On April 25, 1901, two years after Ingersoll’s passing, Bierce published an article in the New York Journal citing the Christian concept of human immortality—life after death—as an absolute truth. Bierce magnanimously [for him] threw an olive branch to countries with a predominately Christian population:
Our modern Christian nations hold a passionate hope and belief in another world, yet the most popular writer and speaker of his time [Ingersoll], the man whose lectures drew the largest audiences, the work of whose pen brought him the highest rewards, was he who most strenuously strove to destroy the ground of the hope, and unsettle the foundation of the belief. Nor does any name than his stand higher today in the admiration and affection of the great body of the American people. Let those who decry or fear the “intolerance" of modern Christianity consider whether they are not denouncing a shadow or cowering before a dream. There should be a lesson to them in the fact that it is only in Christian countries that free speech is known to all—only there that “Girt about by friends or foes. / A man may speak he thing he will.”
Bierce, who survived Ingersoll by some fifteen years, mysteriously vanished in Mexico in 1914, and his remains have never been discovered.
