"Every day at noon, while Ingersoll was lecturing, Hastings would go to old Farwell Hall and answer Ingersoll's statements of the night before. One night Ingersoll painted one of those wonderful word pictures for which he was justly famous. He was a master of the use of words. Men and women would applaud and cheer and wave their hats and handkerchiefs, and the waves of sound would rise and fall like great waves of the sea. As two men were going home from his lecture, one of them said to the other: 'Bob certainly cleaned 'em up tonight.' The other man said: 'There's one thing he didn't clean up. He didn't clean up the religion of my old mother.' "This is the word picture Ingersoll painted: "'I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes; I would rather have lived in a hut, with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing and ripening in the autumn sun; I would rather have been that peasant, with my wife by my side and my children upon my knees twining their arms of affection about me; I would rather have been that poor French peasant and gone down at least to the eternal promiscuity of the dust, followed by those who loved me; I would a thousand times rather have been that French peasant than that imperial incarnation of force and murder (Napoleon); and so I would ten thousand times.' "What was that? Simply a word picture. It was only the trick of an orator. "Let me paint for you a picture, and see if it doesn't make you feel like leaping and shouting hallelujahs. "Infidelity has never won a drunkard from his cups. It has never redeemed a fallen woman from her unchastity. It has never built a hospital for the crushed and sick. It has never dried tears. It has never built a mission for the rescue of the down-and-out. It wouldn't take a ream, or a quire, or a sheet, or even a line of paper to write down what infidelity has done to better and gladden the world. "What has infidelity done to benefit the world? What has it ever done to help humanity in any way? It never built a school, it never built a church, it never built an asylum or a home for the poor. It never did anything for the good of man. I challenge the combined forces of unbelief. They have failed utterly. "Well may Christianity stand today and point to its hospitals, its churches and its schools with their towers and the spires pointing to the source of their inspiration and say: 'These are the works that I do.'