Page:God and His Book.djvu/143

Rh get altered from being a plurality of Gods into one God? In the first verse of the Ghost's book we find it was Elohim (the gods) who "created the heaven and the earth." But, in the fourth verse of the second chapter, we find that it was not the Gods, but the Lord God, or Jehovah, who started the universe. It requires no ripe scholarship to recognise this. All preachers except those of the unlearned Booth and Spurgeon order are aware of the discrepancy to which I refer; but the admission of it would not comport with the interests of their business of gospel-grinding, so they are dishonestly silent. One passage of Scripture they never for a moment forget—the passage which states that the Tree of Knowledge bears "Forbidden Fruit." Dispel ignorance and set the dupes of Christianity on the path of earnest and honest inquiry, and the occupation of the priest is gone. It would never do to impress it upon pious Mr. John Smith, nonconformist and cheesemonger, that the gods created the heaven and the earth, and that subsequently the Lord God created them over again. If it were to be impressed upon Mr. Smith that the heaven and the earth were "created" twice over, first by a plurality of gods and next by a single god, he might stop his pew-rents, and cease to drag to the local Bethel his frump of a wife, Mary Anne, and his giglet of a daughter, Araminta. A god more or less or a world more or less would be a small thing to the parson compared with Mr. J. Smith ceasing to pay his pew-rents and to air off sacredly the Lord's-Day haberdashery upon his Mary Anne and his Araminta. Every kind of parson except the Spurgeon and street-corner kind knows that the heaven and the earth were "created" by the gods; but, for their salary's sake, they are prepared to suppress this knowledge. Some of those Most Low valets of the Most High have only about £100 per annum. So, for this £100 per annum, they, all their lives, read the very first line of the Bible erroneously, making one god where there are several gods. The Ghost goes in for polytheism; but Christian theology goes in for monotheism, and the Ghost is made a monotheist whether he will or not. The Ghost tells us that the gods "created" this planet ; but the parsons know better than the poor