may look through a telescope,
and see the nebula that is to make a sun floating, like a luminous mist,
three hundred million miles away. You may look again, and see another
sun in process of formation. You may look again, and see others almost
completed. You may look again and again, and see millions of suns and
systems spread out across the heavens like rivers of living gems.

You will say that all this speaks of a Creator. I shall not contradict
you. But what kind of Creator must He be who has created such a universe
as this?

Do you think He is the kind of Creator to make blunders and commit
crimes? Can you, after once thinking of the Milky Way, with its rivers
of suns, and the drop of water teeming with spangled dragons, and the
awful abysses of dark space, through which comets shoot at a speed
a thousand times as fast as an express train--can you, after seeing
Saturn's rings, and Jupiter's moons, and the clustered gems of Hercules,
consent for a moment to the allegation that the creator of all this
power and glory got angry with men, and threatened them with scabs
and sores, and plagues of lice and frogs? Can you suppose that such a
creator would, after thousands of years of effort, have failed even now
to make His repeated revelations comprehensible? Do you believe that
He would be driven across the unimaginable gulfs of space, but of the
transcendent glory of His myriad resplendent suns, to die on a cross,
in order to win back to Him the love of the puny creatures on one puny
planet in the marvellous universe His power had made?

Do you believe that the God who imagined and created such a universe
could be petty, base, cruel, revengeful, and capable of error? I do not
believe it.

And now let us examine the character and conduct of this God as depicted
for us in the Bible--the book which is alleged to have been directly
revealed by God Himself.

JEHOVAH THE ADOPTED HEAVENLY FATHER OF CHRISTIANITY

In giving the above brief sketch of the known universe my object was to
suggest that the Creator of a universe of such scope and grandeur must
be a Being of vast power and the loftiest dignity.

Now, the Christians claim that their God created this universe--not the
universe He is described, in His own inspired word, as creating, but the
universe revealed by science; the universe of twenty millions of suns.

And the Christians claim that this God is a God of love, a God
omnipotent, omnipresent, and ete