made a means of propaganda to anything like the extent seen in Britain;
and the greatest part of the work in the States has thus far been done
by the late Colonel Ingersoll, the leading American orator of the last
generation, and the most widely influential platform propagandist of
the last century. No other single freethinker, it is believed, has
reached such an audience by public speech; and between his propaganda
and that of the freethought journals there has been maintained for
a generation back a large body of vigorous freethinking opinion in
all parts of the States. Before the Civil War this could hardly
be said. In the middle decades of the century the conditions had
been so little changed that after the death of President Lincoln,
who was certainly a non-Christian deist, and an agnostic deist at
that, [1758] it was sought to be established that he was latterly
orthodox. In his presidential campaign of 1860 he escaped attack on
his opinions simply because his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, was
likewise an unbeliever. [1759] The great negro orator, Frederick
Douglas, was as heterodox as Lincoln. [1760] It is even alleged
that President Grant [1761] was of the same cast of opinion. Such
is the general drift of intelligent thought in the United States,
from Washington onwards; and still the social conditions impose
on public men the burden of concealment, while popular history is
garbled for the same reasons. Despite the great propagandist power of
the late Colonel Ingersoll, therefore, American freethought remains
dependent largely on struggling organizations and journals, [1762]
and its special literature is rather of the popularizing than of the
scholarly order. Nowhere else has every new advance of rationalistic
science been more angrily opposed by the priesthood; because nowhere is
the ordinary prejudice of the priest more voluble or better-bottomed in
self-complacency. As late as 1891 the Methodist Bishop Keener delivered
a ridiculous attack on the evolution theory before the OEcumenical
Council of Methodism at Washington, declaring that it had been utterly
refuted by a certain "wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds." [1763]
Various professors in ecclesiastical colleges have been driven from
their posts for accepting in turn the discoveries of geology, biology,
and the "higher criticism"--for instance, Woodrow of Columbia, South
Carolina; Toy of Louisville; Winchell of Vanderbilt University; and
more than one professor in the American college at Beyrout. [1764]
In every one of the three former cases, it is true, the denounced
professor has been called to a better chair; and latterly some of
the more liberal clergy have even commercially exploited the higher
criticism by producing the "Rainbow Bible." Generally speaking,
however, in the United States sheer preoccupation with business,
and lack of leisure, counteract in a measure the relative advantage
of social freedom; and while culture is more widely diffused than
in England, it remains on the whole less radical in the "educated"
classes so-called. So far as it is possible to make a quantitative
estimate, it may be said that in the more densely populated parts of
the States there is latterly less of studious freethinking because
there is less leisure than in England; but that in the Western States
there is a relative superiority, class for class, because of the
special freedom of the conditions and the independent character of
many of the immigrants who constitute the new populations. [1765]
Section 2.--Biblical Criticism
It is within the last generation that the critical analysis of the
Jewish and Christian sacred books has been most generally carried on;
but the process has never been suspended since the German Aufklärung
arose on the stimuli of English and French deism.