If you live in Utah, or had lived in Jerusalem, your most certain hope of salvation would have been the possession of numerous wives. In England or New York more than one is sure damnation. Lose your bearings and you are a lost man! Make a mistake in your county and your soul is not worth a copper. A traveler is not safe five minutes, and I doubt if an accident policy would cover his case. God and the Devil have been held accountable for about every crime that ever has been committed, and it has been very largely a geographical question which of the two was responsible. If it was longitude 35∞ 14' east it was the Lord! If you shifted to longitude 70∞ 58' west it was the devil. When locality becomes the all-important question, we do not wonder at the old lady who felt relieved when the new survey threw her house just across the state line into Ohio, after she had been under the impression that she lived in Indiana. "Well," said she, "I am glad we don't live in Indiana; I always did say it was a very unhealthy state. Now, our doctor's bills won't be so high." Pocasset, Mass., is in the devil's country, and murder is not safe; it is a crime. Abraham and Saul lived in a healthier climate--in God's congressional district, where murder was above par and decency was out of fashion. Take it all in all, and the devil seems to make the best governor. Now it seems to me that Sunday-schools should teach nothing so much as geography, so that a man may not be in doubt as to who is his Secretary of State, and when an order comes from head-quarters he may fairly be expected to know whether it is safe to obey--whether obedience means glorification on earth and a home in heaven, or a sprained neck and a bright fire. It seems now that Pocasset is over the line and out of the Lord's clearing. REVELATION. Now this God either did or he did not believe in and command murder and rapine in the days when he used to sit around evenings and chat with Abraham and Moses and the rest of them. His especial plans and desires were "revealed" or they were not. The ideas of justice and right were higher in those days than they are now, or else we are wiser and better than God, or else the Bible is not his revealed will. You can take your choice. My choice is to keep my respect for divine justice and honor, and let the Bible bear the burden of its own mistakes. If religion is a revelation, then it is not a growth, and it would have been most perfect in design and plan when it was nearest its birth. Now accepting the Bible theory of Jehovah, we find that when the communications of God were immediate and personal there could have been no mistake as to his will. To deal with it as a growth or evolution toward better things is to abandon the whole tenet of a revealed law of God. But to deal with it as a revelation is to make God a being too repulsive and brutal to contemplate for one moment with respect.