tence. The law
of nature is the law of prey.

If God is a tender, loving, All-knowing, and All-powerful Heavenly
Father, why did He build a world on cruel lines? Why does He permit evil
and pain to continue? Why does He not give the world peace, and health,
and happiness, and virtue?

In the New Testament Christ compares God, as Heavenly Father to Man, to
an earthly father, representing God as more benevolent and tender: "How
much more your Father which is in heaven?"

We may, then, on the authority of the Founder of Christianity, compare
the Christian Heavenly Father with the human father. And in doing so
we shall find that Christ was not justified in claiming that God is a
better father to Man than Man is to his own children. We shall find that
the poetical and pleasing theory of a Heavenly Father, and God of Love
is a delusion.

"Who among you, if his child asks bread, will give him a stone?" None
amongst us. But in the great famines, as in India and Russia, God allows
millions to die of starvation. These His children pray to Him for bread.
He leaves them to die. Is it not so?

God made the sunshine, sweet children, gracious women; green hills, blue
seas; music, laughter, love, humour; the palm tree, the hawthorn buds,
the "sweet-briar wind"; the nightingale and the rose.

But God made the earthquake, the volcano, the cyclone; the shark,
the viper, the tiger, the octopus, the poison berry; and the deadly
loathsome germs of cholera, consumption, typhoid, smallpox, and the
black death. God has permitted famine, pestilence, and war. He has
permitted martyrdom, witch-burning, slavery, massacre, torture, and
human sacrifice. He has for millions of years looked down upon the
ignorance, the misery, the crimes of men. He has been at once the
author and the audience of the pitiful, unspeakable, long-drawn and
far-stretched tragedy of earthly life. Is it not so?

For thousands of years--perhaps for millions of years--the generations
of men prayed to God for help, for comfort, for guidance. God was deaf,
and dumb, and blind.

Men of science strove to read the riddle of life; to guide and to
succour their fellow creatures. The priests and followers of God
persecuted and slew these men of science. God made no sign. Is it not
so?

To-day men of science are trying to conquer the horrors of cancer and
smallpox, and rabies and consumption. But not from Burning Bush nor Holy
Hill, nor by the mouth of priest or prophet does