The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

‘Go away,’ Mr Tench commanded. The child did not stir. He stood in the hard sunlight looking in with infinite patience. He said his mother was dying. The brown eyes expressed no emotion: it was a fact. You were born, your parents died, you grew old, you died yourself.

He would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt. They deserved nothing less than the truth—a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose. He was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes—first the Church and then the foreigner and then the politician—even his own chief would one day have to go. He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

One mustn’t have human affections—or rather one must love every soul as if it were one’s own child. The passion to protect must extend itself over a world—but he felt it tethered and aching like a hobbled animal to the tree trunk. He turned his mule south.

In one fist he still carried the ball of paper salvaged from his case—a man must retain some sentimental relics if he is to live at all.

It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

Sometimes he wondered whether he was safe, but when there are no visible boundaries between one state and another—no passport examination or customs house—danger just seems to go on, travelling with you, lifting its heavy feet in the same way as you do.

The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle began to eat, and the child lay quietly at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

Loving God isn’t any different from loving a man—or a child. It’s wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.’ He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. ‘It’s wanting to protect Him from yourself.’

He said, ‘I must be going now.’ He felt an odd reluctance to leave Miss Lehr and the house and the brother sleeping in the inside room. He was aware of a mixture of tenderness and dependence.

‘We agree about a lot of things,’ the priest said, idly dealing out his cards. ‘We have facts, too, we don’t try to alter—that the world’s unhappy whether you are rich or poor—unless you are a saint, and there aren’t many of those. It’s not worth bothering too much about a little pain here. There’s one belief we both of us have—that we’ll all be dead in a hundred years.’ He fumbled, trying to shuffle, and bent the cards: his hands were not steady.

He said, ‘Pride was what made the angels fall. Pride’s the worst thing of all.