ook of his eternal remembrance that I denied these lies
for Him.

I do not believe in a slave-holding God; I do not worship a polygamous
Holy Ghost; I do not get upon my knees before any being who commands a
husband to slay his wife because she expresses her honest thought.

Did it ever occur to you that if God wrote the old testament, and told
the Jews to crucify or kill anybody that disagreed with them on
religion, and that God afterward took upon Himself flesh and came to
Jerusalem, and taught a different religion, and the Jews killed
Him--did it ever occur to you that He reaped exactly what he had sown?
Did it ever occur to you that He fell a victim to His own tyranny, and
was destroyed by His own law! Of course I do not believe that any God
ever was the author of the bible, or that any God was ever crucified,
or that any God was ever killed or ever will be, but I want to ask you
that question.

Take this old testament, then, with all its stories of murder and
massacre; with all its foolish and cruel fables; with all its infamous
doctrines; with its spirit of caste; with its spirit of hatred, and
tell me whether it was written by a good God. Why, if you will read the
maledictions and curses of that book, you would think that God, like
Lear, had divided heaven among his daughters, and then, in the insanity
of despair, had launched his curses upon the human race.

And yet, I must say--I must admit--that the old testament is better
than the new. In the old testament, when God got a man dead, He let
him alone. When He saw him quietly in his grave He was satisfied. The
muscles relaxed, and a smile broke over the Divine face. But in the
new testament the trouble commences just at death. In the new
testament God is to wreak His revenge forever and ever. It was
reserved for one who said, "Love your enemies," to tear asunder the
veil between time and eternity and fix the horrified gaze of men upon
the gulfs of eternal fire. The new testament is just as much worse than
the old, as hell is worse than sleep; just as much worse as infinite
cruelty is worse than annihilation; and yet, the new testament is
pointed to as a gospel of love and peace.

But "more of that hereafter," as the ministers say.

"We believe that Jesus Christ came to establish among men the Kingdom
of God, the reign of truth and love, of righteousness and peace."

Well, that may have been the object of Jesus Christ. I do not deny it.
But what w