Here obtaining goods under false pretenses and embezzlement are commended by God himself. It may be claimed that the Egyptians had wronged the Israelites. Suppose they had; could God secure justice for them only by treachery and fraud? Suppose your son worked for a farmer, and that farmer defrauded him of his wages; would you advise your son to borrow a horse of his employer and decamp with it in order to obtain redress, especially when you had the power to obtain redress by lawful means? Instead of encouraging these slaves in an act that would eventually lead them to become a race of thieves and robbers, an honest God would have taken their masters by the collar and said, "You have received the labor of these men and women; pay them for it!" In the Mosaic law we find the following beautiful statute: "Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself; thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it, or thou mayest sell it unto an alien" (Deut. xiv, 21). "Anything that dieth of itself" is diseased. Diseased flesh is poisonous. To authorize its use, even if those receiving it are not deceived, is immoral. Out West, a family, good Christians, had a hog to die of some disease. What did they do with it? Eat it? No, their Bible told them this would be wrong. They dressed it nicely, took it into an adjoining neighborhood, and sold it to strangers. Was this right? The Bible says it was. With the widespread influence of a book inculcating such lessons in dishonesty, what must be the inevitable result? Men distrust their fellow men; along our business thoroughfares Fraud drives with brazen front; in almost every article of merchandise we buy we find a lie enshrined; at every corner sits some Jacob slyly whittling spotted sticks to win his neighbor's flocks. Stealing. I refuse to accept the Bible as a moral guide because it sanctions theft and robbery. Its pages teem with accounts of robberies, and in many instances God is said to have planned them and shared in the spoils. He instructs Moses to send a marauding expedition against the Midianites. They put the inhabitants to the sword, and return with 800,000 cattle. Of this booty God exacts 800 head for himself and 8,000 head for his priests. The remainder he causes to be divided between the soldiers and citizens. So elated are the Israelites with their success, so grateful to God for his assistance, that they make him a gift of 16,000 shekels of stolen gold (Num. xxxi). When Joshua took Jericho, "they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein; only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron they put into the treasury of the Lord" (Josh, vi, 19-24). When he captured Ai, "the cattle and the spoils of that city Israel took for a prey unto themselves, according unto the word of the Lord which he commanded Joshua" (Josh, viii, 27). Jehovah gets the spoils of Jericho, and Israel those of Ai.