There may be some other religion in the world that sings of a God more
cruel than the God of Christianity, but we do not know of any. At any
rate, we believe it is safe to say that no religion of a civilized people
has a God who is more vindictive. We have always wondered how men and
women could set such infernal ideas to music as we find in Christian
hymns. It is really too bad that human beings are compelled to sing such
lies as we find in the pious song-books of the church. The sentiments
contained in them are not fit for savages. It can only brutalize the heart
to sing of blood, and nothing but blood, no matter whose blood it is. The
“precious blood of Jesus” is just as suggestive of cruelty as the blood on
the executioner’s knife. Men become what they read, what they think, what
they sing, what they believe. Religions have made men wicked, cruel, hard,
unkind. It is impossible to have faith in a God of wrath and
vindictiveness without in time developing these qualities. Men grow into
the likeness of their belief. As a man believes, so is he, to a certain
extent.
The influence of cruel sentiments on the mind is greater with the young
than with adults. Some hymns sung in Christian churches are positively
brutal in tone. Think of _human_ beings singing the following verse:—
“But vengeance and damnation lie
On rebels who refuse His grace;
Who God’s eternal Son despise,
The _hottest hell shall be their place_.”
Christians seem to delight in pictures of hell. God would hardly be God to
them if he did not damn somebody. In painting the divine idea vengeance
and damnation are laid on thick.