thinking about it but by forgetting oneself in him.
6. GOD DOES NOT PUNISH

Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for
moral indignation. Many of the early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear.

They were more often "wrath" than not. Such was the temperament of
the Semitic deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps

under the influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian
Trinity and who became also the Moslem God.* The natural hatred of

unregenerate men against everything that is unlike themselves,
against strange people and cheerful people, against unfamiliar

usages and things they do not understand, embodied itself in this
conception of a malignant and partisan Deity, perpetually "upset" by

the little things people did, and contriving murder and vengeance.
Now this God would be drowning everybody in the world, now he would

be burning Sodom and Gomorrah, now he would be inciting his
congenial Israelites to the most terrific pogroms. This divine

"frightfulness" is of course the natural human dislike and distrust
for queer practices or for too sunny a carelessness, a dislike

reinforced by the latentfierceness of the ape in us, liberating the
latentfierceness of the ape in us, giving it an excuse and pressing

permission upon it, handing the thing hated and feared over to its
secular arm. . . .

* It is not so generally understood as it should be among English
and American readers that a very large proportion of early

Christians before the creeds established and regularised the
doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely that Jehovah was God;

they regarded Christ as a rebel against Jehovah and a rescuer of
humanity from him, just as Prometheus was a rebel against Jove.

These beliefs survived for a thousand years tbroughout Christendom:
they were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the

Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The catholic
church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old

Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of
the Cathars against the Hebrew God. But in this book, be it noted,

the word Christian, when it is not otherwise defined, is used to
indicate only the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.

It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct
for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish

sweet familiar things, that these things of the True God should so
readily liberatecruelty and tyranny. It is like a woman going with

a light to tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the
house on fire. None the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of

God the Revengeful, God the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion.
It is only in quite recent years that the growing gentleness of

everyday life has begun to make men a little ashamed of a Deity less
tolerant and gentle than themselves. The recent literature of the

Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this trouble.
Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for

denying the irascibility of his God and teaching "the Kaffirs of
Natal" the dangerous heresy that God is all mercy. "We cannot allow

it to be said," the Dean of Cape Town insisted, "that God was not
angry and was not appeased by punishment." He was angry "on account

of Sin, which is a great evil and a great insult to His Majesty."
The case of the Rev. Charles Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a

second assertion of the Church's insistence upon the fierceness of
her God. This case is not to be found in the ordinary church

histories nor is it even mentioned in the latest edition of the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; nevertheless it appears to have been a

very illuminating case. It is doubtful if the church would
prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso or Mr. Voysey to-day.

7. GOD AND THE NURSERY-MAID
Closely related to the Heresy of God the Avenger, is that kind of

miniature God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the
overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal. You stab your children with

such a God and he poisons all their lives. For many of us the word
"God" first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational

restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye.
God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to

leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while
she goes off upon her own aims. But indeed, the teaching of God

Bogey is an outrage upon the soul of a child scarcely less dreadful
than an indecent assault. The reason rebels and is crushed under

this horrible and pursuing suggestion. Many minds never rise again
from their injury. They remain for the rest of life spiritually

crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a persuasion
of relentlesscruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.

I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered. He and his
Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still

believed in him, and who could help but hate? I thought of him as a
fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening,

perpetually waiting to condemn and to "strike me dead"; his flames
as ready as a grill-room fire. He was over me and about my

feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would
be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a

child of thirteen, by the grace of the true God in me, I flung this
Lie out of my mind, and for many years, until I came to see that God

himself had done this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to
me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been.

I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and mentalcripples with
this bogey God of the nursery-maid, with his black, insane revenges,

still living like a horribleparasite in their hearts in the place
where God should be. They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not

be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish
observances; they dare not look at the causes of things. They are

afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of
science, lest that old watching spider take offence. The voice of

the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing,
but they avert themselves, fear-driven. For the true God has no

lash of fear. And how the foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven
face, his greasy skin, his thick, gesticulating hands, his

bellowings and threatenings, loves to reap this harvest of fear the
ignorant cunning of the nursery girl has sown for him! How he loves

the importance of denunciation, and, himself a malignantcripple, to
rally the company of these crippled souls to persecute and destroy

the happy children of God! . . .
Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children. There is a

real wickedness of the priest that is different from other
wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and

strange perversions of instinctaffect it. Let a former Archbishop
of Canterbury speak for me. This that follows is the account given

by Archbishop Tait in a debate in the Upper House of Convocation
(July 3rd, 1877) of one of the publications of a certain SOCIETY OF

THE HOLY CROSS:
"I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant for the

instruction of very young children. I find, in one of the pages of
it, the statement that between the ages of six and six and a half

years would be the proper time for the inculcation of the teaching
which is to be found in the book. Now, six to six and a half is

certainly a very tender age, and to these children I find these
statements addressed in the book:

"'It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child must
acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him.'

"I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or however many
there were, did not exactly realise what they were writing; that

they did not mean to say that a child was not to confess its sins to
God direct; that it was not to confess its sins, at the age of six,

to its mother, or to its father, but was only to have recourse to
the priest. But the words, to say the least of them, are rash.

Then comes the very obvious question:
"'Do you know why? It is because God, when he was on earth, gave to

his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power of forgiving men
their sins. It was to priests alone that Jesus said: "Receive ye

the Holy Ghost." . . . Those who will not confess will not be
cured. Sin is a terrible sickness, and casts souls into hell.'

"That is addressed to a child six years of age.
"'I have known,' the book continues, 'poor children who concealed

their sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were
tormented with remorse, and if they had died in that state they

would certainly have gone to the everlasting fires of hell.'" . . .
Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen

time after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in
their preaching. It is a distinct lust. Much nobility and devotion

there are among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of
real worship, lives no man may better; this that I write is not of

all, perhaps not of many priests. But there has been in all ages
that have known sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest;