Ingersoll in Canada: A Reply to Wendling, Archbishop Lynch, Bystander; And Others

When the celebrated American agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll toured Canada in the 1880s, his lectures ignited a firestorm among religious leaders. Archbishop Lynch and Reverend Wendling led the charge against this 'dangerous' American, publishing scathing rebuttals that warned of the corrosive effects of freethought on Christian society. Allen Pringle, a committed rationalist, answers them all in this vigorous polemic: a meticulous, point-by-point demolition of clerical objections designed not merely to defend Ingersoll but to champion the right to question. Written for 'clergy and college students,' it stakes out bold ground: that faith must be examined, not blindly obeyed, and that the freethinker's intellectual honesty poses an existential threat to dogmatic authority. The book captures a turning point in Western intellectual culture, when the forces of religious tradition squared off against the rising tide of scientific rationalism. For readers interested in the history of skepticism, the transatlantic spread of agnosticism, or the cultural wars of the Gilded Age, this is a primary source that places you right in the heat of the debate.