hend to some extent how, if God had offered salvation and
a home in heaven forever to all mankind on such easy terms as faith in
the merits of the death of Jesus, He could visit condign punishment on
such as knew it and wilfully rejected it. But I could not see the
justice of such a punishment being inflicted on the countless millions
of people who never heard of it, had no means of knowing it, and could
not be justly blamed for not knowing it. Another thing that I now put
the test of reason to, was the doctrine of salvation by faith itself.
Was faith the only thing that could merit the favor of God? Was
character of no avail? Was all moral purity, goodness and brotherly
love but "filthy rags in the sight of God," unless buttressed by belief
in the Deity of Jesus and the vicarious atonement? Was salvation after
all as arbitrary as that described in "Holy Willie's Prayer"?

"O, Thou who in the heavens dost dwell,
Who as it pleases best thysel'
Sends one to heaven and ten to hell,
A' for Thy glory,
And not for any good or ill
They've done afore Thee."

I thought of such moralists and philosophers as Zoroaster, Buddha,
Confucius, Socrates, Plato, and thousands of others who have lived in
the past, and left a lasting impression in the world for the good of
mankind that continues to this day, some of them but little less than
Jesus himself, in the moral sublimity of their lives and teachings, and
wondered if these men were all in hell to roast and fry and burn
forever because they had not "exercised faith" in the merits of a dying
God of whom they had never known or even heard! And every nobler
sentiment of my human nature rebelled against such an idea. To
attribute such a character and proceeding to God is to make him, in
cruelty and injustice, below the level of the most ferocious beast of
the jungle. This was not all. I beheld the divisions in the church
itself. Some hundreds of different denominations, all bearing the name
Christian, each claiming to be right and all the balance wrong, each
claiming to expound the only truth, and all the balance error; each
claiming to direct to the only true and infallible way of eternal life
and all the balance only deadly heresies. I found the history of the
Christian Church written in blood. For fifteen hundred years Christian
had slain Christian as a part of his religious duty. Fire and fagot,
sword and rack and all the instruments of torture known