understands
his profession will claim that is so. No lawyer who has studied the
history of law will claim it. No man who knows history itself will
claim it. No man will claim it but an ignorant zealot.

Let us go another step--let us compare the ideas of this God with the
ideas of uninspired men. I am making this long preface because I want
to get it out of your minds that the bible is inspired.

Now let us go along a little and see what is God's opinion of liberty.
Nothing is of more value in this world today than liberty--liberty of
body and liberty of mind. Without liberty, the universe would be as a
dungeon into which human beings are flung like poor and miserable
convicts. Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of
the mind. Without it we should be in darkness. Now, Jehovah commanded
the Jewish people to take captives the strangers and sojourners amongst
them, and ordered that they and their children should be bondsmen and
bondswomen for ever.

Now let us compare Jehovah to Epictetus--a man to whom no revelation
was ever made--a man to whom this God did not appear. Let us listen to
him: "Remember your servants are to be treated as your own
brothers--children of the same God." On the subject of liberty is not
Epictetus a better authority than Jehovah, who told the Jews to make
bondsmen and bondswomen of the heathen round about? And He said they
were to make them their bondsmen and bondswomen forever. Why? Because
they were heathen. Why? Because they were not children of the Jews.
He was the God of the Jews and not of the rest of mankind. So He said
to His chosen people: "Pillage upon the enemy and destroy the people of
other gods. Buy the heathen round about." Yet Cicero, a poor pagan
lawyer, said this--and he had not even read the old testament--had not
even had the advantage of being enlightened by the prophets: "They who
say that we should love our fellow-citizens, and not foreigners,
destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, and with it benevolence
and justice would perish forever." Is not Cicero greater than Jehovah?
The bible, inspired by Jehovah, says: "If a man smite his servant with
a rod and he die under his hand he shall be punished. It he continue a
day or two and then die, he shall not be punished." Zeno, the founder
of the stoics, who had never heard of Jehovah, and never read a word of
Moses, said this: "No man can be the owner of another, and the title is
b