that Jehovah was God; they regarded Christ as a rebel
against Jehovah and a rescuer of humanity from him, just as
Prometheus was a rebel against Jove. These beliefs survived
for a thousand years throughout Christendom: they were held
by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the
Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The
catholic church found it necessary to prohibit the
circulation of the Old Testament among laymen very largely
on account of the polemics of the Cathars against the Hebrew
God. But in this book, be it noted, the word Christian,
when it is not otherwise defined, is used to indicate only
the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.

It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct
for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish sweet
familiar things, that these things of the True God should so readily
liberate cruelty and tyranny. It is like a woman going with a light to
tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the house on fire. None
the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of God the Revengeful, God
the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion. It is only in quite recent
years that the growing gentleness of everyday life has begun to make men
a little ashamed of a Deity less tolerant and gentle than themselves.
The recent literature of the Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this
trouble.

Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for denying
the irascibility of his God and teaching "the Kaffirs of Natal" the
dangerous heresy that God is all mercy. "We cannot allow it to be said,"
the Dean of Cape Town insisted, "that God was not angry and was not
appeased by punishment." He was angry "on account of Sin, which is a