rt; but as the man who drove
the oxen--in one place it says that they were oxen, in another that they
were cows with young calves, and you will be damned if you don't believe
both--anyhow, as the driver walked along in horrid fear lest something
should happen to that ark of God, the oxen shied, and the ark toppled,
and instinctively the driver put out his hand to steady the sacred
thing. Well, you would think that any sane man, any reasonable being,
would have commended him for it; but no! Jehovah struck him dead for his
pains. Why? Because that box was so supremely sacred. Supreme nonsense!
Suppose he had not touched it and it had fallen? What then? Most likely
Jehovah would then have struck him dead for not touching it. It strikes
me that the only reasonable, sensible being connected with that whole
story was the driver, the man they abuse, the man the priests murdered,
I suspect because he discovered what was in that ark, and threatened to
expose the humbug.

Whenever any man uses judgment and common-sense the Church calls him
wicked and dangerous. They say he "touches with unholy hands holy
things;" and when he dies, whether his death was expedited or otherwise,
they say God killed him.

Now, if God did kill that man for touching the ark to save it from
falling, what do you think of him--as a God? I can tell you what you
would think of him as a man. You would think he was a ruffian and a
murderer--that is what you would think of him as a man.

Truly gods are made of poor stuff. If I can't have a god that is nobler
and better and truer and kinder than the very best man I ever saw, then
I don't want any god at all. And candor forbids me to state that I ever
saw, heard, or read of any such a god. All the gods I ever read or heard
of have fallen infinitely below a few men I know.

Jehovah, it seems to me, is hardly an average god, even as gods go. He
believed in polygamy. He believed in slavery. He was a murderer--killed
52,000 people once because somebody looked into that four-by-two box
that he thought so much of. Human life was not worth a copper in his
neighborhood. He was always in a rage about something, and you never
knew when he would "get the drop on you" because somebody else had
ruffled his temper. "Any man was liable," as the Irishman said, "to wake
up any morning and find himself burned to ashes in his bed," because one
of his neighbors had been wicked enough to lend a five-dollar greenback
to one of th