and reflecting as it does the deed and motive of ages and races that are no more—it is a deeply-interesting antiquarian study. But here its use and its merit end. That there is anything divine and supernatural about it more than there are about the Vedas and the Koran and the Times newspaper is an utterly untenable hypothesis. When, a century or two hence, the student looks back upon it, all the warping prejudices in its favour forgotten, it will be to him all but incredible that such a bundle of heterogeneous tracts was ever regarded as one homogeneous volume, upon which a definite religious system could be founded. It will appear to him that the impudence and ingenuity which could find a religious system in such a mass of self-contradicting platitude and exploded absurdity could have found a religious system in a wheel-barrow or in a bag of nails.
I have no irreverence for the Bible and its God, as the Bible and its God. It and he were the natural evolutionary product and index of a remote and half-barbarous time. The Bible as the Bible and Jehovah as Jehovah I cannot treat with disrespect. It would be quite as legitimate to heap ridicule upon the fact that I had to creep before I had learnt to walk. The Bible and Jehovah are interesting relics of the cradle upon which the baby-world leant before it had strength to stand. I have no quarrel with those quaint old relics, per se; but when I find that the world would still lean upon them after all these long and weary centuries, in the interests of the human race I do my best to dash the relics to splinters. It is not the Book and the God, in themselves, that provoke my enmity; it is the pretensions put forward on their behalf by an interested priesthood. These pretensions must excite in every man who is a patriot and a friend of his race feelings of repugnance and aversion. I meet these Protestant pretensions with the most cruel laugh of derision, with the most venomous stab of hatred.
As I may possibly have to spend eternity with him, may I respectfully ask Jehovah a question or two which are personal, but, I trust, not impertinent? How many Gods was he originally, and in what mysterious hiatus between the first and second chapter of Genesis did he
