LITTLE no one for a moment ever claimed revealed the genius 

 JOURNEYS of the man. With equal plausibility we could prove that 

 the author of Hamlet was a weakling by selecting all 

 the obscure and stupid passages, and parading these 

 with the unexplained fact that the play opens with the 

 spirit of a dead man coming back to earth, and a little 

 later in the same play Shakespeare has the man who 

 interviewed the ghost tell of" that bourne from whence 

 no traveller returns." Even Shakespeare was not a 

 genius all the time, and Ingersoll the searcher for truth, 

 borrowed from his friends the priests, the cheerful 

 habit of secreting the particular thing that would not 

 help the cause in hand. 



But one of the best things in Ingersoll' s character was 

 that he realized his lapses and in private acknowledged 

 them. On reading of the smooth, florid and plausible 

 sophistry of Wilberforce, Ingersoll once said, " Be easy 

 on Soapy Sam ! A few years ago, a little shifting of 

 base on the part of my ancestors, and I would have 

 had Soapy Sam's job." 



This resemblance of opposites makes one think of that 

 remark applied to Voltaire, " He was the father of all 

 those who wear shovel hats." 



72 



