Is it True?

Truth never joined hands with falsehood; and facts are more wondrous than fiction. Facts do not, how ever, please everybody. Many persons do not like to look at naked facts. They prefer to see them dressed after the human fashion—in fabricated material; considering them, of course, more respectable in such an attire—in fact, only then presentable. They have become so accustomed to see facts only in this unnatural costume that they consider that the costumes are even essentials, because by them the essentials have been hidden from their view. Now it may, by such, be deemed rude in this age of refinement and artificial polish to strip off these gaudy habiliments—the excrescences of civilisation—and reduce facts to their native rudeness, barbaric state, if you will. Yet it must be so if we would discern the true from the false.

Ingersoll admits that "a lie will not fit anything, except another lie made for the express purpose." I like sentences of that kind; how forcible they are! How hard they strike against the walls of fabrication! They come like an explosive shell, which the solid rock can scarce resist. But it is a singular thing that just in the same paragraph in which this grand sentence occurs the author has given another, by which I can strikingly illustrate the feebleness of a "lie" when a truth is thrown at it. Here it is: "The gentleman who wrote it (the Bible) begins by telling us that God made the universe