just as easily, and much more benevolently, have contrived that there should never be any sinners, and, therefore, never any need for hell or torment. The Rev. R.A. Armstrong, with whom I debated this question, says:— “‘Either,’ argues Mr. Bradlaugh, in effect, ‘God could make a world without suffering, or he could not. If he could and did not, he is not all-good. If he could not, he is not all-powerful.’ The reply is, What do you mean by all-powerful? If you mean having power to reconcile things in themselves contradictory, we do not hold that God is all-powerful. But a humanity, from the first enjoying immunity from suffering, and yet possessed of nobility of character, is a self-contradictory conception.” That is, Mr. Armstrong thinks that a “sinless moral system from the first is a self-contradictory conception.” It is difficult to think a loving governor of nations arranging one set of cannibals to eat, and another set of human beings to be eaten by their fellow-men. It is impossible to think a loving creator and governor contriving a human being to be born into the world the pre-natal victim of transmitted disease. It is repugnant to reason to affirm this “free loving supreme moral intelligence” planning and contriving the enduring through centuries of criminal classes, plague-spots on civilisation. The word “unchangeable” contradicts the word “creator.” Any theory of creation must imply some period when the being was not yet the creator, that is, when yet the creation was not performed, and the act of creation must in such case, at any rate, involve temporary or permanent change in the mode of existence of the being creating. So, too, the words of description “governor of nations” are irreconcileable with the description “unchangeable,” applied to a being alleged to have existed prior to the creation of the “nations,” and therefore, of course, long before any act of government could be exercised. To speak of an infinite personal being seems to me pure contradiction of terms. All attempts to think “person” involve thoughts of the limited, finite, conditioned. To describe this infinite personal being as distinct from some thing which is postulated as “what he has created” is only to emphasise the contradiction, rendered perhaps still more marked when the infinite personal being is described as “intelligent.”