mine--saw the fierce eyes
of hunger--the wasted forms, the white lips, saw mothers eating
babes, and remained ferocious as famine.

It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship or
respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a
really civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and
contempt.

But in the old days the good people justified Jehovah in His
treatment of the heathen. The wretches who were murdered were
idolators and therefore unfit to live.

According to the Bible, God had never revealed Himself to these
people and He knew that without a revelation they could not know
that He was the true God. Whose fault was it, then, that they were
heathen?

The Christians said that God had the right to destroy them because
He created them. What did He create them for? He knew when He made
them that they would be food for the sword. He knew that He would
have the pleasure of seeing them murdered.

As a last answer, as a final excuse, the worshipers of Jehovah said
that all these horrible things took place under the "old
dispensation" of unyielding law, and absolute justice, but that
now, under the "new dispensation," all had been changed--the sword
of justice had been sheathed and love enthroned. In the Old
Testament, they said, God is the judge--but in the New, Christ is
the merciful. As a matter of fact, the New Testament is infinitely
worse than the Old. In the Old there is no threat of eternal pain.
Jehovah had no eternal prison--no everlasting fire. His hatred
ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his enemy was
dead.

In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of
punishment that has no end. In the New Testament the malice of God
is infinite and the hunger of His revenge eternal.

The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told His disciples
not to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one
cheek to turn the other; and yet we are told that this same God,
with the same loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish
words: "Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the
Devil and his angels."

These are the words of "eternal love."

No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite
ho