Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/595

 standard of ethics is to enquire into the commands of Jehovah. Let us try then to ascertain what manner of deity Jehovah is. To do so, our best course will be to select the salient features of his history, as related by the sacred writers.

Now, at the very outset of his proceedings we observe that he takes up towards mankind a very definite attitude: that of a superior entitled to demand implicit obedience. Whether the fact that he was man's creator justified so extensive a claim it is needless in this place to discuss. Suffice it that he had the power to enforce under the severest penalties the submission he demanded. But it might have been expected that a divine being, who assumed such unlimited rights over a race so vastly his inferiors in knowledge and in strength, should at least exercise them with discretion and moderation. It might have been expected that where he claimed obedience it would be with a view to the well-being of his creatures; not merely as an arbitrary exercise of his enormous power. What, on the contrary, is the conduct he pursued? His very first act after he had created Adam and Eve and placed them in Paradise was to forbid them, under penalty of death, to eat the fruit of a certain tree which grew in their garden. There is not even a vestige of a pretense in the narrative that the fruit of this tree would in itself, and apart from the divine prohibition, have done them any harm. Quite the contrary; the fact of eating it enlarged their faculties; making them like gods, who know good and evil. And Jehovah was afraid that they might, after eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, eat also that of the tree of life, after which he would be unable to kill them. So that it was his deliberate purpose in issuing this injunction to keep mankind feeble, ignorant and dependent. Nor is this by any means the whole extent of his misconduct. One of two charges he cannot escape. Either he knew when he created Adam and Eve that their nature was such that they would disobey, or he did not. In the first case, he knowingly formed them liable to fall, knowingly placed them amid conditions which rendered their fall inevitable; and then punished them for the catastrophe he had all along foreseen as the necessary result of the character he had bestowed upon them. In the second case, he was ignorant and short-sighted, being unable to guess what would be the nature