But there are more facts in nature than these. There is
premature death, pestilence, famine. And if you answer: Man has
control over these; they are caused by man's ignorance and sin, and
by his breaking of natural laws--what will you make of those
destructive powers over which he has no control; of the hurricane
and the earthquake; of poisons, vegetable and mineral; of those
parasitic Entozoa whose awful abundance, and awful destructiveness
in man and beast, science is just revealing--a new page of danger
and loathsomeness? How does that suit your conception of a God of
love?
We can answer: Whether or not it suits our conception of a God of
love, it suits Scripture's conception of Him. For nothing is more
clear--nay, is it not urged again and again, as a blot on
Scripture?--that it reveals a God not merely of love, but of
sternness--a God in whose eyes physical pain is not the worst of
evils, nor animal life (too often miscalled human life) the most
precious of objects--a God who destroys, when it seems fit to Him,
and that wholesale, and seemingly without either pity or
discrimination, man, woman and child, visiting the sins of the
fathers on the children, making the land empty and bare, and
destroying from off it man and beast! This is the God of the Old
Testament. And if any say (as is often too rashly said): This is
not the God of the New: I answer, but have you read your New
Testament? Have you read the latter chapters of St.
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