_Answer_. Yes, I have taken that ground, and I maintain it. The Bible was produced by cruel people, and in its turn it has produced people like its authors. The extermination of the Canaanites was cruel. Most of the laws of Moses were bloodthirsty and cruel. Hundreds of offences were punishable by death, while now, in civilized countries, there are only two crimes for which the punishment is capital. I charge that Moses and Joshua and David and Samuel and Solomon were cruel. I believe that to read and believe the Old Testament naturally makes a man careless of human life. That book has produced hundreds of religious wars, and it has furnished the battle-cries of bigotry for fifteen hundred years. The Old Testament is filled with cruelty, but its cruelty stops with this world, its malice ends with 188 death; whenever its victim has reached the grave, revenge is satisfied. Not so with the New Testament. It pursues its victim forever. After death, comes hell; after the grave, the worm that never dies. So that, as a matter of fact, the New Testament is in- finitely more cruel than the Old. Nothing has so tended to harden the human heart as the doctrine of eternal punishment, and that passage: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be "saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned," has shed more blood than all the other so-called "sacred books" of all this world. I insist that the Bible is cruel. The Bible invented instruments of torture. The Bible laid the foundations of the Inquisition. The Bible furnished the fagots and the martyrs. The Bible forged chains not only for the hands, but for the brains of men. The Bible was at the bottom of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Every man who has been persecuted for religion's sake has been persecuted by the Bible. That sacred book has been a beast of prey. The truth is, Christians have been good in spite of the Bible. The Bible has lived upon the reputations of good men and good women,--men and women who were good notwithstanding the brutality they found 189 upon the inspired page. Men have said: "My mother "believed in the Bible; my mother was good; there- "fore, the Bible is good," when probably the mother never read a chapter in it.