The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

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.

As said before by the narrator, this policeman is a mystic; here he's a god

He prayed silently, ‘O God, give me any kind of death—without contrition, in a state of sin—only save this child.’

This priest is like Huckleberry Finn here, except that as a Catholic he can believe he will go merely to Purgatory, whereas Huck can only believe that he will go to hell. Another importance difference: Huck believes he will go to hell for helping his friend, while this priest can no longer help his daughter, and he believes he may already be convicted for other sins that have nothing to do with his daughter. Still, the priest does seem to be bargaining a little with God, offering that he'd be okay with dying at a particularly bad moment for his eternal soul (dying in a state of sin, as he says) if only God will look after his child. There's some common ground with Huck.

Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals

Like the first Christians

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. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

Unless you hate ugliness, and we all do to some degree

The old man moved against his shoulder and the night just stayed around them. The darkness was always the same and there were no clocks—there was nothing to indicate time passing. The only punctuation of the night was the sound of urination.

Hell

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. … Life didn’t exist any more:

Purgatory

‘Father,’ the voice said, puzzled and worried, ‘it is our church.’ ‘A church?’ The priest ran his hands incredulously over the wall like a blind man trying to recognize a particular house, but he was too tired to feel anything at all. He heard the man with the gun babbling out of sight, ‘Such an honour, father. The bell must be rung …’ and he sat down suddenly on the rain-drenched grass, and leaning his head against the white wall, he fell asleep, with home behind his shoulder-blades. His dream was full of a jangle of cheerful noise.

Heaven