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The Hidden Agenda in Ben Hur
By James H. Smylie

"It may be that Wallace wrote exactly the kind of apologetic that some Americans in the latter part of the nineteenth century needed, an apologetic which allowed them to have God and Mammon too. Wallace wrote a tale as an opiate for the rich and for all those other Americans who thought that they had a divine calling to make it, even to make it big, in the ‘Great Barbecue.’ They could participate in the struggle not only for existence but also a place in the emerging industrial state of the late nineteenth century-and be Christian too."

BEN HUR still thrills American audiences. That first-century chariot race in which the Jew, with the white steeds, Triumphs over the Roman Messala, with the black horses, is pretty heady drama. For literally thousands of times that race has been held, and for the same number of times Ben Hur has come through the victor. Good still beats evil at the race tracks. In rereading Ben Hur, A Tale of the Christ, I realized that we have been getting Hollywoods redaction of Lew Wallace instead of Lew Wallace, and I think it is about time to have the real Ben Hur stand up.

I

Lew Wallace published Ben Hur in 1880. By that time he had gained a national reputation for his part on the Union side in the Civil War, for presiding over the Andersonville prison trials, and for being governor of the territory of New Mexico. Although he had done some writing, he was catapulted into literary prominence with the publication of his novel about first-century Christians, the volume on which his fame still reclines.¹ Ben Hur was just one of a genre which included William Ware's Julian (1841) and Joseph Holt Ingraham's The Prince of the House of David (1855), but it

James H. Smylie is Professor of American Church History at Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, and Editor of the Journal of Presbyterian History.
¹ For the Christianity and literary development of Lew Wallace, see An Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York, 1906) 1, pp. 1-2, and Irving McKee, "Ben-Hur" Wallace, The Life of General Wallace (Berkeley, 1947), pp. 164-167.

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seemed to have caught the public imagination. ² It kept it after Ben Hur was adapted for the stage and for the developing motion picture industry.

Lew Wallace was raised in a Methodist household. But he professed not to have been very Methodist himself, and he never joined a particular denomination. Yet as early as 1876 he was shaping an apology for orthodox Christianity against attacks which were being made upon it by his fellow-veteran, famous lawyer, and America's flamboyant infidel Robert G. Ingersoll in his lecture, "The Gods." ³ Wallace may be remembered as the author of Ben Hur. He is not remembered as a Christian apologist. Indeed, the nature of his apology has been swallowed up to a certain extent by the theatrics which have characterized Ben Hur as drama.

While it was Wallace's intention to write a novel about first-century Rome and first-century Christians, he told a story which reflects his own time and the unresolved problems of Christians at the end of the nineteenth century. In Wallace's day, America was fast becoming a great industrial state. In the process it was generating fabulous wealth and vast wretchedness and a proportional amount of corruption and discontent. Those who guided the development of the country earned for themselves the title 'Robber Barons' because of their greed, grab, and scandals. Lew Wallace helped to sanctify the age with his apology and with Ben Hur's explicit credo. In the end Ben Hur emerges as a bold success story after the pattern of Horatio Alger's "Tattered Tom," who defined his Christian responsibility as did the boldest baron of the Gilded Age. It is this aspect of Wallace's novel that I wish to explore. ⁴

II

Wallace tells of his intention to write an apologetic against Ingersoll. Although it is not altogether clear how Wallace believed he was fulfilling this through Ben Hur, it is important for us to keep this intention in mind in analyzing the story. Ingersoll gave his address on "The Gods' a subtitle: "An Honest God Is the Noblest Work of Man." In this speech he attacked what he called human "god factories," and the various proofs for the existence of God, such as special providence and miracles and the argument from ignorance. He labeled as the "infamy of infamies" the doctrine that a future happiness and an eternity of bliss depended upon faith.

² See James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (New York, 1950), and Willard Thorp, "The Religious Novel as Best Seller in America," in James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison, eds., Religious Perspectives in American Culture (Princeton, 1961), pp. 195-242.
³ Wallace, "How I Came to Write Ben Hur," reprinted in Autobiography, op. cit., II, p. 931; also p. 950. McKee in "Ben-Hur" Wallace, op. cit., pp. 166-167 , also deals with the encounter of Wallace with Ingersoll and with the former's resolve to deal with the popular infidel.
⁴ In The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb, III., 1971), Chapter 4, Paul A. Carter places emphasis on the importance of Ben Hur but does not explore the novel's full significance as an apology.

