p on the slaughter of his enemies on the part of a
barbarian general, God stopped the whole machinery of the universe for
hours until he got through with his killing. We must believe the
literal story of Jonah's being swallowed by the whale. We must believe
no end of incredibilities; and then, if we dare to read with our eyes
open, we must believe immoral things, cruel things, about men and about
God, things which our civilization would not endure, were it not for
the power of tradition, which hallows that which used to be believed in
the past.

This conception of the Bible, then, is gone.

Then, in the next place, the blood atonement is gone. What did that
mean to the world? It meant that the eternal Father either would not or
could not forgive and receive back to his heart his own erring,
mistaken, wandering children unless the only begotten Son of God was
slaughtered, and we, as the old awful hymn has it, were plunged beneath
this fountain of blood I Revolting, terrible, if you stop to think of
it for one reasoning moment, that God cannot forgive unless he takes
agony out of somebody equal to that from which he releases his own
children! That, though embodied still in all the creeds, has been taken
away. It is gone, like a long, hideous dream of darkness.

Belief in the devil has been taken away. What does that mean? It means
that Christendom has held and taught for nearly two thousand years that
God is not really King of the universe; that he holds only a divided
power, and that here thousands on thousands of years go by, and the
devil controls the destiny of this world, and ruins right and left
millions on millions of human souls, and that God either cannot help it
or does not wish to, one of the two. This belief is taken away.

And then, lastly, that which I have touched on by implication already,
the belief in endless punishment is taken away. Are you sorry? Does
anybody wish something put in the place of this? The belief that all
those except the elect, church members, those who have been through a
special process called conversion, these, including all the millions on
millions outside of Christendom and from the beginning until to-day,
have gone down to the flame that is never quenched, the worm that never
dies, to linger on in useless torture forever and ever? Simply a
monument of what is monstrously called the justice of God! This is
gone.

Now, friends, just ask yourselves, as you go home, as you think