The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

The woman was silent now: he wondered whether after all he had been too harsh with her. If it helped her faith to believe that he was a martyr … But he rejected the idea: one was pledged to truth.

Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals … He had a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove.

‘I had good books in my house,’ she announced, with unbearable pride. He had done nothing to shake her complacency.

It was impossible to say what souls might not be lost simply because he was obstinate and proud and wouldn’t admit defeat.

It was appallingly complicated. He was still afraid of death, he would be more afraid of death yet when the morning came, but it was beginning to attract him by its simplicity.

‘Say an Act of Contrition for your sins. You must trust God, my dear, to make allowances …’

The pious woman said aloud with fury, ‘Why won’t they stop it? The brutes, the animals!’ ‘What’s the good of your saying an Act of Contrition now in this state of mind?’ ‘But the ugliness …’ ‘Don’t believe that. It’s dangerous. Because suddenly we discover that our sins have so much beauty.’

Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner-to them. It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint’s eye:

I know—from experience—how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh no, they were just as quick and light

He said, ‘We’re all fellow prisoners. I want drink at this moment more than anything, more than God. That’s a sin too.’ ‘Now,’ the woman said, ‘I can see you’re a bad priest. I wouldn’t believe it before. I do now. You sympathize with these animals.

It was more difficult to feel pity for her than for the half-caste who a week ago had tagged him through the forest, but her case might be worse. The other had so much excuse—poverty and fever and innumerable humiliations.

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it.

Hate was just a failure of imagination.

He began to feel an overwhelming responsibility for this pious woman.

the woman was still talking about the vocation the nuns had refused to recognize. He said, ‘That made you suffer, didn’t it? To suffer like that—perhaps it was better than being a nun and happy,’ and immediately after he had spoken he thought: a silly remark, what does it mean? Why can’t I find something to say to her which she could remember?

had begun to forget that it would ever be another day, just as one forgets that one will ever die.

Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

The woman’s voice said, ‘He was begging.’ She added mercilessly, ‘He ought to have more sense. I’ve nothing for him.

He prayed silently: Oh God, send them someone more worthwhile to suffer for.

It seemed as if God were deciding … finally.

Advise me.’ ‘It would be murder,’ the priest said, ‘a mortal sin.’ ‘I don’t mean that. I mean about the reward.

Now that the immediate fear was over, he felt only regret. God had decided. He had to go on with life, go on making decisions, acting on his own advice, making plans…

That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt…

The priest held the coin in his fist—the price of a Mass. He said with astonishment, ‘You’re a good man.’

Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. An animal never knows despair.

Then suddenly he laughed: this was human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone.

A man’s need was greater than a dog’s: he would leave that knuckle of meat at the joint. But when the moment came he ate that too—after all, the dog had teeth: it would eat the bone itself. He dropped it and left the kitchen.

It was months since he had seen a book. It was almost like a promise, mildewing there under the piles, of better things to come

The triteness and untruth of ‘for ever’ shocked him a little: a poem like this ought not to be in a child’s hands.

It was an odd thing that ever since that hot and crowded night in the cell he had passed into a region of abandonment—almost as if he had died there with the old man’s head on his shoulder and now wandered in a kind of limbo, because he wasn’t good or bad enough.

It was nearly like peace, but not quite. For peace you needed human company—his aloneness was like a threat of things to come.

Horror and disgust touched him—violence everywhere: was there no end to violence? He said to the woman sharply, ‘What happened?’ It was as if man in all this state had been left to man.

He could feel no meaning any longer in prayers like these. The Host was different: to lay that between a dying man’s lips was to lay God. That was a fact—something you could touch, but this was no more than a pious aspiration. Why should anyone listen to his prayers? Sin was a constriction which prevented their escape; he could feel his prayers weigh him down like undigested food.

Americano.’ That word always came up, like one with many meanings which depends on the accent whether it is to be taken as an explanation, a warning or a threat.

Americano’? The woman followed at his heels with the dead child strapped on her back. She never seemed to tire.

It was like a short cut to the dark and magical heart of the faith—to the night when the graves opened and the dead walked.

Did she expect a miracle? and if she did, why should it not be granted her, the priest wondered? Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith—faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead.

The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity.

the child lay quietly at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

The priest gave his name to a stranger for the first time in ten years because he was tired and there seemed no object in going on living.

discipline is necessary. Drills may be no good in battle, but they form the character. Otherwise you get—well, people like me.’ He looked down with sudden hatred at the shoes—they were like the badge of a deserter. ‘People like me,’ he repeated with fury.

The priest read with some astonishment:

was on the defensive all the time about his faith, as if he were perpetually conscious of some friction, like that of an ill-fitting shoe.

He could hear authority, the old parish intonation coming back into his voice, as if the last years had been a dream and he had never really been away from the Guilds, the Children of Mary, and the daily Mass.

A voice from years back said firmly into his ear: they don’t value what they don’t pay for. It was the old priest he had succeeded at Concepción who had explained to him: ‘They will always tell you they are poor, starving, but they will always have a little store of money buried somewhere, in a pot.

He could feel the old life hardening round him like a habit, a stony cast which held his head high and dictated the way he walked, and even formed his words.

He thought that in some ways it was better over there, across the border. Fear and death were not the worst things. It was sometimes a mistake for life to go on.

It was appalling how easily one forgot and went back;

He remembered the woman in the prison and how impossible it had been to shake her complacency. It seemed to him that he was another of the same kind. He drank the brandy down like damnation:

men like the half-caste could be saved, salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand.