Jehovah, according to the early writers, was stern, wrathful, vengeful--“I will mock you in your calamities”; vain and jealous--“I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God”; cruel--hardening the hearts of his powerless victims in order to punish them for doing what they could not help doing, and according to Joshua, Jehovah commanded him to kill all his enemies, old and young, even the children, and he gave the captured wives of the enemy to the soldiers of the Jewish army; deceptive--“I have sent lying spirits unto Ahab”; in short, and in very truth, he was a god having all the frailties and imperfections of man, and not man at his best either. Take the Genesis story of creation:--When Jehovah created Adam he knew (being an all-wise God) that Adam would fall. Therefore, Adam could not have done otherwise than to yield to temptation; for to have resisted would have proved God’s foreknowledge false. Then why pronounce a curse on one (and his billions of descendants) for doing what God’s foreknowledge made unavoidable? Again it is said that when Jehovah made up his mind to destroy the human race “it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth”--that is, he had made a mistake, like you and I, and was sorry of it, like you and I. How like a man was Jehovah in his short-sightedness! And this is a part of that story of the origin of man which we are asked to accept by the anti-evolutionists instead of the scientific explanation. Before history there was mythology. Beyond the earliest ascertained historic facts of every people, of every early nation, was a mass of myths portraying its childish beliefs concerning its origin, its gods, its heroes, etc. The Jewish nation was no exception. Scriptural literalists, those who believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, know that all ancient peoples had their myths--all except the Jews. In the face of a million facts they still contend that the impossible stories of the early Jews are true as gospel--in fact that they are a part of the gospel. The greatest obstacle to the popular acceptance of the doctrine of evolution is a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible and its literal interpretation. The more conservative or orthodox element of the churches regards the Bible as a direct quotation of the exact words of God. Their conception of inspiration is that the various writers merely held the pen while God caused it to move over the surface of the parchment tracing the characters that spelled his very words. The fact that the various books of the Bible are written in almost as many different styles would seem to disprove verbal inspiration to any thinking mind. Certainly, those books called the Bible are inspired, and in precisely the same sense as Shakespeare’s plays, Burns’ poems and Emerson’s essays are inspired--that is, the writers felt strongly an impulse to write; and in every instance the writings were stamped with the individuality of the author.