hat those words mean, though I do not know what
infinite and absolute mean. So that is what I have to think of, for
my own sake and the sake of all mankind.'

But, they will say, you must not take these words to the letter; man
is so unlike God, and God so unlike man, that God's attributes must
be quite different from man's. When you read of God's love,
justice, anger, and so forth, you must not think that they are
anything like man's love, man's justice, man's anger; but something
quite different, not only in degree, but in kind: so that what
might be unjust and cruel in man, would not be so in God.

My dear friends, beware of that doctrine; for out of it have sprung
half the fanaticism and superstition which has disgraced and
tormented the earth. Beware of ever thinking that a wrong thing
would be right if God did it, and not you. And mind, that is flatly
contrary to the letter of the Bible. In that grand text where
Abraham pleads with God, what does he say? Not, 'Of course if Thou
choosest to do it, it must be right,' but 'Shall not the Judge of
all the earth do RIGHT?' Abraham actually refers the Almighty God
to his own law; and asserts an eternal rule of right and wrong
common to man and to God, which God will surely never break.

Answer: 'If that doctrine be true, which I will never believe, then
the Bible mocks and deceives poor miserable sinful man, instead of
teaching him. If God's love does not mean real actual love,--God's
anger, actual anger,--God's forgiveness, real forgiveness,--God's
justice, real justice,--God's truth, real truth,--God's
faithfulness, real faithfulness, what do they mean? Nothing which I
can understand, nothing which I can trust in. How can I trust in a
God whom I cannot understand or know? How can I trust in a love or
a justice which is not what _I_ call love or justice, or anything
like them?

'The saints of old said, _I_ KNOW in whom I have believed. And how
can I believe in him, if there is nothing in him which I can know;
nothing which is like man--nothing, to speak plainly, like Christ,
who was perfect man as well as perfect God? If that be so, if man
can know nothing really of God, he is indeed most miserable of all
the beasts of the field, for I will warrant that he can know nothing
really of anything else. And what is left for him, but to remain
for this life, and the life to come, in the outer darkness of
ignorance and confusion, misrule and misery, wherein