powerful, all-wise and all-good. No mystery about it. It would be
absurd to suppose that such a God could punish his children to
eternity, or that He would require the suffering of the innocent to
enable him to forgive the guilty. Then, of course, we reject all the
absurd dogmas clustering around your conception of the Trinity. The
simple belief in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man is
enough for us. Instead of your endless punishment, we have the
reasonable belief that the Father punishes simply to bring us good,
so that our joy may be greater. This is all perfectly simple, and can
be understood by the uneducated man as well as by the philosopher.

_Mr. Orthodox_--It is an easy thing to make charges; and, as they are
usually made in sweeping terms, it frequently requires hours of time
and much explanation to answer the charges made in a few minutes,
even when the charges are false. I shall endeavor to defend myself,
but must beg you to give me sufficient time to make myself
understood. In the first place, I claim, as you say, that you cannot
understand all the mysteries about religious doctrines. They must, to
a large extent, be accepted by faith. And I claim that it is more
reasonable to accept them by faith than to reject them on the ground
that you cannot understand them. This may seem ridiculous to you, but
wait until I explain myself further. Take eternal punishment. You say
that man is a free agent, and that through his free agency he is able
to bring evil and punishment upon himself. You say that God has so
ordained because it is best for man that he should be left free, even
though he becomes liable to suffer because of it, as it will be for
his final good. In other words, you claim that God does punish his
children for their own good. It seems perfectly just to you that God
should punish a person because he is a free agent, but when we say
that man can bring eternal punishment upon himself through his free