Part 28

Now, let me ask the reverend gentleman a few plain questions, with the request that he answer them without mist or mystery. If you, Mr. Kraeling, had the power to make a world, would you make an exact copy of this? Would you make a man and woman, put them in a garden, knowing that they would be deceived, knowing that they would fall? Knowing that all the consequences believed in by orthodox Christians would follow from that fall? Would you do it? And would you make your world so as to provide for earthquakes and cyclones? Would you create the seeds of disease and scatter them in the air and water? Would you so arrange matters as to produce cancers? Would you provide for plague and pestilence? Would you so make your world that life should feed on life, that the quivering flesh should be torn by tooth and beak and claw? Would you?

Now, answer fairly. Do not quote Scripture; just answer, and be honest.

Would you make different races of men? Would you make them of different colors, and would you so make them that they would persecute and enslave each other? Would you so arrange matters that millions and millions should toil through many generations, paid only by the lash on the back? Would you have it so that millions and millions of babes would be sold from the breasts of mothers? Be honest, would you provide for religious persecution? For the invention and use of instruments of torture? Would you see to it that the rack was not forgotten, and that the fagot was not overlooked or unlighted? Would you make a world in which the wrong would triumph? Would you make a world in which innocence would not be a shield? Would you make a world where the best would be loaded with chains? Where the best would die in the darkness of dungeons? Where the best would make scaffolds sacred with their blood?

Would you make a world where hypocrisy and cunning and fraud should represent God, and where meanness would suck the blood of honest credulity?

Would you provide for the settlement of all difficulties by war? Would you so make your world that the weak would bear the burdens, so that woman would be a slave, so that children would be trampled upon as though they were poisonous reptiles? Would you fill the woods with wild beasts? Would you make a few volcanoes to overwhelm your children? Would you provide for earthquakes that would swallow them? Would you make them ignorant, savage, and fill their minds with all the phantoms of horror? Would you?

Now, it will only take you a few moments to answer these questions, and if you say you would, then I shall be satisfied that you believe in the orthodox God, and that you are as bad as he. If you say you would not, I will admit that there is a little dawn of intelligence in your brain.

At the same time I want it understood with regard to all these ministers that I am a friend of theirs. I am trying to civilize their congregations, so that the congregations may allow the ministers to develop, to grow, to become really and truly intelligent. The process is slow, but it is sure.