And he was thought to be all-powerful when he is so pitifully ineffectual, with all his crude power--the poor old fellow was forever bungling--then bungling again in his efforts to patch up his errors.

Indeed, he would be rather a pathetic figure if he were not so monstrous! Still, there is a kind of heathen grandeur about him at times.
He drowns his world full of people because his first two circumvented him; then he saves another pair, but things go still worse, so he has to keep smiting the world right and left, dumb beasts as well as men; and at last he picks out one tribe, in whose behalf he works a series of miracles, that devastated a wide area.

How he did love to turn a city over to destruction! And from the cloud's centre he was constantly boasting of his awful power, and scaring people into butchering lambs and things in his honour.

Yet, doubtless, that heathen tribe found its god 'good,' and other people formed the habit of calling him good, without thinking much about it.

They must have felt queer when they woke up to the fact that they were calling infinitely good a god who was not good, even when judged by their poor human standards." Remembering the physician's instructions to soothe the patient, the distressed old man timidly began-- "'For God so loved the world'"-- but he was interrupted by the vivacious one on the couch.
"That's it--I remember that tradition.