uble them for their sins.

A group of these sufferers is shown to the Martian, and the normal
course of this disease is explained. This time all he can do is to
protest that he firmly asserts that not one of our savage chiefs, even
were he of the most primitive tribe, of the cruelest imagination, of the
most base and insane nature, would nor could conceive of such torture as
the Loving Father conceived when he decided upon cancer as a visitation
for our sins. The roasting of a witch alive is but a mere trifle
compared to the long-drawn-out agony, the slow wasting, the anguish of a
cancer patient watching himself sink to death. And when death mercifully
releases this sufferer from his hellish torture the preacher murmurs,
"Lord, thy will be done."

The Martian talks for a few moments with a sufferer from this disease
and ascertains that the latter is a devout and true religionist, that he
has been a good, moral church-goer, and has lived strictly according to
the tenets of his creed, that he firmly and passionately believes that
he has lived so that he will merit the reward of heaven, an everlasting
sojourn in a land where there is no pain and suffering. And yet, this
devout religionist, when he was informed that he had an incurable
cancer, traveled the length and breadth of his land, from one surgeon to
another, allowing himself to be cut to pieces, in order that he might
remain on this earth but a moment longer. To stay and suffer the
tortures of the damned when he might go to heaven and get his reward in
the land where there is no pain!

"I wonder," mused the Martian, "did the grim spectre of death finally
instill a grain of scepticism into his mind?"

Later, in the quiet of his chambers, he reviews the day's
impressions--cruelty, hate, fear, jealousy, racial antagonism, poverty,
luxury, disease, pain, superstition, church, religion, and intolerance.

"If we suppose that the universe is the creation of an Omnipotent and
Benevolent God, it becomes necessary to ask how pain and evil arise.
Pain and evil are either real or unreal. If they are real then God, who,
being omnipotent, was bound by no limitations and constrained by no
necessities, willfully created them. But the being who willfully creates
pain and evil cannot be benevolent. If they are unreal, then the error
which we make when we think them real is a real error. There is no doubt
that we believe we suffer. If the belief is erroneous, then it follows
that