Then the stalwart, white-bearded old gentleman who was dressed as a bishop spoke of his first family, and of how his descendants through a son named Isaac went astray. He spoke of his efforts to retain the affection of his family, through the vigorous methods appropriate to a storm god. But nothing had seemed to avail. There had been fine plagues and deluges and captivities and decimations and devastating miracles by the score. He had sent the swords of Babylon and of Philistia and of dozens of other kingdoms to slay them, and huge dogs to tear their corpses, and many birds of prey and all the wild beasts of earth to devour and to destroy them, without arousing one ray of real affection. He had laid waste their cities; he had made their widows as the sands of the sea; he had starved them, and had smitten them with leprosy, and had burned them with lightnings; he had afflicted them with the most voluble and pessimistic prophets: he had, in a word, done absolutely everything he could think of as likely to requicken their waning affection. But the more he annoyed his descendants, the less they had seemed really to love him. Upon the heels of every warning, and immediately after each paternal correction, the survivors of it seemed only the more inclined to prefer some other patron: and it was all very discouraging. And of his second son he spoke also. Here he became remarkably vague, and he talked as if muddled by the whole affair. There had been a great sacrifice and an atonement, the workings of which the old gentleman could not pretend to understand. He could not yet say just who had been put in a more amiable frame of mind by that atonement, since personally he imagined any father would have found it most distasteful and upsetting. Anyhow, the affair had resulted in a church with which he had felt it rather his duty to associate himself. And, awkwardly enough, after he had thus been persuaded by them formally to commit himself to a policy of peace and forgiveness and general loving-kindness, his incomprehensible servants had gone on squabbling and murdering, only much more often than before, because now they did it on high moral grounds. They had fought over transubstantiation, and over Greek diphthongs, and over the respective merits of complete and frontal baptism, and over infant damnation, and over redemption through faith alone, and over a number of other recondite matters which no Arabian storm god, very simply reared in the country during the really formative years of his life, and with no regular academic training, could well be expected to understand: and it was all very discouraging.