To Thor and Odin lifted a hand: 
        ’Help us from famine
        And plague and strife! 
        What would you have of us? 
        Human life? 
        Were it our nearest,
        Were it our dearest,—­Answer,
        O answer!—­
        We give you his life.’”

The Gods seemed to say that the victim must be either the king’s wife or the king’s child; which it should be, was the terrible question that the king had to answer.  The choice seemed to have fallen on the child, but the wife would not have it that he was the king’s dearest, and she rushed to her own immolation.  The poem reflects the common notion of those dark days, that the angry Gods could only be propitiated by the slaughter of those whom men loved the best.  From this horrible idea the Jewish people were delivered by the insight of their great ancestor.

Dark notions about God still lingered among them, however, and the Old Testament record shows us how they slowly disappeared.  Moses and Samuel were good men for their time, but the God whom they worshiped was a very different being from the God of Hosea or of the later Isaiah.

This development of the idea of God has been going on in modern times.  It is not long since devout men were in the habit of saying that God’s displeasure with the wickedness of cities was exhibited in the scourges of cholera and scarlet fever in which multitudes of little children were the victims.  Not two hundred years ago the great majority of our Puritan ancestors were believing in a God who, for the sin of Adam, was sending millions of infants, every year, to the regions of darkness and despair.  The God of Cotton Mather or of Edward Payson could hardly have lived in the same heaven with the God of Dwight Moody or Phillips Brooks.

The changes which have been taking place in our ideas about God have been mainly in the direction of a purified ethical conception of his character.  We have been learning to believe, more and more, in the justice, the righteousness, the goodness of God.  In the oldest times men thought him cruel and revengeful; then they began to regard him as willful and arbitrary—­his justice was his determination to have his own way; his sovereignty was his egoistic purpose to do everything for his own glory.  We have gradually grown away from all that, and are able now to believe what Abraham believed, that the Judge of all the earth will do right.

In the presence of a God who, I am assured, is a being of perfect righteousness, who never blames any one for what he cannot help, who never expects of any one more than he has the power to render, who means that I shall know that his treatment of me is in perfect accord with my own deepest intuition of truth and fairness and honor, I can stand up and be a man.  My faith will not be the cringing submission of a slave to an absolute despot, but the willing and joyful acceptance by a free man of righteous authority.