infallible. The most he could possibly have been justified in saying, is, that he did not know whether Moses was the author or not. But surely his ignorance is not sufficient to belie the received account of the authorship of the Pentateuch? Ingersoll does not know that there is such a person as Te Whiti, the Maori prophet: but will his ignorance of this fact make it false? I have no evidence that Ingersoll is the author of the lecture under notice: shall I therefore blankly deny that he composed it? True enough it comes to me with his name upon it, having also all the appearance of being an American production; and I, believing from report that there is such a man in the United States, accept the lecture's account of its own origin. Yet I have no proof which amounts to a demonstration: very far from it. How absurd it would be, however, for me to reject the authenticity of the lecture on that account. I have not a tittle of evidence to show that this lecture was not written in Dunedin, by some person now living here, who has an intimate acquaintance with the use of Americanisms. The copy of it which is before me has most evidently page 8 been made in Dunedin, for it bears a Dunedin publisher's name and address, and has other marks which do amount to a demonstration that it has never been in America. Shall not I then say that Ingersoll "never wrote a word of it;" that he never saw it; that it is purely a case of forgery? But as the "general opinion is" that Ingersoll wrote it, I shall for the present purpose admit so much.

Now, people say this lecture is full of wit, sarcasm, and audacity. I care little whether it is or not. The question of importance is—