| OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 413 deepest religious feelings, over; above and below all of this mere worldly business? The most difficult question of all, this: with all his late preoccupation with practical machinations, had his abstract faith been kept intact and in working order? Come to think of it, the Great Battle itself had been a recent instance where he could have shown a little more intuitive faith, could've relied a little more upon the good providential grace of Heavenly Father rather than upon his own poor devices. He hadn't needed to ask the Council of the Twelve to go through channels and obtain the fragmentation bombs (which they'd almost refused to do anyway, controlled as they were these days by Beelzebub's own liberal humanist factions); likewise, he hadn't needed to go to all the trouble of placing that one particularly agile little missionary on the staff of Cheyenne Zoo so that he could secretly release the carnivores and scavengers to help clean up the pre-chewed, bomb-fragmented corpses, thus further consuming the evidence. God's own perfectly-timed disaster, ambiguously natural and/or man-made, but manifestly God's own, had pretty well reamed out the entire mountainside and all of the neo-Nazis and pro-Soviet saboteurs with it. Elder Cicerone shuddered now under his pastel-yellow sheets as he imagined how it must've been: two armies of mindless young male bodies, their instincts for self-preservation broken under a carefully layered barrage of political theory on the one hand and scripture on the other hand, rendering them fanatical as Sheehites in a more primitive part of the world; but these boys are much more golden and sleek and muscular than their underfed Arab counterparts. Under no orders to take cover, they simply continue killing each other even as with Heavenly Father's own help the sky and earth burst |
