The Rev. T. Rhondda Williams, in Shall We Understand the Bible? shows very clearly the gradual evolution of the idea of God amongst the Jews from a lower to a higher conception.

Having dealt with the lower conception, let us now consider the higher.

The highest conception of God is supposed to be the Christian conception of God as a Heavenly Father. This conception credits the Supreme Being with supernal tenderness and mercy—"God is Love." That is a very lofty, poetical, and gratifying conception, but it is open to one fatal objection—it is not true.

For this Heavenly Father, whose nature is Love, is also the All-knowing and All-powerful Creator of the world.

Being All-powerful and All-knowing, He has power, and had always power, to create any kind of world He chose. Being a God of Love, He would not choose to create a world in which hate and pain should have a place.

But there is evil in the world. There has been always evil in the world. Why did a good and loving God allow evil to enter the world? Being All-Powerful and All-knowing, He could have excluded evil. Being good, He would hate evil. Being a God of Love He would wish to exclude evil. Why, then, did He permit evil to enter?

The world is full of sorrow, of pain, of hatred and crime, and strife and war. All life is a perpetual deadly struggle for existence. The law of nature is the law of prey.

If God is a tender, loving, All-knowing, and All-powerful Heavenly Father, why did He build a world on cruel lines? Why does He permit evil and pain to continue? Why does He not give the world peace, and health, and happiness, and virtue?

In the New Testament Christ compares God, as Heavenly Father to Man, to an earthly father, representing God as more benevolent and tender: "How much more your Father which is in heaven?"

We may, then, on the authority of the Founder of Christianity, compare the Christian Heavenly Father with the human father. And in doing so we shall find that Christ was not justified in claiming that God is a better father to Man than Man is to his own children. We shall find that the poetical and pleasing theory of a Heavenly Father, and God of Love is a delusion.

"Who among you, if his child asks bread, will give him a stone?" None amongst us. But in the great famines, as in India and Russia, God allows millions to die of starvation. These His children pray to Him for bread. He leaves them to die. Is it not so?

God made the sunshine, sweet children, gracious women; green hills, blue seas; music, laughter, love, humour; the palm tree, the hawthorn buds, the "sweet-briar wind"; the nightingale and the rose.

But God made the earthquake, the volcano, the cyclone; the shark, the viper, the tiger, the octopus, the poison berry; and the deadly loathsome germs of cholera, consumption, typhoid, smallpox, and the black death. God has permitted famine, pestilence, and war. He has permitted martyrdom, witch-burning, slavery, massacre, torture, and human sacrifice. He has for millions of years looked down upon the ignorance, the misery, the crimes of men. He has been at once the author and the audience of the pitiful, unspeakable, long-drawn and far-stretched tragedy of earthly life. Is it not so?

For thousands of years—perhaps for millions of years—the generations of men prayed to God for help, for comfort, for guidance. God was deaf, and dumb, and blind.

Men of science strove to read the riddle of life; to guide and to succour their fellow creatures. The priests and followers of God persecuted and slew these men of science. God made no sign. Is it not so?

To-day men of science are trying to conquer the horrors of cancer and smallpox, and rabies and consumption. But not from Burning Bush nor Holy Hill, nor by the mouth of priest or prophet does our Heavenly Father utter a word of counsel or encouragement.

Millions of innocent dumb animals have been subjected to the horrible tortures of vivisection in the frantic endeavours of men to find a way of escape from the fell destroyers of the human race; and God has allowed the piteous brutes to suffer anguish, when He could have saved them by revealing to Man the secret for which he so cruelly sought. Is it not so?

"Nature is red in beak and claw." On land and in sea the animal creation chase and maim, and slay and devour each other. The beautiful swallow on the wing devours the equally beautiful gnat. The graceful flying-fish, like a fair white bird, goes glancing above the blue magnificence of the tropical seas. His flight is one of terror; he is pursued by the ravenous dolphin. The ichneumon-fly lays its eggs under the skin of the caterpillar. The eggs are hatched by the warmth of the caterpillar's blood. They produce a brood of larvae which devour the caterpillar alive. A pretty child dances on the village green. Her feet crush creeping things: there is a busy ant or blazoned beetle, with its back broken, writhing in the dust, unseen. A germ flies from a stagnant pool, and the laughing child, its mother's darling, dies dreadfully of diphtheria. A tidal wave rolls landward, and twenty thousand human beings are drowned, or crushed to death. A volcano bursts suddenly into eruption, and a beautiful city is a heap of ruins, and its inhabitants are charred or mangled corpses. And the Heavenly Father, who is Love, has power to save, and makes no sign. Is it not so?

