and all who were to come of them and all the world for their jealous passionate capricious children for their father s sins tempting men or at least them to be tempted into blindness and folly and then destroying them arthur arthur this is not a being to whom i could teach poor man to look up to out of his sufferings in love and hope what that with no motive but his own will he chose out for no merit of their own as an eastern chooses his one small section of mankind leaving � the world besides to devil worship and lies that the pure truth loving of the mountains who morning and night poured out his simple prayer to the universal father for the good of all his children that the noble of and the austere and stately that then these were devil and that one strange people of so cruel that even women and children fell in before their swords that these alone were the true god s servants that god bid them do these things and in their successful as a of his honor compelled the out of their courses to stand still and assist the for myself the most delightful trait in the entire long history is that golden thread of humanity which winds along below the cruelty of the exclusive theory and here and there appears in protest in touches of deeper sympathy for its victims than are ever found for the more highly favored who are those who most call out our tears is it not the outcast mother setting down her child that she may not see it die the injured the fallen s daughter watching by her murdered children or that unhappy husband who followed his wife weeping all along the road as david s were dragging her to his and then there is another thing arthur which seems to be taught not in the old testament but in the new which i should have to say i l a doctrine this not a history and a doctrine so horrible that it could only have taken root in mankind when they were struggling in the of and believed that the devil held a divided empire with god i mean that the lai portion of mankind are to be tortured for ever and ever in unspeakable agonies he cannot preach such doctrines no if i am to be a minister of religion i must teach the poor people that father in heaven not a tyrant one who loves them all beyond short and notices june power of heart to conceive who is sorry when they do wrong not whom they are to love and dread not with coward fear but with deepest awe and reverence as the all pure all good all holy i could never fear a god who kept a hell prison house no not though he flung me there because i refused there is a power stronger than such a one and it is possible to walk even in the furnace what am i to tell these poor millions of who struggle on their wretched lives of want and misery starved into sin passion by the of hunger and in ignorance because they were never taught and with but h of knowledge to feel the deep injustice under which they are am i to tell them i say that there is no hope for them here and less than none hereafter that the grave is but a precipice off which all all of them save here one and one will fall down into another life to which the worst of earth is heaven � why they may lift up their torn hands and cry in bitter anger why almighty one were we ever bom at all if it was but for this again he more some of the difficulties that he feels but why do they believe it at all they must say because it is in the bible yes here it is other books we may sit in judgment upon but not upon the bible that is the exception the one book which is wholly and entirely and we are to believe is there no matter how monstrous on the an of god he has told us and that is enough but how do they know he has told us the church says so why does the say so because the jews said so and how do we know the jews could not be mistaken t because they they were s people and god guided them one w have thought if this were so he would have them in the their too and we ought to be all jews now but in the name of heaven what is the history of those books which we the old no one knows who the authors were of the greater part of them or even at what date they were written they make no to be inspired themselves at least only the make such claim before the there was no collection at all they had only the book of the law as it is called of which they took such bad care that what that was none of us now know the now has not the slightest pretensions to be what moses read in the ears of all the people and wrote upon twelve stones the say their was written by god the say the were we say the bible was and we are but interested witnesses in deciding absolutely and exclusively for ourselves if it be the highest of the three it it because it is not the most divine but the most human it does not differ from them in kind and it seems to me that in it to god we are doing a double to ourselves for want of faith m our soul s strength to god in making him responsible for our weakness there is 