I am in a new field here. I feel very much like the master of a ship who thinks that he can safely guide his bark. (I am not alluding to the traditional bark of St. Peter, in which I hope that I am and will always be, but the ordinary bark that requires a compass and a rudder and a guide.) And I find that all these ordinary things, which we generally take for granted, and which are as necessary to our safety as the air which we breathe, or the sunshine that we enjoy, have been quietly, pleasantly, and smilingly thrown overboard by the gentleman who has just preceded me. Carlyle once said--and the thought came to me as the gentleman was speaking--"A Comic History of England!"--for some wretch had just written such a book--(talk of free thought and free speech when men do such things!)--"A Comic History of England!" The next thing we shall hear of will be "A Comic History of the Bible!" I think we have heard the first chapter of that comic history to-night; and the only comfort that I have--and possibly some other antiquated and superannuated persons of either sex, if such there be within my hearing--is that such things as have seemed to me charmingly to partake of the order of blasphemy, have been uttered with such charming bonhomie, and received with such enthusiastic admiration, that I have wondered whether we are in a Christian audience of the nineteenth century, or in a possible Ingersollian audience of the twenty-third. And let me first, before I enter upon the very few and desultory remarks, which are the only ones that I can make now and with which I may claim your polite attention--let me say a word about the comparison with which your worthy President opened these proceedings. There are two or three things upon which I am a little sensitive: One, aspersions upon the land of my birth--the city of New York; the next, the land of my fathers; and the next, the bark that I was just speaking of. Now your worthy President, in his well-meant efforts to exhibit in the best possible style the new actor upon his stage, said that he had seen Victor Hugo's remains, and Voltaire's, and Jean Jacques Rousseau's, and that he thought the niche might well be filled by Colonel Ingersoll. If that had been merely the expression of a natural desire to see him speedily annihilated, I might perhaps in the interests of the Christian community have thought, but not said, "Amen!" (Here you will at once observe the distinction I make between free thought and free speech!) I do not think, and I beg that none of you, and particularly the eloquent rhetorician who preceded me, will think, that in anything I may say I intend any personal discourtesy, for I do believe to some extent in freedom of speech upon a platform like this. Such a debate as this rises entirely above and beyond the plane of personalities.