<p>V. WAS JEHOVAH A GOD OF LOVE?</p>
<p>Did these words come from the heart of love?—</p>
<p>"When the Lord thy God shall drive them before thee, thou shalt smite them
and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, or show
mercy unto them."</p>
<p>"I will heap mischief upon them. I will send mine arrows upon them; they
shall be burned with hunger and devoured with burning heat and with bitter
destruction."</p>
<p>"I will send the tooth of beasts upon them, with the poison of serpents of
the dust."</p>
<p>"The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man
and the virgin; the suckling also with the man of gray hairs."</p>
<p>"Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow; let his children be
continually vagabonds and beg; let them seek their bread also out of their
desolate places; let the extortioner catch all that he hath, and let the
stranger spoil his labor; let there be none to extend mercy unto him,
neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children."</p>
<p>"And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body—the flesh of thy
sons and daughters."</p>
<p>"And the heaven that is over thee shall be brass, and the earth that is
under thee shall be iron."</p>
<p>"Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field."</p>
<p>"I will make my arrows drunk with blood."</p>
<p>"I will laugh at their calamity.".</p>
<p>Did these curses, these threats, come from the heart of love or from the
mouth of savagery?</p>
<p>Was Jehovah god or devil?</p>
<p>Why should we place Jehovah above all the gods?</p>
<p>Has man in his ignorance and fear ever imagined a greater monster?</p>
<p>Have the barbarians of any land, in any time, worshiped a more heartless
god?</p>
<p>Brahma was a thousand times nobler, and so was Osiris and Zeus and
Jupiter. So was the supreme god of the Aztecs, to whom they offered only
the perfume of flowers. The worst god of the Hindus, with his necklace of
skulls and his bracelets of living snakes, was kind and merciful compared
with Jehovah.</p>
<p>Compared with Marcus Aurelius, how small Jehovah seems. Compared with
Abraham Lincoln, how cruel, how contemptible, is this god.</p>
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