Fragments from Reimarus

complete them, were to have been gathered into one book under the title, An Apology for the Reasonable Believers in God.

The following extracts throw great light on the mind and heart of Reimarus, and religious people will be more than gratified by the disclosure of his own earnest and intense faith in the Living God:

"But God was also to be looked upon as a Judge, and here a new difficulty presented itself. Reimarus had too much sense of truth to endeavor to explain away by artificial demonstration the punishment of eternal hellfire. If salvation was only to be found in the name of Jesus, if all who did not believe in him were to be everlastingly damned—and as this creed must have been handed down from the sayings of Jesus himself—it followed that ninety-nine hundredths of the human race (those who had never heard of Christ or of salvation to be obtained through him, or those who had not been able to convince themselves of it) were unmercifully sentenced, after this short life, to everlasting torment; and this not for the sake of making them better, but to punish them, and to satisfy God’s unquenchable wrath, for a sin committed in the beginning of Creation, and a sin of which they themselves were guiltless. This seemed to banish all Divine perfection, all that was lovable and noble in God, and transformed Him into the likeness of a satanic and hideous demon."