cutting some in two with saws and axes and putting others into brick-kilns.  For obscenity and impurity we have the tales of Onan and Tamar, Lot and his daughters, Amnon and his fair sister (2 Sam. xiii.), Absalom and his father’s concubines, the “wife of whoredoms” of Hosea and, capping all, the Song of Solomon.  For the horrors forbidden to the Jews who, therefore, must have practiced them, see Levit. viii. 24, xi. 5, xvii. 7, xviii. 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 17, 21, 23, and xx. 3.  For mere filth what can be fouler than 1st Kings xviii. 27; Tobias ii. 11; Esther xiv. 2, Eccl. xxii. 2; Isaiah xxxvi. 12, Jeremiah iv. 5, and (Ezekiel iv. 12-15), where the Lord changes human ordure into “Cow-chips!” Ce qui excuse Dieu, said Henri Beyle, c’est qu’il n’existe pas,—­I add, as man has made him.

[FN#320] It was the same in England before the “Reformation,” and in France where, during our days, a returned priesthood collected in a few years “Peter-pence” to the tune of five hundred millions of francs.  And these men wonder at being turned out!

[FN#321] Deutsch on the Talmud:  Quarterly Review, 1867.

[FN#322] Evidently.  Its cosmogony is a myth read literally:  its history is, for the most part, a highly immoral distortion, and its ethics are those of the Talmudic Hebrews.  It has done good work in its time; but now it shows only decay and decrepitude in the place of vigour and progress.  It is dying hard, but it is dying of the slow poison of science.

[FN#323] These Hebrew Stoics would justly charge the Founder of Christianity with preaching a more popular and practical doctrine, but a degradation from their own far higher and more ideal standard.

[FN#324] Dr. Theodore Christlieb ("Modern Doubt and Christian Belief,” Edinburgh:  Clark 1874) can even now write:—­“So then the ‘full age’ to which humanity is at present supposed to have attained, consists in man’s doing good purely for goodness sake!  Who sees not the hollowness of this bombastic talk.  That man has yet to be born whose practice will be regulated by this insipid theory (dieser grauen theorie).  What is the idea of goodness per se? * * * The abstract idea of goodness is not an effectual motive for well-doing” (p. 104).  My only comment is c’est ignolile!  His Reverence acts the part of Satan in Holy Writ, “Does Job serve God for naught?” Compare this selfish, irreligious, and immoral view with Philo Judaeus (On the Allegory of the Sacred Laws, cap. 1viii.), to measure the extent of the fall from Pharisaism to Christianity.  And the latter is still infected with the “bribe-and-threat doctrine:”  I once immensely scandalised a Consular Chaplain by quoting the noble belief of the ancients, and it was some days before he could recover mental equanimity.  The degradation is now inbred.

[FN#325] Of the doctrine of the Fall the heretic Marcion wrote:  “The Deity must either be deficient in goodness if he willed, in prescience if he did not foresee, or in power if he did not prevent it.”