Four thousand years ago our God was in favor of slavery; four thousand years ago our God would have a man beaten to death with rugged rocks for expressing his honest thought; four thousand years ago our God told the husband to kill his wife if she disagreed with him upon the important subject of religion; four thousand years ago our God was a monster; and if He is any better now, it is simply because we have made Him so. I am talking about the God of the Christian world. There may be, for aught I know, upon the shore of the eternal vast, some being whose very thought is the constellation of those numberless stars. I do not know; but if there is he has never written a bible; he has never been in favor of slavery; he has never advocated polygamy, and he never told the murderer to sheathe his dagger in the dimpled breast of a babe. But they say to me, our God has written a book. I am glad he did, and it is by that book that I propose to judge them. I find in that book that it was a crime to eat of the tree of knowledge. I find that the church has always been the enemy of education, and I find that the church still carries the flaming sword of ignorance and bigotry over the tree of knowledge. And if that story is true, ought we not after all to thank the devil? He was the first school master; he was the first to whisper liberty in our ears; he was the author of modesty. He was the author of ambition and progress. And as for me, give me the storm and tempest of thought and action rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Punish me when and how you will, but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And there is one peculiar thing I might as well speak of here. While the world has made gods, it has also made devils; and as a rule the devils have been better friends to man than the gods. It was not a devil that drowned the world; it was not a devil that covered with the multitudinous waves of an infinite sea the corpses of men, women and children.