The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

Robert G. Ingersoll's most provocative lectures and essays blaze with skepticism, wit, and a fierce faith in human progress. From "Why I Am an Agnostic," "The Truth," and "A Lay Sermon" to "The Devil," "Progress," "What Is Religion?," and "A Thanksgiving Sermon," he takes aim at inherited belief, biblical contradiction, miracle stories, eternal punishment, and the machinery of fear that sustains orthodoxy. He argues that children absorb religion from their surroundings, that revival fervor often fades into habit, and that honest inquiry must replace dogma. Drawing on geology, archaeology, and the evidence of prehistoric life, he challenges Scripture's chronology and insists that science, not tradition, reveals humanity's true past. Yet Ingersoll is not only a critic; he is a passionate defender of liberty, labor, education, humane justice, and social reform. He celebrates the real builders of civilization—scientists, inventors, poets, reformers, and statesmen—and calls for punishment that reforms rather than avenges, prisons that preserve dignity, and a society rooted in kindness, self-reliance, and courage. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.