t mortals are to
imitate. God is the moral standard to which every bosom ought to
aspire. The highest perfection and loveliness of man fall infinitely
short of the intrinsic loveliness and divine perfection's of Jehovah.

If he is the standard of moral excellence which we are to imitate,
then we must admit that the copy far exceeds the imitation. If man is
called upon to act like God in order to improve his character and
affections, then God is better than man, and every opposing objection
must, forever, fall to the ground. Perhaps it may be said, that all
denominations of men allow him to be so. This is not correct. It is
true, they _say this_ in so many words. But words are one thing, and
what a doctrine involves is quite _another_. I might believe, and most
rigidly maintain, that an earthly father had prepared a palace of
comfort for his five _obedient_ children, and a furnace of fire to
torture his five _disobedient_ children; and suppose he had dealt with
his ten children as above stated;--with what propriety could I step
before the public, and contend that he was the best man in America?
Even were I persuaded, in my own mind, and firmly believed him to be
the best man in existence, would either my _belief or acknowledgment_
make it a fact? No; every man of common sense, and common humanity
would think me deranged. My saying that he was good, and even
believing him so, could not alter the awful reality, but would be an
evidence of my want of consistency and propriety. He would still be a
bad unfeeling man, and in no comparative sense so good as that father,
who should punish his children in mercy, and for their future
amendment and benefit.

But what is all this compared with the character that thousands
ascribe to the God, who rules above? It is no more than the drop to
the unmeasured ocean: because those five children would soon cease to
suffer; but God, they contend, will torture without mercy or end,
millions on millions of his poor dependent creatures for the sins of a
short life! The most abandoned, and unrelenting savage, that roams the
American forest--the worst wretch in human form would not do this, but
release, at length, the sufferer from pain. And those, who contend
that God will not release, but on the contrary involve the victim of
his ire deeper in who, attribute to him a character infinitely worse,
than the most cruel and degraded of our race, and no argument, to the
contrary, can be for one mome