I went back to the beginning. God was certainly good. He was all-wise, infinite. He must have known all things---the end from the beginning. If He thus knew all things He must have known the whole destiny of man before He created him. He must have known that he would yield to temptation and fall, and that all the direful consequences would follow it that orthodoxy has pictured for centuries. I began to wonder how God could be just and make a creature, whom He knew in advance would do what Adam is alleged to have done, and knew in advance the dreadful consequences that would follow it, not only to Adam himself, but to all the unborn generations yet to people the world. Especially was I perplexed to understand how God could be just and visit all the consequences of Adam's sin on his entire posterity for uncounted generations when they were and could be in no way responsible for it and could not help it. Yet I believed God to be just. He could not be God and be otherwise. Since the whole purpose of religion, and Christianity in particular, was to save mankind from hell hereafter, I first directed my inquiries to the question of hell. Who made hell? and whence came the devil? The Bible is silent as to their origin, except the vague reference in the Book of Revelation to the war in heaven and the casting out of Lucifer with a third part of the angels with him into the bottomless pit so graphically portrayed by Milton in Paradise Lost. But this only carried me back farther. Who created the angels, or were they co-eternal with God? If they are co-eternal with God then there are other eternal beings in the universe over whom God has little or no control. If so God is not omnipotent. The devil is his rival in the spiritual world and, according to the current doctrine, his equal in omniscience and omnipresence, and a close and terrible antagonist in the contest for omnipotence.