As to the assumption that God has a right to kill men by human agency, God has no more right to require a man to kill his fellows, than he has to command him to curse his parents, to worship images, to bear false witness, to steal, to covet, to cherish hatred and revenge, to lie, to hold slaves, and to commit piracy. God has no more right to do wrong than man has. He has no more right to order men to enslave or kill men than man has. What is a violation of love and justice in man, is so in God. What God may command man to do to man, we may urge men to do to each other. What is right and just in God, is right and just in man; what is wrong and unjust in man, is so in God. God can have no right to require a man to kill himself; man can have no right to kill himself, or to require others to kill themselves. Whatever Nature forbids a man to do to himself, it forbids him to do to others. Whatever Nature forbids man to do to himself, it forbids God and man to do to him. A violation of a natural law of body or mind is a wrong and outrage, whether done or commanded by God or man. If Nature forbids suicide, it forbids homicide; and, until it would be just and natural for God to order human beings to kill themselves, it cannot be so for him to command them to kill others.

God has settled one law to bring human beings into this state of existence. He has established another law to take them out of it into a superior state. Whatever he does, he does by fixed and just laws. His method to transfer us from this state to the next is by the operation of a natural law, as he transforms the caterpillar into a butterfly, without any pain or anguish. He has no agency in the removal of those who leave this state in any other way. Men do leave this state in other ways; few leave it as he designed. Of course, their departure is a violation of Nature, and God has no agency in it, except that which was exerted in attaching the certain penalty of disease and death to the violations of the laws of life and health, and in maintaining the

connection between the transgression and the penalty. But the disease and death were not the natural result of unviolated law, but of its transgressions.

But God can have no right to inflict on men the arbitrary penalty of death, by stoning, burning, hanging, drowning, or beheading, because all such inflictions are violations of Nature. God has no right to destroy men by war, famine, pestilence, or disease of any kind. He never does; for all who thus die, die in violation of divine law. Human agency is in it. Neither has God the right to kill men by the agency of fire, water, or any other of the elements; and he never does. Men are destroyed by floods, earthquakes, etc., but God never sends them for that purpose. All these are essential to the existence and healthful growth and happiness of the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Man, through ignorance, carelessness, or design, comes in contact with these natural phenomena, and is killed.

Such, I think, is the law and order of Nature as respects human life. Now, the Bible asserts that God sent a flood, earthquakes, whirlwinds, volcanoes, lightnings, hailstones, famine, pestilence, plagues, and various diseases, to kill human beings, and that when men are thus slain, it is God that kills them. We are told God moved David to number Israel, and then by a pestilence

killed seventy thousand of the people, because he did it. (2d Samuel, 24th chapter.) It also says God sent wild beasts, serpents, and insects, to kill men, and that he often uses these as his instruments to destroy them. Finally, it teaches that God commissions and commands human beings to destroy human beings, and that he sends one tribe or nation to exterminate other tribes of men; that he uses men as magistrates to destroy human life; that he uses husbands and wives, parents and children, and brothers and sisters, as means to destroy one another. In all these statements the Bible errs. The teachings of Nature are against it. These all proclaim the absolute sanctity of human life in this

state from the touch of God or man, unless that law be an exception by which God removes man from this to a higher state; but in doing this, life is not destroyed, it only assumes a new form; the connection between the vital principle and the body ceases naturally and happily, and the soul appears in a new state. God never, by direct, arbitrary command or agency, destroyed a single human body. He can have no right to do so, while man retains his present nature and relations, and the present constitution of the world exists. Of course, then, under no circumstances can it be right for man to kill himself or others. Man has an inherent, inalienable right to life, as well as to liberty. God can have no more right to command a man to inflict death on man as a penalty, than he has to require him to inflict slavery, adultery, rape, polygamy, or any other violations of natural law and equity,

for the same cause.

The idea that God ever employed a husband to stone a wife to death, or to hang, shoot, or stab her; or a wife to kill a husband; a parent to kill a child, or a child a parent; a brother a sister, or a sister a brother, is monstrous. Human nature shudders at it. The human family is a unit, bound together by a common parentage, common natures, common relations, common wants, common sympathies and affections, a common destiny, and a common brotherhood. The idea that the universal Father should employ some of his children to kill others in war, by stoning, hanging, beheading, or in any way, or for any cause, is simply horrible. The human soul recoils from it. It never was done, and never can be done, while God is God, and man is As well assert that he employs lambs to kill lambs, doves to kill doves. The doctrine is a libel on human nature, and an insult to the great Father.

man.

ITEM XII.

THE BIBLE ERRS IN ITS VIEWS OF MARRIAGE.

THE distinction of sex extends through all existences which possess animal or vegetable life. If the male or female in any species of animal or vegetable were destroyed, that species must become extinct.

But I would notice the distinction in the human species; its nature, its object and abuses. As to its extent and duration, it extends to the entire being, body and soul; a man is a man in all his nature, and woman a woman in all hers; each having an organization that fits them for the peculiar offices devolving upon them, in the economy of perfecting and perpetuating the race. The soul of man fits him to be a husband and a father; the soul of woman fits her to be a wife and mother. But the Bible says, that in the resurrection state there is no marrying; that the distinction of sex ceases with our residence in the body, and was created for the convenience and continuance of the race in this state.

Nature defines marriage to be a union, by love, between one man and one woman,· a love that absorbs each into the other, and leaves to neither a separate interest in anything. Nature abhors polygamy and concubinage, as it does war, and slavery, and drunkenness. Nature has decreed it an impossibility for a man to have more than one wife, or a woman more than one husband, at the same time. He that has two or more wives by civil law, has none by Nature's law; and a law or book that sanctions polygamy or concubinage, denies marriage. Marriage exists only between one man and one woman, and the desire for more than one is the extinction of marriage; or, rather, it demon

strates its absence. Such is the fiat of God, engraven on the human soul.

But the Bible says, God authorized polygamy. It holds up those who practised it as men after God's own heart. In this it sanctions a violation of the most positive law of Nature. The leading minds of Christendom admit that polygamy is a violation of natural law, and that it is sanctioned by the Bible. Yet they will not allow that the book errs. How do they get over it? As follows: (I quote from a work entitled "An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; by Thomas Hartwell Horne, B. D., of St. John's College, Cambridge," etc., printed in 1835.) - Part IV., Chapter 3d, Vol. 2d, he says:

"From the first institution of marriage, it is evident that God gave but one woman to one man; and if it be true, as it is a common observation, that there are everywhere more males than females born in the world, it follows that those men certainly act contrary to the law both of God and nature, who have more than one wife at the same time. But though God, as supreme lawgiver, had a power to dispense with his own laws, and ACTUALLY DID So with the Jews, for the more speedy peopling of the world; yet it is certain there is no such toleration under the Christian dispensation, and, therefore, that example is no rule for us."

"God, as supreme lawgiver, had a power to dispense with his own laws"! Here is the fatal rock, on to which all who receive the Bible as the word of God are driven. They admit that polygamy, aggressive war, and the penal code of the Jews, are contrary to Nature; and that many things in the book, if done now, would be crimes. But they say that God has a right to dispense with his laws, and to require men to do what Nature forbids. They admit that the command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, and many other things, were violations of nature; but that God had a right to dispense with or set aside his own laws. Now,