He would continue in this strain, rising occasionally and walking about the room.  Once, considering the character of God—­the Bible God-he said: 

“We haven’t been satisfied with God’s character as it is given in the Old Testament; we have amended it.  We have called Him a God of mercy and love and morals.  He didn’t have a single one of those qualities in the beginning.  He didn’t hesitate to send the plagues on Egypt, the most fiendish punishments that could be devised—­not for the king, but for his innocent subjects, the women and the little children, and then only to exhibit His power just to show off—­and He kept hardening Pharaoh’s heart so that He could send some further ingenuity of torture, new rivers of blood, and swarms of vermin and new pestilences, merely to exhibit samples of His workmanship.  Now and then, during the forty years’ wandering, Moses persuaded Him to be a little more lenient with the Israelites, which would show that Moses was the better character of the two.  That Old Testament God never had an inspiration of His own.”

He referred to the larger conception of God, that Infinite Mind which had projected the universe.  He said: 

“In some details that Old Bible God is probably a more correct picture than our conception of that Incomparable One that created the universe and flung upon its horizonless ocean of space those giant suns, whose signal-lights are so remote that we only catch their flash when it has been a myriad of years on its way.  For that Supreme One is not a God of pity or mercy—­not as we recognize these qualities.  Think of a God of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all His handiwork.  They are a part of the Infinite plan.  The minister is careful to explain that all these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he doesn’t run from it, and he sets paper with molasses on it for the house-fly.

“Two things are quite certain:  one is that God, the limitless God, manufactured those things, for no man could have done it.  The man has never lived who could create even the humblest of God’s creatures.  The other conclusion is that God has no special consideration for man’s welfare or comfort, or He wouldn’t have created those things to disturb and destroy him.  The human conception of pity and morality must be entirely unknown to that Infinite God, as much unknown as the conceptions of a microbe to man, or at least as little regarded.

“If God ever contemplates those qualities in man He probably admires them, as we always admire the thing which we do not possess ourselves; probably a little grain of pity in a man or a little atom of mercy would look as big to Him as a constellation.  He could create a constellation with a thought; but He has been all the measureless ages, and He has never acquired those qualities that we have named—­pity and mercy and morality.  He goes on destroying a whole island of people with an earthquake, or a whole cityful with a plague, when we punish a man in the electric chair for merely killing the poorest of our race.  The human being needs to revise his ideas again about God.  Most of the scientists have done it already; but most of them don’t dare to say so.”