OCR Text |
Show 222 case heavy with tracts and softbound copies of a book with an angel blowing a trumpet stamped in gold on the cover. He kept an appointment book in his inside coat pocket. He was never seen except in the company of a companion a couple of years younger than himself, also wearing a dark suit and carrying an attache case. He pounded cold pavements with this companion in a distant northern city, whipped by winds off the lake, breathing industrial grit. He knocked on doors which opened a crack to disclose a nose and further back, cast in shadow, an eye, which he informed that he was Elder Hood and his companion was Elder Sorenson, and what church they represented, and had the eye and nose heard of it and would they like to know more, whereupon the nose withdrew and the crack closed. He sat up late poring over texts and supplements and reference guides until his eyes hurt, the better to have at his fingers' ends the riposte to every challenge. He knew the passage in Amos that foretold the closing of the heavens and the suspension of revelation, and he knew the passage in Joel that promised revelation would be restored in the latter days. He could locate a rhapsodic verse in Zechariah that clearly showed Zion was not to be confused with Jerusalem, and if someone looked at him askance he could flip to a little-known passage in Isaiah that implied the same thing and said furthermore that Zion would be mountainous, and a passage in Micah that said the same thing, only better. With his eyes closed he could pick out sections of Numbers, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah, Ephesians, John, and Hebrews that described a premortal existence; references in Ezekial, Isaiah, Daniel, and Hosea to a postmortal one, reinforced by passages scattered all through the Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Revelation. There were sobering accounts in Luke, Hebrews, and Second Peter of the consequences of apostasy, and harrowing accounts of the misery, in Jude and Revelation, of the ugly third |