went to seek his father's asses and found instead a
nation of subjects--two-legged asses, who begged him to mount them and
ride.

Take another case. Why did God permit the Nihilists to assassinate the
late Czar of Russia? All their previous plots had failed. Why was the
last plot allowed to succeed? There is only one answer. God had nothing
to do with any of them, and the last succeeded because it was better
devised and more carefully executed. If God protected the Czar against
their former attempts, they were too many for him in the end; that is,
they defeated Omnipotence--an absurdity too flagrant for any sane man to
believe.

Why should God care for princes more than for peasants, for queens more
than for washerwomen? There is no difference in their compositions;
they are all made of the same flesh and blood. The very book these
loyal gushers call the Word of God declares that he is no respecter of
persons. What are the distinctions of rank and wealth? Mere nothings.
Look down from an altitude of a thousand feet, and an emperor and his
subjects shall appear equally small; and what are even a thousand feet
in the infinite universe? Nay, strip them of all their fictions of
dress; reduce them to the same condition of featherless bipeds; and
you shall find the forms of strength or beauty, and the power of brain,
impartially distributed by Nature, who is the truest democrat, who
raises her Shakespeares from the lowest strata of society, and laughs to
scorn the pride of palaces and thrones.

Providence is an absurdity, a superstitious relic of the ignorant past.
Sensible men disbelieve it, and scientists laugh it to scorn. Our
very moral sense revolts against it. Why should God help a few of his
children and neglect all the others? Explosions happen in mines, and
scores of honest industrious men, doing the rough work of the world
and winning bread for wife and child, are blown to atoms or hurled into
shapeless death. God does not help them, and tears moisten the dry bread
of half-starved widows and orphans. Sailors on the mighty deep go down
with uplifted hands, or slowly gaze their life away on the merciless
heavens. The mother bends over her dying child, the first flower of her
wedded love, the sweetest hope of her life. She is rigid with despair,
and in her hot tearless eyes there dwells a dumb misery that would touch
a heart of stone. But God does not help, the death-curtain falls, and
darkness reigns where all was