pauper with the
rheumatism began to think in her own mind, who will bring me food?
That night God appeared to her in a dream. He did not cure her
rheumatism though. He appeared to her in a dream, and he took her out
of the house and pointed on the right hand to an immense mountain of
bread, and on the left hand to an immense mountain of butter. And when
I read that I said to myself, my Lord, what a place that would be to
start a political party. And he said to her: "These belong to your
father; do you think that he will allow one of his children to starve?
What a place would Ireland be with that mountain of bread and butter!
Until I read these two sermons I hardly believed that in this day and
generation anybody believed that God would make a child an idiot simply
because the mother had prayed for its sweet dear life, or that God's
visits are only in dreams. But so it is.

Orthodoxy has not advanced upon the religion of the Fiji Islander. It
is the same yesterday, today and forever. Now we are told that there
is a god; and nearly every nation has had a god; generally a good many
of them. You see the raw material was so cheap, and Gods were
manufactured so easily, that heaven has always been crammed with the
phantoms of these monsters. But they say there is a god, and every
savage tribe believes in a God. It is an argument made to me every
day. I concede to you that fact; I concede to you that all savages
agree with you. I admit it takes a certain amount of civilization, a
certain amount of thought, to rise above the idea that some personal
being, for his own ends, for his own glory, made and governs this
universe. I admit that it takes some thought to see the universe is
good and all that is good, and every star that shines is a part of God,
and I am something, no matter how little, and that the infinite cannot
exist without me, and that therefore I am a part of the infinite. I
admit that it takes a little civilization to get to that point.

Now every nation has made a god, and every man that has made a god has
used himself for a pattern; and men have put into the mouth of their
god all their mistakes in astronomy, in geography, in philosophy, in
morality, and the god is never wiser or better than his creators. If
they believe in slavery, so did he; if they believe in eating human
flesh, he wanted his share; if they were polygamous, so was he; if they
were cruel, so was he. And just to the extent that