I am responsible further--I am responsible to my neighbor. I know that I am my neighbor's keeper, I know that as I touch your life, as you touch mine, I am responsible every moment, every hour, every day, for my influence upon you. I am either helping you up, or I am dragging you down; you are either helping me up or you are dragging me down--and you know it. Sophistry cannot get away from this; eloquence cannot seduce us from it. You know that if you look back through the record of your life, there are lives that you have helped and lives that you have hurt. You know that there are lives on the downward plane that went down because in an evil hour you pushed them; you know, perhaps with blessing, lives that have gone up because you have reached out to them a helping hand. That responsibility for your neighbor is a responsibility and an accountability that you and I cannot avoid or evade. I believe one thing further: that because there is a creation there is a Creator. I believe that because there is force, there is a Projector of force; because there is matter, there is spirit. I reverently believe these things. I am not angry with my neighbor because he does not; it may be that he is right, that I am wrong; but if there be a Power that sent me into this world, so far as that Power has given me wrong direction, or permitted wrong direction, that Power will judge me justly. So far as I disregard the light that I have, whatever it may be--whether it br light of reason, light of conscience, light of history--so far as I do that which my judgment tells me is wrong, I am responsible and I am accountable. Now the Protestant theory, as I understand it, is simply this: It would vary from the theory as taught by the mother church--it certainly swings far away from the theory as suggested by my friend; I understand the Protestant theory to be this: That every man is responsible to himself, to his neighbor, and to his God, for his thought. Not for the first impression--but for that impression, for that direction and result which he intelligently gives to the first impression or deduces from it. I understand that the Protestant idea is this: that man may think--we know he will think--for himself; but that he is responsible for it. That a man may speak his thought, so long as he does not hurt his neighbor. He must use his own liberty so that he shall not injure the well-being of any other one--so that when using this liberty, when exercising this freedom, he is accountable at the last to his God. And so Protestantism sends me into the world with this terrible and solemn responsibility. It leaves Mr. Ingersoll free to speak his thought at the bar of his conscience, before the bar of his fellow-man, but it holds him in the inevitable grip of absolute responsibility for every light word idly spoken. God grant that he may use that power so that he can face that responsibility at the last!