And to me His downfall seems in some ways rather sad. For, as I recall it, He was not thought of as being particularly cruel and dreadful--any longer. And the Old Testament was accepted in its entirety and without any especial difficulty in the Virginia of that day, wherein almost all other generally respected elderly gentlemen had been, as a matter of public knowledge, rather wild in their youth.... As I recall it, there was a prevalent feeling that God had some while since settled down, in very much the manner of your grandfather; and that the Amalekites and the Hittites and all those other demolished persons were in some way connected with the hundreds of Yankee soldiers whom, for equally inexplicable but assuredly good causes, your grandfather had killed so long before you were born. Thus there was no large difficulty about our Episcopalian Jehovah, and really no terribleness.... And I sometimes incline to question if this god--with wild oats undeniably sown and harvested in the past, but with a prevailing disposition nowadays to be agreeable, subject always to His not having been of late upset by one or another mysterious grown-up affair,--was not, after all, the most plausible sort of demiurge I have yet heard of. He still seems to me the likeliest creator, upon the whole, to have fashioned, it may be in some moment of youthful indiscretion and effusion, such as elsewhere had resulted in people having mulatto cousins, the wholly incomprehensible world we live in.... And essentially, I find, I still believe in Him, with a faith that undermines and goes deeper than mere reason because it was developed in me earlier. During thunderstorms this faith assumes especial vigor: and while I do not presume to think all this terrific display was got up solely for my benefit, the notion most certainly does flicker about me, livid and troubling, that while He has this storm in hand, and is actually passing my way, it might appear to Him mere thriftiness to use a thunderbolt in the old, practical, explicit manner. So I do not quite heartily enjoy the beauty of a thunderstorm.... But the point is that this demiurge also conformed to the great general rule. The point is that men have not ever, at any time, pictured the benevolence of their gods and creators as being anything like a good risk; and that no mythology has ever told of such gods as would in strict logic seem apt to be foreplanning a pleasant future for anybody.