“Your God is a God of infinite love, you say. Yet in the opinion of many of you, at least, this infinitely loving God, omnipotent, and having the power to make man as He chose,—omniscient, and knowing how to make him good and happy if He wished to,—has chosen in his love to make him weak and impotent, to endow him with passions which are temptations to evil, to afflict him with disease and pain, to render him susceptible to torments of every kind and sufferings beyond his power to avoid, however he strive to be good and virtuous and obedient; and then at the last, after a life of suffering and struggle here, either to save him and make him eternally happy, or, if He so elect, without any reason intelligible to you or any one, to plunge him into everlasting torment, from which he can never free himself. Now, I ask you in what respect is such a God better than Jupiter, who, even according to the lowest popular notions, whatever were his passions, was at least placable; who, whatever were his follies, was not a demon like this? And when one takes into consideration the fact that there is not a humane man living who would not be ashamed to do to his own child, however vicious, what he calmly attributes to this all-loving God, the belief in such a God seems all the more extraordinary.” “It is a mystery,” I said, “that one like you, born in another age and tinctured with another creed, could not be expected to understand. It would be useless for me to attempt it, and certainly not now, when I so greatly prefer hearing you to speaking myself. My purpose is not now to defend my religion, but to listen to your defense of yours.” “Well, then, allow us to have our mystery too. If you cannot explain all, neither could we; but neither with us nor with you was that a reason for not believing at all. It was the mystery itself, perhaps, that attracted us and attracts you. The love of the unintelligible is at the root of all systems of religion. If man is unintelligible to us, shall not God be? Man has always invested his gods with his own passions, and his gods are for the most part his own shadows cast out into infinite space, enlarged, gigantic, and mysterious. Man cannot, with the utmost exercise of his faculties, get out of himself any more than he can leap over his own shadow. He cannot comprehend (or inclose within himself) God, who comprehends and incloses him; and therefore he vaguely magnifies his own powers, and calls the result God. God the infinite Spirit made man; but man in every system of religion makes God. In our own reason He is the best that we can imagine—that is, our own selves purged of evil and extended. We cannot stretch beyond ourselves.” “Ay, but your gods were not the best you could conceive. They were lower of nature than man himself in some particulars, and were guilty of acts that you yourself would reprove.”