Nor to-day was his position much happier. He found himself ranked rather high in the church with which he was associated professionally. Yes, the old gentleman admitted, with plain bewilderment, his name was honored. But all his actions—even such quite notable actions as holding a conference with his disciples in a fiery furnace, and affording his messengers inter-urban transportation by means of a whale, and of causing the sun itself to stand still,—all these fine exploits, along with his every natural exhibition of the irascibility and truculence appropriate to a storm god, had been reduced to poetic inventions. His very existence had been complicated with a triplicity which, since the mind could not grasp it, prevented his existence from being, actually, believed in by anybody. That had seemed, from the first moment he heard of it, a doctrine a bit difficult for him personally to accept, after having been an undivided deity in regular practice for so many thousands of years. And eighteen centuries of pondering upon that doctrine of his triune nature, to which he was through his official position committed, had showed a matter so abstruse and puzzling to be far beyond the comprehension of any country-bred Arabian storm god, howsoever faithfully he had broadened his mind, at the courts of various Christian monarchs and in the larger nunneries, since the commencement of his religious training among the farming element of Seir and Sinai. Nor could he honestly say that he had ever been able to take quite kindly to the notion that his being was confessedly a mystery not to be understood by prelates graduated from the best seminaries, and that his actions were all poetic inventions. For that left of him, so far as could be seen by a plain-thinking Arabian storm god, nothing which the human mind could grasp as an actuality; it made every one of his really thorough-going servants who accepted utterly the teachings of his church, so far as he could infer, a devotee of vacuousness: and it was all very discouraging.