with radiant jowls of tenderness, shining dewlaps of love;
paternal, omnipotent, calm--this deity, though sublime in its
way, was too plainly an extension of their own desires. His
prominent parishioners--Mr. Dobermann-Pinscher, Mrs. Griffon,
Mrs. Retriever; even the delightful Mr. Airedale himself--was it
not likely that they esteemed a deity everlastingly forgiving
because they themselves felt need of forgiveness? He had been
deeply shocked by the docility with which they followed the codes
of the service: even when he had committed his blunder of the
contradictory prayers, they had murmured the words automatically,
without protest. To the terrific solemnities of the Litany they
had made the responses with prompt gabbling precision, and with a
rapidity that frankly implied impatience to take the strain off
their knees.

Somehow he felt that to account for a world of unutterable
strangeness they had invented a God far too cheaply simple. His
mood was certainly not one of ribald easy scoff. It was they (he
assured himself) whose theology was essentially cynical; not he.
He was a little weary of this just, charitable, consoling,
hebdomadal God; this God who might be sufficiently honoured by a
decorously memorized ritual. Yet was he too shallow? Was it not
seemly that his fellows, bound on this dark, desperate venture of
living, should console themselves with decent self-hypnosis?

No, he thought. No, it was not entirely seemly. If they pretended
that their God was the highest thing knowable, then they must
bring to His worship the highest possible powers of the mind. He
had a strange yearning for a God less lazily conceived: a God
perhaps inclement, awful, master of inscrutable principles. Yet