Not Miraculous - By Definition

"'I can't think how a man like you can believe in those things. The Indians, yes. Why the frist time they see an electric light they think it's a miracle.' [The Lieutenant]

'And I dare say the first time you saw a man raise from the dead you might think so too.' He [the priest] giggled unconvincingly behind the smiling mask. 'Oh, it's funny, isn't it? It isn't a case of miracles not happening - it's just a case of people calling them something else. Can't you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn't breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart's not beating: he's dead. The somebody gives him back his life, and they all - what's the expression? - reserve their opinion. They won't say it's a miracle, because that's a word they don't like. Then it happens again and again perhaps - because God's about on earth - and they say: these aren't miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is. Now we know you can be alive without pulse, breath, heart-beats. And they invent a new word to describe that state of life, and they say science has disproved a miracle.' He giggled again. 'You can't get round them.'"

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory p. 201

Fear of the Lord('s love)

"'Oh,' the preist said, 'that's another thing altogether - god is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.'"

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory p. 199-200

Hating the Imago Dei

"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."

Graham Green, The Power and the Glory p. 131

Lovely Sin

"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."

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory p. 130

Deathbed Conversion?

"That was the fallacy of the death-bed repentance - penitence was the fruit of long training and discipline: fear wasn't enough."

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory p. 118

Predictable Sin

"How often the priest had heard the same confession - Man was so limited he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you say and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. 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."

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, p. 97

Sin Covered Globe

"The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise - the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died. He could not believe that to a watcher there this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship. The whole globe was blanketed with his own sin."

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory p. 29