ed with it."

He would continue in this strain, rising occasionally and walking about
the room. Once, considering the character of God--the Bible God-he said:

"We haven't been satisfied with God's character as it is given in the
Old Testament; we have amended it. We have called Him a God of mercy and
love and morals. He didn't have a single one of those qualities in the
beginning. He didn't hesitate to send the plagues on Egypt, the most
fiendish punishments that could be devised--not for the king, but for
his innocent subjects, the women and the little children, and then only
to exhibit His power just to show off--and He kept hardening Pharaoh's
heart so that He could send some further ingenuity of torture, new
rivers of blood, and swarms of vermin and new pestilences, merely to
exhibit samples of His workmanship. Now and then, during the forty
years' wandering, Moses persuaded Him to be a little more lenient with
the Israelites, which would show that Moses was the better character of
the two. That Old Testament God never had an inspiration of His own."

He referred to the larger conception of God, that Infinite Mind which
had projected the universe. He said:

"In some details that Old Bible God is probably a more correct picture
than our conception of that Incomparable One that created the universe
and flung upon its horizonless ocean of space those giant suns, whose
signal-lights are so remote that we only catch their flash when it has
been a myriad of years on its way. For that Supreme One is not a God of
pity or mercy--not as we recognize these qualities. Think of a God
of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the
centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all His handiwork. They are
a part of the Infinite plan. The minister is careful to explain that all
these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to
destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he doesn't run
from it, and he sets paper with molasses on it for the house-fly.

"Two things are quite certain: one is that God, the limitless God,
manufactured those things, for no man could have done it. The man has
never lived who could create even the humblest of God's creatures. The
other conclusion is that God has no special consideration for man's
welfare or comfort, or He wouldn't have created those things to disturb
and destroy him. The human conception of pity and morality must
be entirely unkno