6. GOD DOES NOT PUNISH


Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for moral
indignation. Many of the early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear. They were
more often "wrath" than not. Such was the temperament of the Semitic
deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps under the
influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian Trinity and
who became also the Moslem God.* The natural hatred of unregenerate men
against everything that is unlike themselves, against strange people
and cheerful people, against unfamiliar usages and things they do
not understand, embodied itself in this conception of a malignant and
partisan Deity, perpetually "upset" by the little things people did,
and contriving murder and vengeance. Now this God would be drowning
everybody in the world, now he would be burning Sodom and Gomorrah,
now he would be inciting his congenial Israelites to the most terrific
pogroms. This divine "frightfulness" is of course the natural
human dislike and distrust for queer practices or for too sunny a
carelessness, a dislike reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape
in us, liberating the latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it
an excuse and pressing permission upon it, handing the thing hated and
feared over to its secular arm. . . .

* It is not so generally understood as it should be among
English and American readers that a very large proportion of
early Christians before the creeds established and
regularised the doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely