There cannot in the history of any pagan country be found an instance more glaring, of the unjustifiable perpetuation of revenge, than this putting a whole people to the sword for a wrong done by their ancestors some hundred years before.
If examples draw us, while precepts do no more than lead, according to the proverb, what influence are such examples of the morality of the Bible likely to produce in those who are taught to view it as the word of God?
From the pernicious influence of such religious errors may the noble spirits of our progenitors relieve us and our offspring!
[22] Shakspeare’s king, in the tragedy of Hamlet, is made to express this correct sentiment in the midst of his villainy: “Pray I cannot, be my inclination sharp as ‘twill.” Why? because he still retained the objects for which he sinned. But though David had exposed Uriah to be killed to obtain his wife, he retained her in despite of his professed penitence.
Yet of this man Jehovah is represented as saying, “I took thee from the sheepcote, from following sheep, that thou shouldst be ruler over my people Israel, and I have been with thee wheresoever thou hast walked, and have cut off all thine enemies from before thee, and have made thee a name of the great men that are in earth.”
Thus God is represented as the constant companion, and, of course, accomplice of his butchering, robbery, and treachery: just the part which would belong to Satan, were such an evil being to exist. He is called to account for the murder of Uriah, but the pagans whom he robbed and massacred were only vermin in the estimation of the Jewish Jehovah.
[23] In Great Britain, nearly forty millions of dollars per annum.
[24] Perhaps, however, the high-church Episcopalians occupy middle ground.
[25] God is made out to be a strange bungler. Though omnipotent, he does not make his creatures as he wishes them to be; and although omniscient, has to subject them to trial to discover what they are. He does not inform them of that which he wishes them to believe, but punishes them and their children to the third and fourth generation for his own omission. For no other reason than his having afforded to a particular nation more knowledge of his will than he had afforded to others, he gives them a right to extirpate their neighbours and take possession of their lands.
[26] “I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee. And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite from before thee. I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beasts of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land. And I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.”