Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/269

222 mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but by no means clearing the guilty.” Jehovah consents, but adds, “As truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of Jehovah,” but “ because all these men … have tempted me now these ten times, … surely they shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers, … your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness, … in this wilderness they shall be consumed, and there they shall die.”

If an unprejudiced Christian were to read this for the first time in a heathen writer, and it was related of Kronos or Moloch, he would say, What foul ideas those heathens had of God; thank Heaven we are Christians, and cannot believe in a deity so terrible. It is true there are now pious men, who believe the story to the letter, profess to find comfort therein, and count it part of their Christianity to believe it. But is God angry with men; passionate, revengeful; offended because they will not war, and butcher the innocent? Would he violate his perfect law and by a miracle destroy a whole nation, millions of men, women, and children, because they fall into a natural fit of despair, and refuse to trust ten witnesses rather than two witnesses? Does God require man's words to restrain his rage, violence, and a degree of fury which Nero and Caracalla, butchers of Men though they were, would have shuddered to think of? Is He to be teased and coaxed from murder? Are we called on to believe this in the name of Christianity? Then perish Christianity from the face of earth, and let Man learn of his Religion and his God from the stars and the violet, the lion and the lamb. View this as the savage story of some oriental who attributed a bloodthirsty character to his God, and made a Deity in his own image, and it is a striking remnant of barbarism that has passed away, not destitute of dramatic interest; not without its melancholy moral. There are some things which may be true, but must be rejected for lack of evidence to prove them true; but this story no amount of evidence could make credible.

Throughout the whole of the Law, fact and fiction, history and mythology, are so intimately blended, that it seems impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. The laws are not perfect; they contain a mingling