heerful people, against unfamiliar usages and things they do
not understand, embodied itself in this conception of a malignant and
partisan Deity, perpetually "upset" by the little things people did,
and contriving murder and vengeance. Now this God would be drowning
everybody in the world, now he would be burning Sodom and Gomorrah,
now he would be inciting his congenial Israelites to the most terrific
pogroms. This divine "frightfulness" is of course the natural
human dislike and distrust for queer practices or for too sunny a
carelessness, a dislike reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape
in us, liberating the latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it
an excuse and pressing permission upon it, handing the thing hated and
feared over to its secular arm. . . .

* It is not so generally understood as it should be among
English and American readers that a very large proportion of
early Christians before the creeds established and
regularised the doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely
that Jehovah was God; they regarded Christ as a rebel
against Jehovah and a rescuer of humanity from him, just as
Prometheus was a rebel against Jove. These beliefs survived
for a thousand years throughout Christendom: they were held
by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the
Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The
catholic church found it necessary to prohibit the
circulation of the Old Testament among laymen very largely
on account of the polemics of the Cathars against the Hebrew
God. But in this book, be it noted, the word Christian,
when it is not otherwise defined, is used to indicate only
the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.

It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct
for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish sweet
familiar things, that these things of the True God should so readily
liberate cruelty and tyranny. It is like a woman going with a light to
tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the house on fire. None
the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of God the Revengeful, God
the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion. It is only in quite recent
years that the growing gentleness of everyday life has begun to make men
a little ashamed of a Deity less tolerant and gentle than themselves.
The recent literature of the Anglicans abounds in the ev