edemption of mankind! For nineteen hundred years the Church has
thus execrated and anathematised Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, the
High Priests, the whole Jewish nation and the Roman Empire, and
consigned them to eternal perdition, the tormenting flames of an
eternal hell, and scattered the Jews to the four quarters of the earth,
never ceasing its horrid persecutions, in many places even to this day;
and all for what? For crucifying Christ; for carrying out the divine
purpose planned from before the foundation of the world; for obeying
the Eternal Will; for doing only what they were _compelled_ by the
eternal fates to do in order that mankind might be saved from the
eternal burning!

Our author that I had been studying says on page 257, "No man can read
the Bible with any faith in its teachings, and deny that this terrible
calamity (the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation) overtook
the Jews on account of their great sins, _especially their rejection of
the Son of God_." (Italics mine.) Suppose they had not rejected him.
Suppose they had accepted him as the Messiah of prophecy, as the Church
insists he was, and had set about to make him their king and succeeded;
and he had lived on a normal life and died a natural death, what would
have become of the "scheme of redemption" by vicarious atonement? What
about the "plan of salvation," the remission of sins only thru the
"power of the blood"? "Apart from the shedding of blood there is no
remission." Then if the Jews _had not_ rejected Jesus and thereby
caused his blood to be shed, what would have been the eternal destiny
of the whole human race? According to orthodox Christianity, the whole
plan would have failed, and the whole human race would have been
irretrievably lost and plunged forever and ever into eternal torments,
"where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched"!

I had now reached the crisis. After pursuing this course of study and
this line of reasoning for a period of about three years after
finishing the book I have herein described, does any one wonder that I
threw the whole thing overboard, Bible, inspiration, revelation, church
and religion, into the scrap heap of superstition, legend, fable and
mythology? I gave up the whole thing as a farce and a delusion, as
"sounding brass and tinkling cymbals." I could no longer honestly
preach such a gospel; I could not be a hypocrite. I withdrew from the
church and ministry and turned