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He was particularly incensed at the way in which clergymen balanced all "the real ills of this life with the expected joys of the next." After describing all of these ills he complained about Christians: "In heaven they are too happy to have sympathy; too busy singing to aid the imploring and distressed. Their eyes are blinded; their ears are stopped and their hearts are turned to stone by the infinite selfishness of joy." Ingersoll attacked emphasis upon a future life as an opiate to the conscience which allowed the worse exploitation. He pleaded for a Religion of Humanity based upon reason, observation, and experience. ⁵ Using Ingersoll's trinity, Wallace showed both his agreement and disagreement with his cantankerous contemporary.

Actually Wallace confirms Ingersoll's point that a man is a god-maker. As he describes the Roman Empire he comes to the conclusion that there was nothing "so common and cheap as gods." But in his novel he seems to suggest that this is an expression of the deepest human longing. Laying hold on the widespread interest in this subject prompted by the publication of James Freeman Clarke's Ten Great Religions of the World in 1871, ⁶ Wallace goes to great length in describing this yearning.

In the first part of Ben Hur, the author introduces the three wise men on their way to visit the infant Christ. In their conversation on their pilgrimage, the magi mention all the religious quests. Gaspar, the Athenian, embodies the wisdom of Greece and the Greek quest for God through philosophy. Olympus was the home of gods as well as God, but no home for the seeking Gaspar, since the Greeks had been unable to bring God and man into a satisfactory relationship. Melchior is from India. He had been unable to find happiness in his quest of knowledge and perfection as a Hindoo. He lived with an uneasy conscience particularly because of his inability to deal with untouchables. Balthasar, an Egyptian, expresses his dissatisfaction with the mysticism of Persia and the nirvana of Buddhism. He concludes that man's greatest need of life with God is not fulfilled in any of these ways. God alone must come in person to establish the proper relationship. That is why these men are on their way to greet the Messiah at his birth. Wallace implies in his novel that he accepts Clarke's apologetic for Christ as the pleroma, he who filled up that which was lacking in the other religions of the world. ⁷

⁵ Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods " in The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, 12 vols. (New York, 1900), I, especially pp. 7, 15, 17, 52, 73-74, 86. Ingersoll himself came out of a pious household. His father John Ingersoll, served as pastor of Congregational and Presbyterian churches."
⁶ See James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2 vols. (Boston, 1871 and 1883) . Sydney E. Ahlstrorn has shown how popular was the study of religions in The American Protestant Encounter with World Religions (Beloit, Wis., 1962).
⁷ Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ (New York, 1880), Book First. Cited hereinafter as BH. Apparently Wallace had worked on this section of the book before he resolved to turn it into an apology against Ingersoll.

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III

But Wallace thought he had an even better apologetic. In Ben Hur he had decided to write a story which would give the reader an idea of the moral, social, and political condition of the world at the time of Jesus' birth, and thereby show that mankind was "so debased as to be past salvation except by direct interposition of the Almighty." ⁸ Thereby he hoped to undercut Ingersoll's Religion of Humanity. Ingersoll had enthroned Reason. Reason would hasten the day when society would "cease producing millionaires and mendicants-gorged indolence and famished industry-truth in rags, and superstition robed and crowned." ⁹ Ingersoll held religion responsible for all evil.

Wallace does not see it this way as he describes the decay of the empire. Rome had conquered under Mars and ruled with Bacchus. Rome was a "monster . . . a ravenous beast gorging with blood." All of the bloody games and spectacles were attempts to deal with the boredom in which Romans lived. Thus Rome produced nothing but brutes in the constant effort to rule. Areas, such as Greece and Egypt, over which Rome extended authority, were no better, and Jerusalem had become a mere copy of Rome, a "center of unholy practices, a seat of pagan power.' Wallace writes that the "wretchedness of the masses, and their hopeless condition, had no relation whatever to religion; their murmurs and groans were not against their gods or for want of gods." He adds, "No, the unhappy condition was not from religion, but misgovernment and usurpations and countless tyrannies." ¹⁰

All of this corruption is personalized in Wallace's hero, Ben Hur, who nurses his own animosities toward Rome. When he accidentally displaces a tile from the comer of his house and injures the new Procurator of Judea, he is accused of being an assassin. He is sentenced to the galleys without a proper hearing and a trial. Although his mother and sister have nothing to do with the accident, they are arrested, locked in a dungeon to die, contract leprosy, and become untouchables. Hur loses his property to the Procurator and to his boyhood friend, Messala, who has become corrupted by Rome -the beast. According to Wallace, the situation called not for Reason; there was as much of that in the Empire as there were gods. The situation called for God and God's intervention.¹¹

