in special providences. I believe that the
universe is governed by strict and immutable laws: If one man's
family is swept away by a pestilence and another man's spared it is
only the law working: God is not interfering in that small matter,
either against the one man or in favor of the other.

I cannot see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any
good end, therefore I am not able to believe in it. To chasten a
man in order to perfect him might be reasonable enough; to
annihilate him when he shall have proved himself incapable of
reaching perfection might be reasonable enough; but to roast him
forever for the mere satisfaction of seeing him roast would not be
reasonable--even the atrocious God imagined by the Jews would tire
of the spectacle eventually.

There may be a hereafter and there may not be. I am wholly
indifferent about it. If I am appointed to live again I feel sure
it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder
about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a
confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not
evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to
follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore
shall not care a straw about it.

I believe that the world's moral laws are the outcome of the world's
experience. It needed no God to come down out of heaven to tell men
that murder and theft and the other immoralities were bad, both for
the individual who commits them and for society which suffers from
them.

If I break all these moral laws I cannot see how I injure God by it,
for He is beyond the reach of injury from me--I could as easily
injure a planet by throwing mud at it. It seems to me that my
misconduct could only injure me and other men. I cannot benefit God
by obeying these moral laws--I could as easily benefit the planet by
withholding my mud. (Let these sentences be read in the light of
the fact that I believe I have received moral laws only from man
--none whatever from God.) Consequently I do not see why I should be
either punished or rewarded hereafter for the deeds I do here.

If the tragedies of life shook his faith in the goodness and justice and
the mercy of God as manifested toward himself, he at any rate never
questioned that the wider scheme of the u