ure of man that lifts him above all known forms of creation could,
and should be, appealed to as the final authority and last test in all
things. And since reason was universally recognized as the court of
last resort in all other things outside of religion, why should it not
be applied to this also? I felt that if I thus honestly and sincerely
followed the last and only light I had, that God could not be just and
everlastingly damn me for some possible error in my conclusions. The
process I followed and the results I reached will be told in the next
chapter.

CHAPTER V

THE CRISIS

I went back to the beginning. God was certainly good. He was
all-wise, infinite. He must have known all things---the end from the
beginning. If He thus knew all things He must have known the whole
destiny of man before He created him. He must have known that he would
yield to temptation and fall, and that all the direful consequences
would follow it that orthodoxy has pictured for centuries. I began to
wonder how God could be just and make a creature, whom He knew in
advance would do what Adam is alleged to have done, and knew in advance
the dreadful consequences that would follow it, not only to Adam
himself, but to all the unborn generations yet to people the world.
Especially was I perplexed to understand how God could be just and
visit all the consequences of Adam's sin on his entire posterity for
uncounted generations when they were and could be in no way responsible
for it and could not help it. Yet I believed God to be just. He could
not be God and be otherwise.

Since the whole purpose of religion, and Christianity in particular,
was to save mankind from hell hereafter, I first directed my inquiries
to the question of hell. Who made hell? and whence came the devil?
The Bible is silent as to their origin, except the vague reference in
the Book of Revelation to the war in heaven and the casting out of
Lucifer with a third part of the angels with him into the bottomless
pit so graphically portrayed by Milton in Paradise Lost. But this only
carried me back farther. Who created the angels, or were they
co-eternal with God? If they are co-eternal with God then there are
other eternal beings in the universe over whom God has little or no
control. If so God is not omnipotent. The devil is his rival in the
spiritual world and, according to the current doctrine, his equal in
omniscience and omnipresence, and a close