Blindness, epilepsy, leprosy, madness, fall like a dreadful blight upon a myriad of God's children, and the Heavenly Father gives neither guidance nor consolation. Only man helps man. Only man pities; only man tries to save.

Millions of harmless women have been burned as witches. God, our Heavenly Father, has power to save them. He allows them to suffer and die.

God knew that those women were being tortured and burnt on a false charge. He knew that the infamous murders were in His name. He knew that the whole fabric of crime was due to the human reading of His "revelation" to man. He could have saved the women; He could have enlightened their persecutors; He could have blown away the terror, the cruelty, and the ignorance of His priests and worshippers with a breath.

And He was silent. He allowed the armies of poor women to be tortured and murdered in His name. Is it not so?

Will you, then, compare the Heavenly Father with a father among men? Is there any earthly father who would allow his children to suffer as God allows Man to suffer? If a man had knowledge and power to prevent or to abolish war and ignorance and hunger and disease; if a man had the knowledge and the power to abolish human error and human suffering and human wrong and did not do it, we should call him an inhuman monster, a cruel fiend. Is it not so?

But God has knowledge and power, and we are asked to regard Him as a Heavenly Father, and a God of infinite wisdom, and infinite mercy, and infinite love.

The Christians used to tell us, and some still tell us, that this Heavenly Father of infinite love and mercy would doom the creatures He had made to Hell—for their sins. That, having created us imperfect, He would punish our imperfections with everlasting torture in a lake of everlasting fire. They used to tell us that this good God allowed a Devil to come on earth and tempt man to his ruin. They used to say this Devil would win more souls than Christ could win: that there should be "more goats than sheep."

To escape from these horrible theories, the Christians (some of them) have thrown over the doctrines of Hell and the Devil.

But without a Devil how can we maintain a belief in a God of love and kindness? With a good God, and a bad God (or Devil), one might get along; for then the good might be ascribed to God, and the evil to the Devil. And that is what the old Persians did in their doctrine of Ormuzd and Ahrimann. But with no Devil the belief in a merciful and loving Heavenly Father becomes impossible.

If God blesses, who curses? If God saves, who damns? If God helps, who harms?

This belief in a "Heavenly Father," like the belief in the perfection of the Bible, drives its votaries into weird and wonderful positions. For example, a Christian wrote to me about an animal called the aye-aye. He said:

Now, how does the creation of this long finger show the "infinite goodness of God"? The infinite goodness of God to whom? To the animal whose special finger enables him to catch the insect? Then what about the insect? Where does he come in? Does not the long finger of the animal show the infinite badness of God to the insect?

What of the infinite goodness of God in teaching the cholera microbe to feed on man? What of the infinite goodness of God in teaching the grub of the ichneumon-fly to eat up the cabbage caterpillar alive?

I see no infinite goodness here, but only the infinite foolishness of sentimental superstition.

If a man fell into the sea, and saw a shark coming, I cannot fancy him praising the infinite goodness of God in giving the shark so large a mouth. The greyhound's speed is a great boon to the greyhound; but it is no boon to the hare.

But this theory of a merciful, and loving Heavenly Father is vital to the Christian religion.

Destroy the idea of the Heavenly Father, who is Love, and Christianity is a heap of ruins. For there is no longer a benevolent God to build our hopes upon; and Jesus Christ, whose glory is a newer revelation of God, has not revealed Him truly, as He is, but only as Man fain would believe Him to be.

And I claim that this Heavenly Father is a myth: that in face of a knowledge of life and the world we cannot reasonably believe in Him.

There is no Heavenly Father watching tenderly over us, His children. He is the baseless shadow of a wistful human dream.