tic figure if he were not so
monstrous! Still, there is a kind of heathen grandeur about him at times.
He drowns his world full of people because his first two circumvented him;
then he saves another pair, but things go still worse, so he has to keep
smiting the world right and left, dumb beasts as well as men; and at last
he picks out one tribe, in whose behalf he works a series of miracles,
that devastated a wide area. How he did love to turn a city over to
destruction! And from the cloud's centre he was constantly boasting of his
awful power, and scaring people into butchering lambs and things in his
honour. Yet, doubtless, that heathen tribe found its god 'good,' and other
people formed the habit of calling him good, without thinking much about
it. They must have felt queer when they woke up to the fact that they were
calling infinitely good a god who was not good, even when judged by their
poor human standards."

Remembering the physician's instructions to soothe the patient, the
distressed old man timidly began--

"'For God so loved the world'"--but he was interrupted by the vivacious
one on the couch.

"That's it--I remember that tradition. He was even crude enough to beget a
son for human sacrifice, giving that son power to condemn thereafter those
who should not detect his godship through his human envelope! That was a
rather subtler bit of baseness than those he first perpetrated--to send
this saving son in such guise that the majority of his creatures would
inevitably reject him! Oh! he was bound to have his failures and his
tortures, wasn't he? You know, I dare say the ancient Christians called
him good because they were afraid to call him bad. Doubtless the one great
spiritual advance that we have made since the Christian faith prevailed
is, that we now worship without fearing what we worship."

Once more the distressed old man had risen to stand with assumed
carelessness by the door, having writhed miserably in his chair until he
could no longer endure the profane flood.

"But, truly, that god was, after all, a pathetic figure. Imagine him amid
the ruins of his plan, desolate, always foiled by his creatures--meeting
failure after failure from Eden to Calvary--for even the bloody expedient
of sending his son to be sacrificed did not avail to save his own chosen
people. They unanimously rejected the son, if I remember, and so he had to
be content with a handful of the despised Gentiles. A sorrowful old f