Wallace is not explicit about the American gods of the nineteenth century. However, he did write his book in a period of American life marked by widespread corruption. The nation was rocked in

⁸ See Wallace, Autobiography, op. cit., II, pp. 931, 950. This Aristotelian apology for Christianity-do not introduce the gods until they are needed-is hinted at directly on the title page of BH. Wallace quotes Count de Gabalis: "Learn of philosophers always to look for natural causes in all extraordinary events; an when such natural causes are wanting, recur to God."
⁹ Ingersoll, "The Gods," op. cit., pp. 89-90.
¹⁰ See BH, pp. 40, 43, 120, 272-273, 341, 349, 556.
¹¹ See BH, Book Second, for the account of Ben Hur's misfortunes.

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the early part of the decade by the exposures of corruption in the Grant administration. The Credit Mobilier and the Whiskey Ring scandals involved sculduggery high up in Grant's official family as well as among many American business men. So widespread was the decline of public mortality that such exposures seemed to confirm many Americans' belief in Vanderbilt's credo: "The Public Be Damned!"

Wallace does not relate his description of corruption to America. Since many Americans thought of themselves as latter-day Romans and had an image of America as an imperial power, perhaps the correlation was obvious. When Wallace suggests that the corruption of Rome and the unhappy condition of Romans was based on misgovernment, usurpations, and countless tyrannies, not upon religion, he avoids the question of the relation between the corruption of the Empire and the corruption of religion, and he never discusses the issue fully. In turning to the positive statement of his apology, he does not face the problem of the relation between empire and piety.

IV

After analyzing maids efforts as a god-maker-and conceding Ingersoll's point-and after describing the corruption he found in ancient Rome, Wallace proceeds to proclaim the true God and his Kingdom. This is where Jesus comes in and Wallace subtitled his book A Tale of the Christ. Christ is, as Balthasar puts it, "A MAN WHOM THE WORLD COULD NOT DO WITHOUT." ¹² From one perspective, Jesus is a neglected man in the novel, and there is a certain docetic quality about him. Wallace was not certain whether or not Americans would accept Jesus as the hero of a work of fiction. Therefore, as he describes the corruption of Rome and traces the troubles of Ben Hur, Jesus appears only occasionally. He is present as a baby, a child as other children, to be sure, but in a scene in which God is all and the child nothing, He appears a second time as a youth to give to Ben Hur a cup of fresh water as Hur is being taken to the galleys. Jesus is so appealing on this occasion, "so full of love and holy purpose," that Hur's desire for revenge melts for the time being under Jesus' look. Jesus is introduced at the conclusion of the story during the last week of his life, to touch the untouchable and to heal Hur's mother and sister, to be crucified and to rise from the dead. Wallace's reticence about portraying Christ carries over into his insistence that the Messiah be represented by a light in the stage adaptation of the book. ¹³ A close

¹² BH, p. 269.
¹³ For references in the story to Christ, see BH, pp. 80, 130, 502, and the last Chapter in which Wallace describes the Miracle, the Passover, and the Crucifixion. For Wallace's uneasiness about dealing with Christ see his Autobiography, op. cit., II, pp. 928ff. and McKee, "Ben Hur" Wallace, op. cit., p. 170 and Chapter XII, passim. McKee has a thorough discussion of the development of the early versions of the play and the movie.

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reading of the novel indicates that Wallace's concern rests elsewhere in a direction, by the way, which may have been difficult to convey in the dramatic presentations of Ben Hur at a later time.

Christ came to proclaim a Kingdom of Souls. Balthasar, the wise man from Egypt, carries the chief apologetic task at this point. Balthasar puts down Ingersoll's chief attack upon religion as an opiate by boldly asserting that man's ultimate concern is death and life after death. Balthasar looks for a Messiah who will establish not a political kingdom, but a Kingdom of Souls. Jesus is that Messiah. Balthasar gradually unfolds the shape of the Messiah's Kingdom through his various conversations beginning in the very earliest encounter of the wise men on the way to Bethlehem. The three sit in silence after a speech by Balthasar with the "unspeakable joy of souls on the shores of the River of Life, resting with the Redeemed in Gods presence."

