Perhaps it may be well to give here a quotation which I came across years afterwards, as illustrating this process of reasoning from the assumed hypothesis of a divine and infallible revelation, that must be taken as the starting point. It is from Dr. Albert Barnes, a distinguished Presbyterian minister of Philadelphia, about the middle of the last century. I quote him because of his high character and representative position; and his dilemma is substantially the same with practically all others with whom I have conversed on the subject. Here is what he says:
"That the immortal mind should be allowed to jeopard its infinite welfare, and that trifles should be allowed to draw it away from God and virtue and heaven; that any should suffer forever,—lingering on in hopeless despair and rolling amidst infinite torments, without the possibility of alleviation and without end; that since God can save men, and will save a part, He has not purposed to save all; that, on the supposition that the atonement is ample, and that the blood of Christ can cleanse from all and every sin, it is not in fact applied to all; that, in a word, a God who claims to be worthy of the confidence of the universe, and to be a being of infinite benevolence, should make such a world as this, full of sinners and sufferers; and that, when an atonement had been made, He did not save all the race, and put an end to sin and woe forever,—these, and kindred difficulties, meet the mind when we think on this great subject; and they meet us when we endeavor to urge our fellow-sinners to be reconciled to God, and to put confidence in him. On this ground they hesitate. These are real, not imaginary difficulties. They are probably felt by every mind that has ever reflected on the subject; and they are unexplained, unmitigated, unremoved. I confess, for one, that I feel them more sensibly and powerfully the more I look at them, and the longer I live. I do not understand these facts; and I make no advances towards understanding them. I do not know that I have a ray of light on the subject, which I had not when the subject first flashed across my soul.
"I have read, to some extent, what wise and good men have written; I have looked at their theories and explanations; I have endeavored to weigh their arguments; for my whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. But I get neither; and, in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever, I see not one ray to disclose to me the reason why sin came into the world, why the earth is strewed with the dying and the dead, and why man must suffer to all eternity.
"I have never yet seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind; but I confess, when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers, upon death-beds and graveyards, upon the world of woe, filled with hosts to suffer forever; when I see my parents, my friends, my family, my people, my fellow-citizens,—when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin and danger; and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet he does not do it,—I am struck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I cannot disguise it."
I think the conclusions Dr. Barnes reached are about the only conclusions any honest, intelligent man can reach, starting from his hypothesis, that a certain book is a divine and infallible revelation from God, which no one dare question, or go behind. But, as has been seen, this foundation had now entirely slipped from under me. My only course was to proceed just as tho no such book were known; or at least, that it was completely shorn of all claim to being a divine revelation, or infallible truth. I proposed to analyze every element that entered into the whole Christian system, creation, sin, redemption, atonement, salvation, immortality, heaven and hell, going back to original sources so far as possible, without any preconceived hypothesis whatever, in search of abstract truth. I felt that since God had left me without any conclusive and indisputable proofs of the truth of those things which I had always believed to be of the most supreme importance to mankind for time and eternity, that this supreme, distinguishing feature of man that lifts him above all known forms of creation could, and should be, appealed to as the final authority and last test in all things. And since reason was universally recognized as the court of last resort in all other things outside of religion, why should it not be applied to this also? I felt that if I thus honestly and sincerely followed the last and only light I had, that God could not be just and everlastingly damn me for some possible error in my conclusions. The process I followed and the results I reached will be told in the next chapter.
CHAPTER V
THE CRISIS
I went back to the beginning. God was certainly good. He was all-wise, infinite. He must have known all things—-the end from the beginning. If He thus knew all things He must have known the whole destiny of man before He created him. He must have known that he would yield to temptation and fall, and that all the direful consequences would follow it that orthodoxy has pictured for centuries. I began to wonder how God could be just and make a creature, whom He knew in advance would do what Adam is alleged to have done, and knew in advance the dreadful consequences that would follow it, not only to Adam himself, but to all the unborn generations yet to people the world. Especially was I perplexed to understand how God could be just and visit all the consequences of Adam's sin on his entire posterity for uncounted generations when they were and could be in no way responsible for it and could not help it. Yet I believed God to be just. He could not be God and be otherwise.
Since the whole purpose of religion, and Christianity in particular, was to save mankind from hell hereafter, I first directed my inquiries to the question of hell. Who made hell? and whence came the devil? The Bible is silent as to their origin, except the vague reference in the Book of Revelation to the war in heaven and the casting out of Lucifer with a third part of the angels with him into the bottomless pit so graphically portrayed by Milton in Paradise Lost. But this only carried me back farther. Who created the angels, or were they co-eternal with God? If they are co-eternal with God then there are other eternal beings in the universe over whom God has little or no control. If so God is not omnipotent. The devil is his rival in the spiritual world and, according to the current doctrine, his equal in omniscience and omnipresence, and a close and terrible antagonist in the contest for omnipotence.