The character of God as painted for us in the Bible is not calculated, in my humble opinion, to encourage the moral life. The god of the Jewish and Christian scriptures is not a moral being. He does not live up to his profession. He violates his own commandments. I do not say this hastily or carelessly,--I have studied the question. Take the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." Jehovah breaks that commandment a hundred times, if the Bible is reliable. No sooner had Moses descended from Mt. Sinai, with the Ten Commandments, than God urged him to get the Jews to kill one another, and fifty thousand were slain in one passion. The repeated commandment of God to the Jews to exterminate their neighbors,--to put men, women and children to the edge of the sword, would indicate that he did not mean to live up to his profession. In the same way he commands "Thou shalt not steal," and then tells his people how they may spoil their neighbors, destroy their altars and temples and seize their lands. He says "Thou shalt not commit adultery," and then commands his soldiers to capture the daughters of the Gentiles and keep them forcibly. He says "Thou shalt not bear false witness," and on every page in the Old Testament, everything base is said of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, whose character modern research has vindicated, and it has been proved that their civilization was far in advance of that of their accusers. He says "Thou shalt not covet"--and then shows them the pleasant lands and homes of other peoples, to arouse their covetousness, to satisfy which they wade through a sea of blood from Egypt to the land of Canaan. How can a being, who does not live up to his profession,--who breaks his own commandments, be our moral ideal or model? In our attempt to reconcile God's conduct with morality, we resort to sophistry. We say God is not bound by the same moral law that we are: He can take away life, land, or property from one man and give it to another. He is above all law. He is good even when he does that which if we did it would make us criminals, and so on. Thus, sophistry becomes a profession. We develop Jesuitical powers; we become intellectual gymnasts, dancing on ropes and splitting hairs to prove that God can break all the moral commandments and still be our model and pattern for morality. It is a fact, moreover, that close indentification with such a being has contributed to corrupt both the church and the state. Tyrants have claimed the right to violate the moral law when ever it interfered with their personal pleasures. As the anointed of God, kings have tried to answer all protests against their misdeeds by quoting the example of God. Priests have persecuted and exterminated whole races, and have given the example of God who destroys the heretics as their justification. The atmosphere created about us by the consciousness that our moral teacher has himself done the very things he has forbidden is an evil one.