Royal Bob by Dr. C. H. Cramer

Author:Dr. C. H. Cramer [Cramer, C. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Wars & Conflicts (Other), United States, 20th Century, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9781787209428
Google: 8TtODwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2018-02-27T16:00:30+00:00

Ingersoll’s attack on Christianity resulted in a number of literary controversies in which the pros and cons were vehemently debated in current magazines and newspapers. Most widely publicized was the intellectual sparring during the 1880s in the pages of the North American Review between the agnostic contender and leading orthodox heavyweights. On the American side of the Atlantic Ingersoll took on jurist Jeremiah Black, who was a Campbellite, and Presbyterian-Congregationalist dominie Henry Field. The contention became international when Episcopalian William Ewart Gladstone and Catholic Cardinal Manning also entered the ring. In the Black-Field-Gladstone-Manning-Ingersoll controversy the agnostic wrote seven articles for the Review; his opponents contributed five. The major premises of the antagonists were irreconcilable. Cardinal Manning expressed the opinion of the fighters in his corner when he said: “Christianity is an order of supernatural truth appealing intellectually to my reason.” Ingersoll, as the apostle of science, responded with the observation that the supernatural does not and cannot exist, that an educated man was satisfied that all phenomena are natural, that his opponents had found no way by which “the neck of orthodoxy can escape the noose of Darwinism.” Expository thrusts and counterthrusts by both sides, which fill four hundred pages, seemed exciting at the time but make dreary reading now. The only lively passages are those in which the combatants, temporarily leaving the center of the ring, slugged it out in personal skirmishes along the ropes. All of them participated in these discursive tactics except Cardinal Manning. The Catholic kept his eyes steadfastly on the Infinite, refused to recognize a finite Ingersoll and never once mentioned his name.{169}

Because Jeremiah Sullivan Black was orthodox in theology and a Democrat in politics there were two solid reasons for a spirited debate with the Republican agnostic. On the religious side Black was an ardent Campbellite; in the political arena he had been Attorney General and Secretary of State in Buchanan’s cabinet. A zealot who “reveled in righteousness and expression,” in the course of his life he defended a variety of persons and causes with might and main—Buchanan, Tilden, the Constitution, Christianity and the Ten Commandments. In the literary controversy with Ingersoll he intended to confine the argument to the religious issue but could not resist an occasional political jab at his Republican opponent. While his general attack followed the orthodox line, he overstepped himself in defending slavery as the groundwork of human society. Black, who had been Secretary of State when South Carolina seceded from the Union, thought there was no question that “when a Jew [in the Old Testament] took a neighboring savage for his bond-servant, incorporated him into his family, tamed him, taught him to work, and gave him a knowledge of the true God, he conferred upon him a most beneficent boon.” Black referred to his role as that of a policeman who was needed to silence Ingersoll as a rude disturber of the congregation, and he played his part as a gendarme with such enthusiasm that he managed to score a few personal blows below the belt.

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