FROM my childhood I had heard read and read the Bible. Morning and
evening the sacred volume was opened and prayers were said. The Bible
was my first history, the Jews were the first people, and the events
narrated by Moses and the other inspired writers, and those predicted
by prophets were the all important things. In other books were found the
thoughts and dreams of men, but in the Bible were the sacred truths of
God.
Yet in spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God.
He was so saving of mercy, so extravagant in murder, so anxious to kill,
so ready to assassinate, that I hated him with all my heart. At his
command, babes were butchered, women violated, and the white hair of
trembling age stained with blood. This God visited the people with
pestilence--filled the houses and covered the streets with the dying
and the dead--saw babes starving on the empty breasts of pallid mothers,
heard the sobs, saw the tears, the sunken cheeks, the sightless eyes,
the new made graves, and remained as pitiless as the pestilence.
This God withheld the rain--caused the famine--saw the fierce eyes of
hunger--the wasted forms, the white lips, saw mothers eating babes, and
remained ferocious as famine.
It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or
respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really
civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.
But in the old days the good people justified Jehovah in his treatment
of the heathen. The wretches who were murdered were idolaters and
therefore unfit to live.
According to the Bible, God had never revealed himself to these people
and he knew that without a revelation they could not know that he was
the true God. Whose fault was it then that they were heathen?
The Christians said that God had the right to destroy them because he
created them. What did he create them for? He knew when he made them
that they would be food for the sword. He knew that he would have the
pleasure of seeing them murdered.
As a last answer, as a final excuse, the worshipers of Jehovah said
that all these horrible things happened under the "old dispensation"
of unyielding law, and absolute justice, but that now under the "new
dispensation," all had been changed--the sword of justice had been
sheathed and love enthroned. In the Old Testament, they said, God is the
judge--but in the New, Christ is the merciful. As a matter of fact, the
New Testament is infinitely worse than the Old. In the Old there is no
threat of eternal pain. Jehovah had no eternal prison--no everlasting
fire. His hatred ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his
enemy was dead.
In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of
punishment that has no end. In the New Testament the malice of God is
infinite and the hunger of his revenge eternal.
The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told his disciples not
to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one cheek to
turn the other, and yet we are told that this same God, with the same
loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish words: "Depart ye
cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels."