idence of this
trouble.

Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for denying
the irascibility of his God and teaching "the Kaffirs of Natal" the
dangerous heresy that God is all mercy. "We cannot allow it to be said,"
the Dean of Cape Town insisted, "that God was not angry and was not
appeased by punishment." He was angry "on account of Sin, which is a
great evil and a great insult to His Majesty." The case of the Rev.
Charles Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a second assertion of the
Church's insistence upon the fierceness of her God. This case is not to
be found in the ordinary church histories nor is it even mentioned in
the latest edition of the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; nevertheless it
appears to have been a very illuminating case. It is doubtful if the
church would prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso or Mr. Voysey
to-day.

7. GOD AND THE NURSERY-MAID

Closely related to the Heresy of God the Avenger, is that kind of
miniature God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the overtaxed
parent are so apt to appeal. You stab your children with such a God and
he poisons all their lives. For many of us the word "God" first came
into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational restraint, as Bogey,
as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye. God Bogey is a great
convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to leave Fear to mind her
charges and enforce her disciplines, while she goes off upon her own
aims. But indeed, the teaching of God Bogey is an outrage upon the soul
of a child scarcely less dreadful than an indecent assault. The reason
rebels and is crushed under this horrible and pursuing suggestion. Many
minds never rise again from their injury. They remain for the rest of
life spiritually crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a
persuasion of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.

I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered. He and his Hell
were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still believed
in him, and who could help but hate? I thought of him as a fantastic
monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening, perpetually waiting
to condemn and to "strike me dead"; his flames as ready as a grill-room
fire. He was over me and about my feebleness and silliness and
forgetfulness as the sky and sea would be about a child drowning in
mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a child of thirteen, by the grace of
the true God in me,