saw, why not pray to the thunderclouds not to strike us dead, and to
the seas and rivers not to sweep us away? For this great,
wonderful, awful world in which we are, however beautiful may be its
flowers, and its fruits, and its sunshine, there is no trusting it;
we are sitting upon a painted sepulchre, a beautiful monster, a gulf
of flood and fire, which may burst up any moment, and sweep us away,
as it did our forefathers.'

Again, Noah's children would have begun to say, 'These beasts here
round us, they are so many of them larger than us, stronger than us,
able to tear us to atoms, eat us up as they would eat a lamb. They
are self-sufficient, too; they want no clothes, nor houses, nor
fire, like us poor, weak, naked, soft human creatures. They can run
faster than we, see farther than we; their scent, too, what a
wonderful, mysterious power that is, like a miracle to us! And,
besides all their cunning ways of getting food and building nests,
they never do WRONG; they never do horrible things contrary to their
nature; they all abide as God has made them, obeying the law of
their kind. Are not these beasts, then, much wiser and better than
we? We will honour them, and pray to them not to devour us--to make
us cunning and powerful as they are themselves. And if they are no
better than us, surely they are no worse than us. After all, what
difference is there between a man and a beast? The flood which
drowned the beasts drowned the men too. A beast is flesh and blood,
what more is a man? If you kill him, he dies, just as a beast dies;
and why should not a man's carcase be just as good to eat as a
beast's, and better?' And so there would have been a free opening
at once into all the horrors of cannibalism!

Again, Noah's descendants would have said, 'Our forefathers offered