Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert G. Ingersoll

Ingersoll’s genius here is courtroom compression: he turns two sprawling libraries of scripture into a pair of verdicts, “criminal” and “insane,” then leaves the jury to feel the snap of inevitability. The line works because it doesn’t bother arguing theology on theology’s turf. It drags the Bible into the modern state’s jurisdiction - where violence, slavery, and tribal conquest are prosecuted, and where radical self-abnegation can read like pathology. That shift is the trick: he reframes “obedience” as evidence.

The intent is not a careful exegesis; it’s a moral provocation aimed at public authority. As a lawyer and famed 19th-century freethinker, Ingersoll is speaking from the Gilded Age’s pressure points: fights over blasphemy laws, church influence in civic life, and the emerging confidence of science and secular governance. His audience wasn’t seminarians. It was voters and jurors, people deciding what counts as law.

The subtext is sharper than simple Bible-bashing. By splitting Old and New Testaments into separate dangers, he hits both sides of American Protestant respectability: the Old as a catalog of sanctioned brutality, the New as an ethic so absolutist it becomes unlivable in a society that runs on property, self-preservation, and reciprocal obligation. It’s also a taunt to “literalism”: if you insist the text is binding, he implies, you’re either endorsing crime or romanticizing self-destruction.

Like many Ingersoll barbs, it’s unfair in particulars and devastating in effect. It forces a choice: reinterpret, concede selectivity, or admit that “divine command” is a poor stand-in for ethics.