Even so, in populating these worlds, the romanticist has been tardy ever to imagine the gods as other than sinister and, as a rule, detestable beings. You see, the creature stays incurably logical, he is as faithful to logic as was Florian de Puysange in the old story, and he reasons from effect to cause. The romanticist has thus from the first been unable to conceive of this world, which he found, upon the whole, abominable, as being the creation of any other sort of Demiurge, or as being ruled by any other sort of overlords. In all heathen theogonies heaven is thus the home of every pravity in the way of lust and greed, of deceit and cruelty and plain childishness; and looms as a mysteriously splendid court of rogues and paphians presided over by a supreme tyrant, who is also a master-rogue. This formula was, very gradually, improved upon by Hebraic poets, who in particular recolored all anaphrodisiacally: so that the Old Testament presents, by and large, a rather novel and a more strait-laced notion of the Demiurge and his immediate entourage; with only here and there, in passages about the sons of God and the daughters of men, and more embarrassingly in the stories of Eve and Sarah, the unedited, unexpurgated, unrecolored legend of divine amours left, to consideration, apparent. § 51 But about the Jahveh-Elohim of the Old Testament, who remains by tacit admission the God the Father of the New Testament, I really prefer here not to speak at all. I find it far too difficult to resist an unfair bias in the favor of any target of so many assaults. For His present embarrassment is not merely that Colonel William Jennings Bryan[7] and the Reverend William Ashley Sunday[8] have ruthlessly united to compromise Him with their praise: even the state legislators of Tennessee and Oklahoma, and Florida, have officially endorsed Him in His difference of opinion with Charles Darwin, and rest vociferant in Zion.... Outside, is a troubling babblement about tribal deities and Babylonian myths, and a rather distressing tendency to discuss the birth of Christ from Joseph's point of view. Meanwhile the ordained and inescapable clergy are at pains to suggest that in His official revelations the Lord God of Sabaoth, like the dear, queer, overmodest old fellow He is, has branded Himself with uncommitted atrocities; and in their denials of any really grave wrong-doing, commend Him in terms as high as were, from any pulpit, ever applied to a prohibition agent detected in embezzlement. And meanwhile too, among the advanced young, there is much superior sniffing at His bloodthirstiness and variability of mind, at Jonah's great fish and the bears of Elisha, at Noah's raven and Adam's rib. And I find it droll to reflect that the deity who was everywhere trusted and worshipped in my youth is to-day as little regarded as Jupiter Stator or Marduk of the Bright Glance.