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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
and the waste of life which characterise nature's process of evolution might have been avoided.”
Mr. McCabe also quotes from Mallock's 'Religion as a Credible Doctrine' from which we take the following extract as having a special bearing on the point under consideration :--
“We must divest ourselves of all foregone conclusions, of all question-begging reverences, and look the facts of the universe steadily in the face. If theists will but do this, what they will see will astonish them. They will see that if there is anything at the back of this vast process with a consciousness and a purpose in any way resembling our own-a Being who knows what he wants and is doing his best to get it-he is, instead of a holy and all wise God, a scatter-brained, semi-powerful, semi-impotent monster. They will recognize as clearly as they ever did the old familiar facts which seemed to them evidences of God's wisdom, love and goodness; but they will find that these facts, when taken in connection with the others, only supply us with a standard in the nature of this Being himself by which most of his acts are exhibited to us as those of a cri. minal madman. If he had been blind, he had not had sin; but if we maintain that he can see, then his sin remains. Habitually a bungler as he is, and callous when not actively cruel, we are forced to regard him, when he seems to exhibit benevolence, as, not divinely benevolent, but merely weak and capricious, like a boy who fondles a kitten, and the next moment sets a dog at it. And not only does his moral character fall from him bit by bit, but his dignity disappears also, The orderly processes of the stars and the larger phenomena of nature are suggestive of nothing so much as a wearisome Court ceremonial surrounding a king who is unable to understand or to break away from it; whilst the thunder and whirlwind, which have from time immemorial been accepted as special revelations of his awfal power and majesty, suggest, if they suggest anything of a personal character at all, a blackguardly larrikin kicking up his heels in the clouds, not perhaps bent on mischief, but indifferent to the fact that he is causing it. , . . A God who could have been deliberately guilty of them (the evolutionary processes] would be a God too absurd, too monstrous, too mad to be credible.”
Such is the opinion of Mr. Mallock, who, we learn
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