A rain lasting for forty days—the water rising hour by hour, and the poor wretched children of God climbing to the tops of their houses—then to the tops of the hills. The water still rising—no mercy. The people climbing higher and higher, looking to the mountains for salvation—the merciless rain still falling, the inexorable flood still rising. Children falling from the arms of mothers—no pity. The highest hills covered—infancy and old age mingling in death—the cries of women, the sobs and sighs lost in the roar of waves—the heavens still relentless. The mountains are covered—a shoreless sea rolls round the world, and on its billows are billions of corpses.
This is the greatest crime that man has imagined, and this crime is called a deed of infinite mercy.
Do you believe that? I do not believe one word of it, and I have the right to say to all the world that this is false.
If there be a good God, the story is not true. If there be a wise God, the story is not true. Ought an honest man to be sent to the penitentiary for simply telling the truth?
Suppose we had a statute that whoever scoffed at science—whoever by profane language should bring the rule of three into contempt, or whoever should attack the proposition that two parallel lines will never include a space, should be sent to the penitentiary—what would you think of it? It would be just as wise and just as idiotic as this.
And what else says the defendant?
"The Bible-God says that his people made him jealous." "Provoked him to anger."
Is that true? It is. If it is true, is it blasphemous?
Let us read another line—
"And now he will raise the mischief with them; that his anger bums like hell."