This Kingdom of Souls is that which is prophesied in the biblical accounts in the Old Testament-in Malachi, Enoch, the Psalms, Ezra, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Zechariah. It is a universal kingdom which embraces all mankind and which will mean for all mankind and justice," and Wallace completes the quotation without adequately explaining it, "in the whole earth." It is an everlasting kingdom, one which will not be subject to the vicissitudes of nations, to their decline and fall. It is a future kingdom, a paradise in which death is conquered and is no more. Death is man's basic problem. The after-life had become so obscure that it might be called a "lost light,' according to Balthasar. "The monuments of the nations are all protests," he argues at one point, "against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history."

In connection with this concern, the Messiah's role is not to be a king, but to be a savior from the last enemy which is death. This is a constant refrain throughout Wallace's apology against Ingersoll until the last scenes of Ben Hur in which the resurrection is affirmed. Balthasar confesses the immortality of the soul in a life with God, an immortality which robs death of its terrors, life of its sorrows, and gives to all men a sense of "divine superiority" and a "life of absolute purity." ¹⁴

This Kingdom of Souls, as Balthasar describes it, does seem to impinge upon this life through its laws. The laws of the Messianic Kingdom, according to Wallace, are "Faith, Love, and Good Works." Faith involves belief in God, Gods Savior, and in God's Kingdom of Souls, as Balthasar has described it. Love is a little more complicated as Wallace develops it in this novel. The love of the Roman Empire is a love without law, an unrestrained love, not the mark of the Kingdom of Souls. In one instance, Wallace even

¹⁴ For references to and discussions of the Kingdom of Souls and death, see BH, especially pp. 34, 269, 272, 331-333, 554.

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asserts that it would be better to have law without love than a love without law. But, he concedes at another place, love is always better and mightier than force in achieving governance and its object-peace and order among men. Good works flow from faith and love among those who are citizens of the Kingdom of Souls. ¹⁵

It is in the appearances of Christ that these laws are manifest. In describing the scene in which Jesus is arrested, Wallace writes: "Peace and good-will, and love and non-resistance, had been the burden of the Nazarene's teaching; would he put his preaching into practice?" 16 And he did! Ben Hur waits for a signal from Jesus so that he can rise in insurrection. He is dumbfounded as he watches Jesus' arrest, trial, and death, in obedience to the laws of God ! Wallace does not, in fact , develop systematically any particular view of incarnation or of atonement. Christ came to reaffirm and reassure humanity of the immortality of the soul and to emphasize that man should live with God in his Kingdom of Souls.

V

With his argument novelist Wallace came to the support of another contemporary, evangelist Dwight L. Moody. "I look on this world," Moody preached, "as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a life-boat, and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can.'" This familiar statement does not do full justice to the thought of the famous preacher, but it does indicate a dominant theme which ran through Moody's sermons and services. Moody did confirm one of Ingersoll's notions about heaven. He insisted that there would be great singing in the future kingdom! Maybe under the direction of Ira Sankey? This emphasis on death as man's ultimate concern is a very telling point with regard to the human quest, and there is evidence that Ingersoll was concerned about it in his own life as friends and members of his own family passed away.17 In the context of the 1880's, Ben Hur seemed to corroborate what Ingersoll had maintained about heaven and how it could be used as a convenient escape from the responsibilities of this life.

When we think of the opposition to the "applied Christianity" movement, among those who attempted to develop a more responsible concept of the Kingdom of God-Washington Gladden, for example, the problem comes more into focus. A closer look at the fortunes of Ben Hur himself makes the point and problem of the book much sharper.

¹⁵ For some references to the laws of the Kingdom of Souls see BH, pp. 77, 554.
¹⁶ BH, p. 528.
¹⁷ Moody's eschatological outlook is discussed by James F. Findlay, Jr., Dwight L. Moody, American Evangelist, 1837-1899 (Chicago, 1969), P. 249ff., especially p. 253. Carter explores the interest of people of the Gilded Age in death in his chapter, "If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again," The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age, op. cit., pp. 85-107. See references to Ingersoll and death, pp. 93ff.

