I Want to Kick the Doctrine

about hell—I want to kick it out every time I go by it. I want to get Americans in this country placed that so they will be ashamed to preach it. I want to get the congregations so that they won't listen to it. We cannot divide the world off into saints and sinners in that way. There is a little girl, fair as a flower, and she grows up until she is 12, 13, or 14 years old. Are you going to damn her in the loth, 16th, or 17th year, when the arrow from Cupid's bow touches her heart and she is glorified—are you going to damn her now? She marries and loves, and holds in her arms a beautiful child. Are you going to damn her now? When are you going to damn her? Because she has listened to some Methodist minister, and after all that flood of light failed to believe? Are you going to damn her then? I tell you God cannot afford to damn such a woman.

A woman in the state of Indiana 40 or 50 years ago, who carded the wool and made rolls and spun them, and made the cloth and cut out the clothes for the children, and nursed them, and sat up with them nights and gave them medicine, and held them in her arms and wept over them—cried for joy and wept for fear, and finally raised ten or eleven good men and women with the ruddy glow of health upon their cheeks, and she would have died for any one of them any moment of her life, and finally she, bowed with age and bent with care and labour, dies, and at the moment the magical touch of death is upon her face, she looks as if she never had had a care, and her children burying her, cover her face with tears. Do you tell me God can afford to damn that kind of woman? One such act of injustice would turn heaven itself into hell. If there is any God, sitting above him in infinite serenity we have