IF this God exists, how do we know that he is-I good? How can we prove
that he is merciful, that he cares for the children of men? If this
God exists, he has on many occasions seen millions of his poor children
plowing the fields, sowing and planting the grain, and when he saw them
he knew that they depended on the expected crop for life, and yet this
good God, this merciful being, withheld the rain. He caused the sun to
rise, to steal all moisture from the land, but gave no rain. He saw the
seeds that man had planted wither and perish, but he sent no rain. He
saw the people look with sad eyes upon the barren earth, and he sent no
rain. He saw them slowly devour the little that they had, and saw them
when the days of hunger came--saw them slowly waste away, saw their
hungry, sunken eyes, heard their prayers, saw them devour the miserable
animals that they had, saw fathers and mothers, insane with hunger,
kill and eat their shriveled babes, and yet the heaven above them was
as brass and the earth beneath as iron, and he sent no rain. Can we say
that in the heart of this God there blossomed the flower of pity? Can
we say that he cared for the children of men? Can we say that his mercy
endureth forever?
Do we prove that this God is good because he sends the cyclone that
wrecks villages and covers the fields with the mangled bodies of
fathers, mothers and babes? Do we prove his goodness by showing that he
has opened the earth and swallowed thousands of his helpless children,
or that with the volcanoes he has overwhelmed them with rivers of fire?
Can we infer the goodness of God from the facts we know?
If these calamities did not happen, would we suspect that God cared
nothing for human beings? If there were no famine, no pestilence, no
cyclone, no earthquake, would we think that God is not good?
According to the theologians, God did not make all men alike. He made
races differing in intelligence, stature and color. Was there goodness,
was there wisdom in this?
Ought the superior races to thank God that they are not the inferior? If
we say yes, then I ask another question: Should the inferior races thank
God that they are not superior, or should they thank God that they are
not beasts?
When God made these different races he knew that the superior would
enslave the inferior, knew that the inferior would be conquered, and
finally destroyed.
If God did this, and knew the blood that would be shed, the agonies that
would be endured, saw the countless fields covered with the corpses of
the slain, saw all the bleeding backs of slaves, all the broken hearts
of mothers bereft of babes, if he saw and knew all this, can we conceive
of a more malicious fiend?
Why, then, should we say that God is good?
The dungeons against whose dripping walls the brave and generous have
sighed their souls away, the scaffolds stained and glorified with noble
blood, the hopeless slaves with scarred and bleeding backs, the writhing
martyrs clothed in flame, the virtuous stretched on racks, their joints
and muscles torn apart, the flayed and bleeding bodies of the just, the
extinguished eyes of those who sought for truth, the countless patriots
who fought and died in vain, the burdened, beaten, weeping wives,
the shriveled faces of neglected babes, the murdered millions of the
vanished years, the victims of the winds and waves, of flood and flame,
of imprisoned forces in the earth, of lightning's stroke, of lava's
molten stream, of famine, plague and lingering pain, the mouths that
drip with blood, the fangs that poison, the beaks that wound and tear,
the triumphs of the base, the rule and sway of wrong, the crowns that
cruelty has worn and the robed hypocrites, with clasped and bloody
hands, who thanked their God--a phantom fiend--that liberty had been
banished from the world, these souvenirs of the dreadful past, these
horrors that still exist, these frightful facts deny that any God exists
who has the will and power to guard and bless the human race.