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VI

The story of Ben Hur should be considered in the context of the 1870s and not that of the first century. Wallace wrote Ben Hur in the Gilded Age, a period in which Americans were literally scrambling from rags to riches, from selling newspapers to manipulating stock on Wall Street. In 1869 Horatio Alger, Unitarian clergyman turned novelist, began writing his best-selling tales of "Ragged Dick” and "Tattered Tom," in which poor boys grew up to be "Robber Barons." Usually the poor boy, by a special providence, is on hand when the rich man's daughter is in danger. He saves the daughter through his bravery and starts the drive upward aided not only by the rich man, but also by his own hard work, thrift, and perseverance. But not all poor boys made it. And the 1870's, 1880's, and 1890's were an uncertain age for many people, especially for the poor who were often mercilessly exploited by some of the very people who helped to sponsor Dwight L. Moody's revivals. It was a period of strikes, riots, and the fear of revolutionary anarchy which sent shock waves through Victorian America during the crises of 1877, 1886, 1892-1894. ¹⁸ Only if we keep this background in mind does Ben Hur become fully comprehensible.

Wallace's hero is a Jew. He is a servant of the Lord God of Israel, the God of Moses, who wishes to deliver his people from bondage to Rome. Wallace shows how this passion grows and changes in his character. Very early in the book Hur gains his mother's consent to be a soldier, to learn Roman ways in war in order to be a liberator. After his accident, he is spurred on in his purpose by a personal desire for revenge when he is separated from his mother and sister, is sent to the galleys, and loses his property. He is goaded in his desire for revenge-legitimate for a Jew-not only for his people but also for himself and his family.

“If God favor thee not," the Sheik cries out to Ben enduring armed rebellion, "it is because he is dead." And he trains himself in revolutionary tactics, waiting for a Messiah under whom he will serve as a warrior and under whose political kingship be will help to establish "national liberty." ¹⁹ At first he resists Balthasar's interpretation of the Messianic promises about a Savior Messiah and a Kingdom of Souls, much to the wise man's sadness. But when Hur meets Christ, when Christ heals his mother and sister, untouchables whom he touches to restore to health and strength, when Hur witnesses the resurrection, he is converted and accepts his place as a Christian in the Kingdom of Souls.

¹⁸ For a description and analysis of Horatio Alger see John Tebbel, From Rags to Riches, Horatio Alger, Jr., and the American Dream (New York, 1963). Also see Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York, 1949), for the story of the economic "earthquakes" which rocked America in this period.
¹⁹ For Ben Hur's personal development as a revolutionary and for his desire for revenge see BH, pp. 114, 270, 282, 295, 315-317, 336, 507.

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VII

If the reader is not alert as he reads about Ben Hur's conversion to Christ's Kingdom of Souls, he will forget to chart the hero's very fascinating economic fortune. Hur is a first-century Tattered Tom. To be sure, he starts out in comfortable circumstances provided for him by his father. But after his accident he loses all of his property, or so he thinks, and is reduced to utter poverty. As a matter of fact, the service in the galley usually meant the sentence of death. But then his fortune begins to move upward, and in the course of events he once again becomes a man of wealth. As a slave, "as Providence would have it," ²⁰ Ben Hur is not chained to the ship during the seafight with the pirates. He saves the Roman tribune, Arrius, is adopted as his son, and becomes his heir.

Later on in the novel, as Hur turns more of his attention toward revolution, he sells the property he has inherited from his step-father to keep it from falling into the bands of the "imperial robbers." In his journey back to Judea to find his mother and sister, Hur happens to meet with his father's old servant, Simonides. Simonides, at great physical torture and torment to himself, refused to tell the Romans the whereabouts of all of the property of Ben Hur, after Hur has been sentenced to the galley. He recounts his faithfulness as a servant with the talents. He has invested all which he was able to save, and be is able to turn over to Ben Hur enough money to make him "the richest subject in the world."

In arranging for the chariot race, Ben Hur's managers get Messala to wager a huge sum of money, the money which Messala had taken from Ben Hur when he sent Hur to the galley. Although Messala loses and is completely shattered in body, Hur makes him pay the whole of the wager, leaving his enemy destitute. It is Simonides who calls Success "the greatest of the angels of men," but one cannot help but believe that the angel had been watching over Ben Hur. He regains all of the wealth which he had before his misfortune, and then some. ²¹ With one exception, Wallace does not discuss how this money is made. Ben Hur won the chariot race by "cunningly" catching Messala's wheel with the ironshod point of his axle and crushing it-a trick, by the way, which Messala pulls on Ben Hur in the movie redaction of the story. This was in his unregenerate days, and perhaps we should not expect too much of Ben Hur. ²² How much should we expect of Wallace? Wallace does not raise questions about this matter of money-making. By the time be meets Jesus, Hur has his revenge, at least on Messala. He has his riches. And he gets religion too.

