That, man’s thoughts being wicked, this God of love and forgiveness, of long suffering and loving kindness, destroyed not only the full-grown man and woman, but also the little child as yet without thought. Man’s thoughts being wicked, God drowned the whole world, including bird, beast, and creeping thing. Did you ever picture to yourselves this story of the flood? Just paint in imagination a mother with her child in her arms, wearily toiling up some hill, slippery with the falling waters. See her fleeing from the waves coming swift behind, like ravenous wolves, with gaping mouths greedy for her life. Imagine her cry to heaven for mercy, not for herself alone, not so much for herself, but for her child, a child, which sucking at her breast, as yet knows no sin. Then picture your all-loving and merciful God shutting his ears to her wild shrieks for mercy, and drowning her and her babe in the flood. Did you ever picture to yourselves the scene when, the world being again peopled, its inhabitants intended to build a tower that would reach to heaven, and God, the all-wise, hearing of it in heaven, where he then resided, came down to earth to see whether the rumour was true, and finding that it was, confounded the language of men? Do you recollect how God chose Abraham—and I don’t deny that he was worth choosing, a man who was just 75 years old when he had lived 135 years—how God, the infinite and omnipresent, came down from heaven and told Abraham that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed; and that Abraham, though so old that his body was “as good as dead,” should have a son in his old age? Have you read how God, who cannot lie, with a covenant and an oath promised a certain land to Abraham, and how he never gave him “so much as to set his foot on?” Have you read how Sarah, it having ceased to be with her after the manner of women, laughed when God made the promise of a son; how God asked why she laughed; and how Sarah, whose faith is praised, denied to God’s very face that she had laughed at all? Have you read that God said, I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob; that Jacob proved to be a knave and a liar; that Jacob made a conditional bargain with the Almighty God, that if the Lord would do certain things for him, then the Lord should be his God? Have you read how God promised to protect Abraham’s children, and how they became slaves in Egypt, and how he left them to be oppressed? Have you read how, hearing their cries, God took them out of Egypt, amongst a number of nations who had committed no crime against the Jews, but were created by God to be destroyed by his chosen people? Have you traced the track of blood and murder from Egypt to Palestine? Have you read how God gave the Israelites the right to make war on any city, and if the inhabitants made peace, then they were tributaries, but if not “I, the Lord God, will deliver them into thy hands; thou shalt smite them utterly, and leave