In the twentieth century it seems almost ludicrous
to find that the conception of the ancient Hebrews is still held by some
rulers. Be the reasons what they may, of late there has been a strange
recrudescence of the tribal God idea. This is the twentieth century, not
the tenth! Think of a man sending his soldiers into Belgium, saying,
"Make yourselves as terrible as the Huns of Attila, and the Lord our God
will give you victory." Just as if God were not the God of the whole
earth, a disinterested God, a God who makes His sun to shine and His
rain to fall upon all His children, without regard to race or clime or
color. Why, it is as artless as the way the old Hebrew peasant called on
God to blast his enemy's field, and drown his children with floods, and
smite his herds with the plague. The tribal idea of God belongs with the
ox cart, the medicine man, the cave dweller. This is an era of science.
Whatever is true is universal, not racial. If the heart beats and the
blood circulates in a German soldier's veins, the blood flows in the
veins of the people of England and France. If the earth goes around the
sun in Berlin, the earth goes around the sun in Petrograd and Edinburgh.
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