Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/60

 When the chief of this obscure and brutal horde of assassins asserts that the God of the Universe was enclosed in a box of shittim wood "two feet long and three feet wide, " and brought home in a new cart, I smile at the impertinence of so shallow an imposture. But it is blasphemy of a more hideous and unexampled nature to maintain that the Almighty God expressly commanded Moses to invade an unoffending nation, and on account of the difference of their worship utterly to destroy every human being it contained, to murder every infant and unarmed man in cold blood, to massacre the captives, to rip up the matrons, and to retain the maidens alone for concubinage and violation. At the very time that philosophers of the