your good Lord
gives war; that the good Lord is the cause of famine; in a word, that
the good Lord, without ceasing to be good, has the will and the right to
do you the greatest evils you can endure! Cease to call your Lord good
when He does you harm; do not say that He is just; say that He is the
strongest, and that it is impossible for you to avert the blows which
His caprice inflicts upon you. God, you say, punishes us for our highest
good; but what real benefit can result to a nation in being exterminated
by contagion, murdered by wars, corrupted by the examples of perverse
masters, continually pressed by the iron scepter of merciless tyrants,
subjected to the scourge of a bad government, which often for centuries
causes nations to suffer its destructive effects? The eyes of faith must
be strange eyes, if we see by their means any advantage in the most
dreadful miseries and in the most durable evils, in the vices and
follies by which our kind is so cruelly afflicted!

XC.--REDEMPTION, AND THE CONTINUAL EXTERMINATIONS ATTRIBUTED TO JEHOVAH
IN THE BIBLE, ARE SO MANY ABSURD AND RIDICULOUS INVENTIONS WHICH
PRESUPPOSE AN UNJUST AND BARBAROUS GOD.

What strange ideas of the Divine justice must the Christians have who
believe that their God, with the view of reconciling Himself with
mankind, guilty without knowledge of the fault of their parents,
sacrificed His own innocent and sinless Son! What would we say of a
king, whose subjects having revolted against him, in order to appease
himself could find no other expedient than to put to death the heir to
his crown, who had taken no part in the general rebellion? It is, the
Christian will say, through kindness for His subjects, incapable of
satisfying themselves of His Divine justice, that God consented to the
cruel death of His Son. But the kindness of a father to strangers does
not give him the right to be unjust and cruel to his son. All the
qualities that theology gives to its God annul each other. The exercise
of one of His perfections is always at the expense of another.

Has the Jew any more rational ideas than the Christian of Divine
justice? A king, by his pride, kindles the wrath of Heaven. Jehovah
sends pestilence upon His innocent people; seventy thousand subjects are
exterminated to expiate the fault of a monarch that the kindness of God
resolved to spare.

XCI.--HOW CAN WE DISCOVER A TENDER, GENEROUS, AND EQUITABLE FATHER IN A
BEING WHO HAS CREA