But, as intimated above, he does not intend to restore the whole world to its pristine purity, but only a part of it. This is alarming. He creates the whole world perfect, but now he is satisfied to have only a portion of it redeemed from the devil. If he can save at all, pray, why not save all? This is not an irrelevant question when it is remembered that the whole world was created perfect in the first place. The refusal of the deity to save all of his world from the devil would lead one to believe that even when God created the world perfect he did not mean to keep all of it to himself, but meant that some of it, the greater part of it, as some theologians contend, should go to the devil! Surely this is nothing but myth. Let us hope for the sake of our ideals that all this is no more than the childish prattle of primitive man. But let us return to the story of the fall of man; God decides to save a part of his ruined perfect world by the sacrifice of his son. The latter is supposed to have said to his father: "Punish me, kill me, accept my blood, and let it pay for the sins of man." He thus interceded for the _elect_, and the deity was mollified. As Jesus is also God, it follows that one God tried to pacify another, which is pure myth. Some theologians have another theory--there is room here for many theories. According to these, God gave up his son as a ransom, not to himself, but to the devil, who now claimed the world as his own. I heard a distinguished minister explain this in the following manner: A poor man whose house is mortgaged hears that some philanthropist has redeemed the property by paying off the mortgage. The soul of man was by the fall of Adam mortgaged to the devil. God has raised the mortgage by abandoning his son to be killed to satisfy the devil who held the mortgage. The debt which we owed has been paid by Jesus. By this arrangement the devil loses his legal right to our souls and we are saved. All we need to do is to believe in this story and we'll be sure to go to heaven. And to think that intelligent Americans not only accept all this as inspired, but denounce the man who ventures to intimate modestly that it might be a myth, as a blasphemer! "O, judgment!" cries Shakespeare, "thou hast fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason."