The definitive biography of the man who more than any other figure in the history of the United States influenced the course of popular thought in the realm of unorthodoxy. “...one of the bravest, grandest champions of human liberty the world has ever seen.” Rediscover Robert Green Ingersoll. Celebrated orator of 19th century America, lawyer, Civil War officer, personal friend of three US presidents, the individual most responsible for the flowering of freethought in the United States.

Life story of the 19th century orator whose iconoclastic pronouncements caused him to be denounced in some quarters and acclaimed in others.

Robert Ingersoll was America''s finest orator and foremost leader of freethinkers. Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Eugene V. Debs, and Elizabeth Cady used to gather to hear the speeches of "the great agnostic."Roger E. Greeley has selected the best from speeches and essays of this iconoclastic orator who labored to destroy the superstition and hypocrisy of fundamentalism in America and who answered the Moral Majority in the last century.One hundred years after he advanced into the national spotlight, Ingersoll''s commentaries still retain their fresh, penetrating, and witty character. His pleas for civil rights, the rights of women and children, responsible and responsive government, and individual freedom of conscience and religious belief have placed him in the vanguard of enlightened thinkers.Today the legacy of Robert Ingersoll, prophet and pioneer, merits the attention of anyone who espouses humane, liberal, rational, or agnostic opinions.

There was a time when a falsehood, fulminated from the pulpit, smote like a sword; but, the supply having greatly exceeded the demand, clerical misrepresentation has at last become almost an innocent amusement. Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit's last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. The church, impotent and malicious, regrets, not the abuse, but the loss of her power, and seeks to hold by falsehood what she gained by cruelty and force, by fire and fear. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising, unreasoning, aggressive and insolent. Christianity has held all other creeds and forms in infinite contempt, divided the world into enemies and friends, and verified the awful declaration of its founder -- a declaration that wet with blood the sword he came to bring, and made the horizon of a thousand years lurid with the fagots' flames.....Robert Green Ingersoll