It is a little curious that when God wished to reform the ante-diluvian
world he said nothing about hell; that he had no revivals, no
camp-meetings, no tracts, no outpourings of the Holy Ghost, no baptisms,
no noon prayer meetings, and never mentioned the great doctrine of
salvation by faith. If the orthodox creeds of the world are true, all
those people went to hell without ever having heard that such a place
existed. If eternal torment is a fact, surely these miserable wretches
ought to have been N warned. They were threatened only with water when
they were in fact doomed to eternal fire!
Is it not strange that God said nothing to Adam and Eve about a future
life; that he should have kept these "infinite verities" to himself and
allowed millions to live and die without the hope of heaven, or the fear
of hell?
It may be that hell was not made at that time. In the six days of
creation nothing is said about the construction of a bottomless pit, and
the serpent himself did not make his appearance until after the creation
of man and woman. Perhaps he was made on the first Sunday, and from that
fact came, it may be, the old couplet,
"And Satan still some mischief finds
For idle hands to do."
The sacred historian failed also to tell us when the cherubim and the
flaming sword were made, and said nothing about two of the persons
composing the trinity. It certainly would have been an easy thing to
enlighten Adam and his immediate descendants. The world was then only
about fifteen hundred and thirty-six years old, and only about three
or four generations of men had lived. Adam had been dead only about
six hundred and six years, and some of his grand children must, at that
time, have been alive and well.
It is hard to see why God did not civilize these people. He certainly
had the power to use, and the wisdom to devise the proper means. What
right has a god to fill a world with fiends? Can there be goodness in
this? Why should he make experiments that he knows must fail? Is there
wisdom in this? And what right has a man to charge an infinite being
with wickedness and folly?
According to Moses, God made up his mind not only to destroy the people,
but the beasts and the creeping things, and the fowls of the air. What
had the beasts, and the creeping things, and the birds done to excite
the anger of God? Why did he repent having made them? Will some
christian give us an explanation of this matter? No good man will
inflict unnecessary pain upon a beast; how then can we worship a god who
cares nothing for the agonies of the dumb creatures that he made?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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