“Yours is the old doctrine of the Magians,” remarked Richard.
“Well?”
“I could accept it easily beside what people believe now.”
“What do they believe?”
“They believe in the God of the Bible, who makes pets of a few of his creatures, and sends all the rest into eternal torment. Would you comfort people with the good news of a God like that?”
“Such a God is not to be believed in! Deny him all you can. But because there cannot be an evil God, what right have you to say there cannot be a good one? That is to reason backward! The very notion of a night like this having no meaning in it—no God in it who intends it to look just so, is enough to make me miserable. But I will not believe it! I shall hate you if you make me believe it!”
“The Bible says there is an evil being behind it!”
“I don't know much about the Bible, but I don't believe it says that.”
“Of course it calls him good, but it says he does certain things which we know to be bad.”
“You make too much of the Bible, if it says such things. Throw it out of the window and have done with it. But how dare you tell me there is nobody greater than me to account for me! You make of me a creature that was not worth being made; a mere ooze from nothing, like the scum on the pond, there because it cannot help it. If I have no God to be my justification, my being becomes loathsome to me. I don't know how I came to be, where I came from, or where I am going to; and you say there can be nobody that knows; you tell me there is no help; that I must die in the dark I came out of; that there is no love about me knowing what it loves. Even if I found myself alive and awake and happy after I was dead, what comfort would there be if there was no God? How should I ever grow better?—how get rid of the wrong things in myself?—If life has no better thing for this poor woman, be kind and let her die and have done with it. Why keep her in such a hopeless existence as you believe in? You can have but little regard for her surely! I beg of you don't say that thing to her, for you don't know it.”