It is blasphemy to deny that god, “whose tender mercy is over all his works” (Prayer-book), said that he would destroy “both man and beast, and the creeping things and the fowls of the air” (Gen. vi., 7). We are not told what sins had been committed by the beasts and fowls and creeping things, so that god exclaimed: “it repenteth me that I have made them.” If the Bible were a mere human book, and “the Lord” were a mere ordinary man, I should say that he was behaving like a naughty, passionate child, who has lost his temper because the paper animals he has cut out very badly will not stand properly, and who tears them up in a rage. But as it is blasphemy to say this, and blasphemy to deny that god did act exactly in the fashion that would be naughty if he were a child, I can only suppose that the conduct for which a child would be put in the corner is admirable when displayed by a god. Out of all the wicked men there was one man, Noah, who found “grace in the eyes of the Lord” (Gen. vi., 8). Noah was not what Atheists would regard as a very good man, so far as his conduct is recorded in Holy Scripture. In fact, we are not told of any one good action that he committed. He was a very selfish man, for he saved himself and his family in the ark, and left all his poor fellow-creatures to drown; he drank so much wine that he misbehaved himself shamefully before his children (Gen. ix., 21), and in any respectable society would have had a sack thrown over him, and would have been carried on a stretcher to the nearest police station; he cursed and swore at his poor grandson because his son, the young man’s father, had told his brethren of the condition to which Noah had reduced himself (Gen. ix., 25). Yet, in spite of all this disgusting misbehavior, it is blasphemy to deny that “Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.”