So with the institution of polygamy. If anything on the earth is immoral, that is. If there is anything calculated to destroy home, to do away with human love, to blot out the idea of family life, to cover the hearthstone with serpents, it is the institution of polygamy. The Jehovah of the Old Testament was a believer in that institution. Can we now say that the Bible is inspired in its morality? Consider for a moment the manner in which, under the direction of Jehovah, wars were waged. Remember the atrocities that were committed. Think of a war where everything was the food of the sword. Think for a moment of a deity capable of committing the crimes that are described and gloated over in the Old Testament. The civilized man has outgrown the sacred cruelties and absurdities. There is still another side to this question. A few centuries ago nothing was more natural than the unnatural. Miracles were as plentiful as actual events. In those blessed days, that which actually occurred was not regarded of sufficient importance to be recorded. A religion without miracles would have excited derision. A creed that did not fill the horizon--that did not account for everything--that could not answer every question, would have been regarded as worthless. After the birth of Protestantism, it could not be admitted by the leaders of the Reformation that the Catholic Church still had the power of working miracles. If the Catholic Church was still in partnership with God, what excuse could have been made for the Reformation? The Protestants took the ground that the age of miracles had passed. This was to justify the new faith. But Protestants could not say that miracles had never been performed, because that would take the foundation not only from the Catholics but from themselves; consequently they were compelled to admit that miracles were performed in the apostolic days, but to insist that, in their time, man must rely upon the facts in nature. Protestants were compelled to carry on two kinds of war; they had to contend with those who insisted that miracles had never been performed; and in that argument they were forced to insist upon the necessity for miracles, on the probability that they were performed, and upon the truthfulness of the apostles. A moment afterward, they had to answer those who contended that miracles were performed at that time; then they brought forward against the Catholics the same arguments that their first opponents had brought against them. This has made every Protestant brain "a house divided against itself." This planted in the Reformation the "irrepressible conflict."