CHAPTER XXII.
Rise and Progress of Bob the God-Stealer.—Omnipotence in Danger.—How the Valiant Blatherskite came to the Help of the Helpless Almighty.
IN the latter days of the sad existence of the Society for the Protection of the Almighty, there arose most strangely from nowhere, a huge, heavy-footed dog, that ran about scattering dismay and confusion amongst the salaried barkers, by encouraging the dogs to speak disrespectfully of the various societies in general, and of the Society for the Protection of the Almighty in particular.
A very independent and fearless dog was he. He was endowed with a voice of thunder and an eye of lightning, and he had a set of great sharp teeth that seemed to have been made especially and particularly to tear and worry the salaried barkers, and the pious dog thumpers and clubbers.
Wherever they gathered together, there he appeared in the midst of them to spoil their counsels, to frustrate their plans, and drive them crazy. Never did they meet save to devise some new way to harass the forlorn and hungry dogs, in the name of God and to the enrichment of the fleas, and never did they meet but they had to meet the lightning of his eye, the thunder of his voice, and the cutting snap of his gleaming teeth; which, after braving and enduring a few times, they learned to respect by tucking their tails snugly away between their legs and scattering with howls of pain and rage, to the accompaniment of the laughter of the poor dogs which gratefully recognized in him a friend.
All the pious dog thumpers, the virtue compellers, the morality cobblers hated him because he boldly told them that the Tree of Virtue could only grow up out of the ground of Good Victuals and healthy bodies, which they said was a wicked and damnable heresy and subversive of the good old Gospel of the Club; and all the salaried barkers hated him because he laughed at their Almighty Fiction, and called it the ugly creation of their own diseased brains.