I do not think the Bible, in its present form, is a fit book to place in the hands of children, and it certainly is not a fit book to send out for the "salvation" of savage and ignorant people. OUR HEAVENLY FATHER 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.