²⁰ BH, p. 159.
²¹ For Ben Hur's financial advance see BH, pp. 238, 325-326, 339, 346, 378, 379, 521, 523. Simonides refers to success, BH, pp. 237, 557.
²² BH, p. 376.

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After his conversion to Christianity, Ben Hur puts down his revolutionary sword. He waits out his days with peace of soul, as well as with his money, in expectation of paradise. If Wallace does not allow Ben Hur to develop an "applied Christianity" as an alternative to revolution, he does allow him to develop a rationale for his wealth. Hur came to the conclusion that his "fortune was meant for the service of the Giver." He builds a great reputation because of the large sums which he gives to the church in Antioch. Furthermore, during the Neroian persecution Christians were not allowed to build temples above ground. Hur helps to build them underground.

Wallace ends Ben Hur with a cryptic allusion to the fact that his hero helps to gild and garnish the Catacomb of Calixto, one of the richest of Christian catacombs in Rome. "Out of that tomb," Wallace concludes, "Christianity issued to supersede the Caesars." By using his fortune in the service of the Giver, Ben Hur has his final revenge on Rome. ²³ It should be noted that in 1889 Andrew Carnegie published 'Wealth' in the North American Review. He argued that the rich man was a mere trustee of riches. Carnegie himself preferred libraries to churches. J. P. Morgan, one of the greatest tycoons of them all, liked churches, and helped lay the foundation for St. John the Divine during this period.

VIII

Why did Wallace's book gain such popularity? Maybe Americans found it to be a good story. Actually it is a very interesting book, not only because of its moments of drama in the battle scene and the chariot race, but also in the way in which Wallace describes life in the first-century Roman Empire. Furthermore, the point about man's ultimate concern with death is compelling at points. How does Wallace's book add up as an apology against Ingersoll? Against some of Ingersoll's objections to Christianity of the nineteenth century, Wallace simply wraps up special providence, miracle, and prophecy in a tale with the hope that his reader will accept these as partial proofs for the existence of God. Did Americans get what Wallace considered to be his most telling apologetic? Did they correlate Roman corruption with American corruption and cry out to be saved? It would be hard to tell.

It may be that Wallace wrote exactly the Kind of apologetic that some Americans in the latter part of the nineteenth century needed, an apologetic which allowed them to have God and Mammon too. Wallace wrote a tale as an opiate for the rich and for all those other Americans who thought that they had a divine calling to make it, even to make it big, in the "Great Barbecue." They could participate in the struggle not only for existence but also a place in the emerging industrial state of the late nineteenth century-and be

²³ See BH, pp. 554, 559, 560.

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Christian too. Americans could follow Ben Hur from riches to rags to riches again, identify with him, and be assured that in the Kingdom of Souls this struggle did not count anyway. They did not even have to ask questions about bow they were getting wealth, or how the laws of the Kingdom of Souls-"Faith, Love, and Good Works"-should be applied to the struggle. All they needed to do was to make sure they were good investors, and that they used what they got in the service of the Giver. They could shut out and drown out the cries of the distressed and the oppressed by singing loudly about the bliss of the Kingdom of Souls in the churches and tabernacles which they built with their money. Ben Hues wealth may have been the just reward for a man who bad turned from his dark, rebellious, and revolutionary ways, and settled down to a peaceful life as the citizen of God's true Kingdom. Of course, Wallace could not have known about the cries of the poor since Jacob Riis did not write How the Other Half Lives until 1890.

The subtitle which Ingersoll gave to his lecture on "The Gods" was "An Honest God is the Noblest Work of Man." Ironically, Wallace, who started out to write an apology against the infidel, succeeded in shaping a God after the image of a nineteenth century American. Of course, Ingersoll did too, although he may have been a little more forthright about it. Furthermore, Wallace's apology made it more difficult for those who were attempting to develop a responsible Christian response to the industrial revolution with an emphasis on the Kingdom of God in which there would be a greater degree of justice for all in this life. ²⁴

²⁴ For another approach to the Kingdom of God see Robert T. Handy, ed., The Social Gospel in America, Gladden, Ely, Rauschenbusch (New York, 1966), passim.