Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for moral
indignation. Many of the early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear. They were
more often “wrath” than not. Such was the temperament of the Semitic
deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps under the
influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian Trinity and
who became also the Moslem God.* The natural hatred of unregenerate men
against everything that is unlike themselves, against strange people
and cheerful people, against unfamiliar usages and things they do
not understand, embodied itself in this conception of a malignant and
partisan Deity, perpetually “upset” by the little things people did,
and contriving murder and vengeance. Now this God would be drowning
everybody in the world, now he would be burning Sodom and Gomorrah,
now he would be inciting his congenial Israelites to the most terrific
pogroms. This divine “frightfulness” is of course the natural
human dislike and distrust for queer practices or for too sunny a
carelessness, a dislike reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape
in us, liberating the latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it
an excuse and pressing permission upon it, handing the thing hated and
feared over to its secular arm. . . .
* It is not so generally understood as it should be among
English and American readers that a very large proportion of
early Christians before the creeds established and
regularised the doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely
that Jehovah was God; they regarded Christ as a rebel
against Jehovah and a rescuer of humanity from him, just as
Prometheus was a rebel against Jove. These beliefs survived
for a thousand years throughout Christendom: they were held
by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the
Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The
catholic church found it necessary to prohibit the
circulation of the Old Testament among laymen very largely
on account of the polemics of the Cathars against the Hebrew
God. But in this book, be it noted, the word Christian,
when it is not otherwise defined, is used to indicate only
the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.
It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct
for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish sweet
familiar things, that these things of the True God should so readily
liberate cruelty and tyranny. It is like a woman going with a light to
tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the house on fire. None
the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of God the Revengeful, God
the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion. It is only in quite recent
years that the growing gentleness of everyday life has begun to make men
a little ashamed of a Deity less tolerant and gentle than themselves.
The recent literature of the Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this
trouble.
Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for denying
the irascibility of his God and teaching “the Kaffirs of Natal” the
dangerous heresy that God is all mercy. “We cannot allow it to be said,”
the Dean of Cape Town insisted, “that God was not angry and was not
appeased by punishment.” He was angry “on account of Sin, which is a
great evil and a great insult to His Majesty.” The case of the Rev.
Charles Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a second assertion of the
Church’s insistence upon the fierceness of her God. This case is not to
be found in the ordinary church histories nor is it even mentioned in
the latest edition of the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; nevertheless it
appears to have been a very illuminating case. It is doubtful if the
church would prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso or Mr. Voysey
to-day.